OK, I’m very happy with my macs at the mo. Snow leopard solved some of my biggest gripes with new finder features (thumbnails icon size slider) and since 10.5 they’ve got rid of the horrible finder crash/stall when disconnected from a network drive. As well as much improved printing and a multitude of other little features such as hitting CMD -r in a file requestor to show the file in the finder.

Now that Lion has been announced with some nifty launch features I’d like to take this opportunity to list some of my top wants for the new OS.

Add an iOS layer. It is obvious that at one point the 2 OS branches will meet down the line and with the line blurring between Mac devices and iOS tablets, I reckon we’ll see a gradual move towards a reunified OS. Apple claims that touch doesn’t work on large screens, I agree but they are working and will support touch via things like the touch pad. Having said that, ever since the studio was equipped with new 27″ iMacs, no client has resisted the temptation of touching the screen (much to the design monkeys’ chagrin) and one even asked if it’s a touch screen like an iPhone, mimicking the pinch to zoom gesture! However, the smaller macs like the new MacBook Air would definitely benefit from a tablet mode where the screen would double up as a touch panel. It would make it the fastest iPad out there but with a physical keyboard and camera! This might finally truly fulfil the promise of those early tablet pc attempts. Also, developers will suddenly have another 4 million or so devices running iOS per quarter and these are users who spend more time with their devices on and are a more captive audience than the normal iPhone user.

Next major updated – Finder

1) Spotlight: For the love of god improve spotlight searching! First add more control on how it operates – I do not want search as you type – slows most machines down, even a powerful machine will lag if you have 12TB of attached storage. Make options more straightforward too – the privacy tab should be something more obvious like “exclude from spotlight search”! And there should be options to schedule the indexing. I’ve been mucking about my mac pro, exchanging HDDs whilst trying to upgrade to snow leopard, it had lots to index but I couldn’t wait for it (48hours???) also, had to re-index when I swapped back to Tiger! That ate 10-25% of my CPU not to mention the constant disk accessing. When running a busy studio from this computer the last thing I needed was spotlight indexing to eat away at my CPU cycles. I’d like to have the option to index later and have the computer shut down when done.

2) Finder list view: Is it that difficult to allow me to sort by whatever parameter/meta tag I like? Searching is more cumbersome in many cases where I need to isolate a number of files in a folder by file type. At least I’d expect to have the same filters I have in a normal Finder window when I browse through search results. As any user knows that is not the case! Likewise, why can’t I sort through files in open save dialogues in the same way.

Server technology

Now that apple has discontinued the Xserve and doubts have arisen over the future of OS X server, it’s time that Apple consolidates its OS into one offering even further. A lot of the server features come from modules, many of which can easily run atop OS X client. 3 features I definitely would like to see in the client version -

1) A GUI for creation of multiple sites through Virtual Hosts. Utilities like headdress and virtualhostX do an admirable job of providing a simple UI but I think that enough people use macs as web development machines that this could be simpler and built in.

2) A DLNA upnp server: Again this can currently be taken care of by 3rd party software such as eyeconnect and playback. I do understand that Apple might wish to avoid this as it circumnavigates their iTunes ecosystem. However this comes built in most versions of Windows OSes these days and I think many people would find it useful.

3) Home iHub :- they could add more home server features, besides the above DLNA media server, some power monitoring features and something like an app update server for both iOS and OSx. OS X server has the nifty feature built in where you can download 1 update and it will be installed on chosen machines on the network. Wouldn’t it be great if a central computer would be able to handle all software updates for all apple devices in a household? Why do I have to waste so much bandwidth if apple releases a 1gb update (I Have 4 macs and 2 iPod touches at home).

GUI – Consistency and refresh

1) There are many GUI elements that aren’t visually or behaviourally consistent anymore (many never were in spite of Apple’s guidelines). There are too many different types of window and dialogue boxes. I want most of my GUI to be similar – that’s why there is an OS GUI in the first place – imagine if every app developer reinvented the wheel with each app!

2) The floating palettes: Firstly I’d suggest apple removes the micro window toolbars. You know the ones – they can be found on the character palette or the colour palette – actually on most palettes. Things have improved since moving to a unified toolbar but it’s still not the best solution. Also it’s time to update those tired palettes anyway! The font selector, the colour palette etc. – they are a great way to allow programmers to insert these tools into their apps but they feel they have been left behind.

3) Better gui widgets: We’re still waiting for vector based GUI elements and we can see that this will be great for app developers to create resolution independent scalable user interfaces – from the iPad to the 27” iMac. In the meantime we can have new scrollbars for OSX. ITunes appears to be the test bed for new GUI elements, and them scrollbars sure need to be smaller. Better selectors

Default settings

1) Dock magnification – turn it on – people always want it on, it’s the first and most prominent bit of eye candy OSX has to offer and yet it’s off as default.

