Problems with Image Capture

jiclark (apparently) - 05:23am Sep 19, 2006 PST
via email

At one point, Adam Engst wrote:

> …so it's not a good replacement for Apple's own Image Capture
> utility for selective import…

I simply could not let this comment go by without replying. I'm
hoping maybe someone at Apple reads TidBITS Talk, since I've had
serious issues with Image Capture since the initial release of Tiger.
I've sent bug reports, posted on various fora, etc.

As someone who was a very satisfied user of Image Capture since
discovering it in Jaguar or Panther (can't remember which), I've been
absolutely appalled with the way it's been abandoned in Tiger. It's
functionality has gone backward so far, with no fix in all the
ensuing updates to 10.4, that I assume that Apple has decided it has
no value and will eventually eliminate it.

I'm not sure I can even remember all the problems I discovered in it,
since I have been forced to abandon it myself since moving to Tiger
so many months ago now. Adam's comment sent me back to try once more,
and alas, it seems to still have some major issues:

1) For a long time, it refused to remember a saved window state. On
my machines, when you clicked on 'Download Some...' it always opened
in a tiny window in the lower left-hand corner of my screen. That
seems to be fixed now, but only to a point; now it *only* opens to a
window that fills the screen, and if I set it to show the thumbnails
at maximum size, it won't remember that next time I fire it up! It
used to do that, I'm sure of it!

2) In another example of interface weirdness, in Icon view, you can't
do a Command-click to select non-contiguous items! It works in list
view, but not in Icon view. I know it worked in the Panther version
(as it does in almost every other app on the Mac), because that's how
I'd *always* used it! List view is unacceptable for me because the
thumbnails are so small and not resizable.

There may be other things as well, as I did a very quick run-through.
It just doesn't bode well for Apple's internal software development
structure when an existing piece of software, regardless of whether
it's free or not, loses features and gets worse over time!

/rant,
John