There should be an option to enter the exact number of things. The options simply aren't good enough, especially if you have 5000 elements, and your options are 1, 10, 20, 30, and 5000.
i think stoot said they're working on that. it came up in a conversation about mail- i wanted to mail ONE stew, not all 8! i'm generous, but not really taht generous ;)
If we can't have a quantity box, it would be nice to have the list include a number for the uses left in the tool. (If I can grind 7 more rocks with my Grinder, but I'm holding 150, I can't select fewer than 10 without choosing 1 repeatedly.)
...and as Spixy said, keeping a 3 in the list would save me SO much time.
It's kinda nice the way it is now... just a small dialog with a couple of options. In theory it could get all blown up to something like the buy/sell dialog with a text entry field and +/- buttons, but I think small & simple is better.
Maybe it just needs to show some intelligence... at the moment it scales according to how many you have. Shouldn't be impossible for it to say to itself "you're feeding a pig? OK, let's put a '3' in there" or "your tool has 7 uses left? Let's put a 7 in there"
I like how small and unobtrusive the box is right now, but yeah, it is a pain when you have a load of items and no you don't want to use 30 drinks but 17, or something.