My OSX wish list
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 2nd 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’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. 