2) Mouse setting :- increase the mouse tracking speed to more than half and for the love of all that is holy in the world of flying amphibians (chocolate, curry, pizza!) enable the 2^nd mouse button as default.

3) Limited open/save dialogues – WHYYY? Apple why do have to click on a disclosure button every time I load a newly installed app on a new machine. Mercifully it’s something that the app usually remembers and does not have to be set again. However a global setting somewhere should mean an end of this for once and for all

I love using my macs – I have them at work, I have 3 at home.. I’ve had macs since the colour iMacs were released (mine was a blueberry one). It’s not that I ever particularly loved macs. I’m not a mac fanboy as people think me to be. I am however, a Microsoft hater. Their software is crap. From their OS to their Office suite… Since my other choices such as Linux or the long forgotten Amiga are really no-gos. I’ve had to make do with the Mac. Don’t get me wrong – OS X is great – it’s many times better than the MS world. It’s not without it’s flaws but that’s to be expected. However there are a couple of things MS have that I’d like to see in OS X.

Firstly is a finder that allows me to properly filter files by any meta data I should choose. On a PC I can list the files in list mode and sort them in many, many ways even for example by pixel size. The mac version of this feature is more limited.

Another thing that Vista has is UPNP DLNA support built in. What’s that? Short answer, it lets you turn your computer into an industry standard media streaming server which allows other devices to stream from it. For example, I like to play my content from my mac on my big screen TV using my PS3. To add this functionality I used a 3rd party piece of software called EyeConnect. there are others available such as Twonky media or Playback. Windows (or some versions) come with this functionality built in. Besides being able to stream from Windows Media player (from my understanding), DLNA shares on the network show up in the networks places area in Windows.

Apple’s solution is all based on their iTunes software and ecosystem. Since there isn’t an iTunes media store here then that’s a no go. Besides which there are other limitations. Apple would like you to by an Apple TV to play their media on the big screen. This has not proven to be very successful… Apple should know better than to release a single function device these days (what worked for the iPod once does not hold true today with consumers’ expectations of multifunction devices like the iPhone and iPod touch. I expect the Apple TV to develop into a fully web enabled games console one day… but I digress.

I’ve finally managed to install Leopard. Took me over a week because I wanted to go out and get myself an external hdd. I did this not so much for Time Machine which I don’t have much use for at home but I wanted to do 2 clean installs so I needed something to back up to. I proceeded to install Leopard on my 3 month MacBook and on my 4 year old G5. The G5 has 2 hdd’s, one of which I cleaned after moving its data to the external HDD.The HDD (a 500gb LaCie basic model from scanmalta.com for Lm52) will also house all my software installers and backed up installer CDs in one neat place. It will also be used to back up my Mac Pro at work. This will free up some space on my other LaCie external drive which sits on the network as my media server. I’m pretty happy with LaCie’s products and chose them originally for their long standing support for the Mac platform knowing set up would be very straightforward. (more…)

Checking out the blogoshpere and it appears many peeps are a bit disappointed regarding the latest Steve Jobs keynote speech at their WWDC (worldwide developers conference). My expectations were low. One last minute surprise was the availability of safari for windows. this was done as a tactic to allow web devs on PCs to develop for the iPhone which uses Safari. As a Mac user I don’t really enjoy seeing bits of what make using a Mac great being grafted onto PCs but as a webdev myself any increase in Safari’s market share can only be a good thing™.

Anyways I like what I’m seeing from the updated finder though the sidebar’s getting a bit cluttered, the fact that shares appear to have been revamped and new previews and sorting options are included, bodes well. What I’m waiting for are new print and open/save dialogues as they’re a bit sucky in Tiger.

Was replying to a post on TUAW and got a bit carried away – thought I might reproduce it here : D

Dear Santa Steve i know it’s a few months left till crimbo but there are a feww things i’d like but prolly won’t see in leopard -

1. well a new finder is a given – i’d really like to see some features windoze has that would be nice such as cut n paste of files even tho it breaks the paradigm…, file management features in open / save dialogues – oh improve keyboard navigation of same dialogue requesters

2. I’d like for the finder not to stall (and at times crash) each time a machine that was being accessed via a mounted share is switched off

3. I’d like the printer options to use tabs or icons a la prefs rather than a drop down menu with at times hard to understand names – a clearly labelled static menu makes for a better ui menu than any drop down menu.

(more…)