Submitted by “At the Worldwide Developers Conference in August, Apple plans to provide a sneak preview of the next major update to OS X, code named Leopard. Apple is typically tight-lipped about what to expect from Leopard, so we have no idea what new and improved features await us in August. But that’s not stopping us from coming up with a list of things we’d like to see in OS X 10.5.” And for when you’re done reading.
I did not see, anywhere, in that wishlist better support for third party devices. I know that Apple supports almost all SonyEricsson, Nokia (series 60) and Motorola phones, but what about synching of Windows Mobile phones? Blackberries? Non-smartphone on the nokia side (nokia series 40 for example), Series 80 smartphones and sidekicks (They’ve got the Woz connection! Use it!)
Yes there are third-party solutions out there, but it would be nice if it were built-in
Edited 2006-06-29 17:45
isync was updated recently and now supports series 40 nokia phones and lots of others… try doing a software update.
I’ll second that – especially when it comes to support for USB wifi adapters. I’ve spent the last month trying to find one that will work with an old iBook that lacks built-in wireless (and the local reseller quoted me $250 Cdn for an internal airport card from Apple – no thanks, I could buy five wireless routers for that much).
There do seem to be some generic chipset drivers out there, although most of them also seem to require adding the device id and vendor id of your specific device to an info.plist file. I don’t consider that a terrible hardship, although it would probably be beyond the typical non-geek – and it’s pretty anithetical to the whole “it just works” ideal.
* Bluetooth Voice Gateway!
Mac users cannot use the call pickup button on headsets! It took me ages to find this out!
* FTFF
speaks for itself
That’s all I really need.
The second link is actually quite nice!
…with the wish list. I understand the widgets/sherlock issue… but I would rather have seen them talk more about the Finder.
The other stuff… eh. I would just as soon use the 3rd party products instead of having them built into the OS… that way I would have more control over how bloated my system becomes.
This is a ridiculous wish list. It’s essentially a list of 3rd-party tools that these guys want to have included with Mac OSX at no extra charge.
If you want to have nifty new features that were conceived independently of your OS distributor packaged in future versions of the OS, then I suggest you take a look at the OSS distributors.
On the other hand, it seems that a Mac user’s idea of taking control of their system is to seek out 3rd-party products, which doesn’t jive with the mantra of these Macworld columnists.
“This is a ridiculous wish list. It’s essentially a list of 3rd-party tools that these guys want to have included with Mac OSX at no extra charge. “
You must be new here
Looking at third party software is a good indicator of future OS X built-in features. Right now we have:
* SoundJam -> iTunes (Very interesting story, http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/ )
* Watson -> Sherlock 3
* LaunchBar/QuickSilver -> Spotlight (when used as a launcher)
* RapidWeaver/Sandvox -> iWeb
* Some_app(I don’t remember the name)_that_then_became Quartz Composer
* Konfabulator -> Dashboard
…and I’m probably forgetting a few more.
What I would like to have is a possibility to manage the open windows when they are in expose mode. If I want to clean up my desktop now I have to open expose, click on a window, close it, open Expose, click on a window, close it … I want to be able to close windows while Expose is running.
Anton
Exactly! When it was first introduced, I was surprised that it didn’t support keyboard commands for close, quit, hide or minimize from within expose. It seems like such a natural feature.
Although I do find that Peter Maurer’s Witch window switcher does the job very well.
I’ve got 4000 item folders opening in under a second. Or take /usr/share/man/man3 for example, 5000 items opening in a flash. He must be talking about a 400 MHz iBook. And even then..
But anyway, Apple, if you’d be so kind as to MAKE NEW FOLDERS OPEN IN COLUMN VIEW when I tell it to (and I’ve been telling it to for a few years now), that would be great.
Thanks Apple. Love,
junior
i just opened a folder with 3447 items in it and it did take around 20 seconds, granted that was a network volume. but i think my mini at home has the same problem (though its at 512 mb of ram).
as for opening in column view.
i think the phrasing of this in the finder preferences is bad. if you shift +n (new finder window) then it will be in column view. and thats what the option says “open new windows in column view”, but if you click on a folder then it doesn’t open in column view.
i think most users would expect it to force every window from then on into column view. and im totally with you on this one.
I opened the folder /usr/share/man/man3/ as he said.
4 945 files so far. It opened in 2 seconds on my powerbook G4 1,5Ghz and 1,5Go Ram.
I think your issue come from the -> network <- volume.
Yes, that’s what I meant. I want every window to be in column view. It’s easy enough to hit cmd-1 or cmd-2 if I want icon or list view for a change, but now I keep hitting cmd-3 till I’m blue in the face – it has become automatism.
What about implementing cut and paste in the Finder, that’s number one on my request list for Mac OS X Leopard.
err… cut and paste in the Finder is there and has been for ages.
Nope. There’s no Cut menu for _files_. You can’t cut. You can copy or duplicate. But no cut. OS X forces you to drag files to move them, which is fine by me except
– you can’t move up a directory when you’re dragging. You’ve got no option but to go the long way around. Even if you could press Cmd+Up whilst dragging, it still doesn’t work. In Windows you can just press backspace. In OS X this is a torture when dealing with Zip files.
– You can’t drag on to the back button or the path button either. The only option is to either bring up two windows or use column view, both of which require setting things in their place first.
I’d prefer Enter-CtrlX-Backspace-CtrlV any day.
ROFL, I thought OSX is the best and most advanced operating system in teh world?
Not being an English speaker I’d rather go for localizing features English-speaking users have had for ages:
– Spaniard text-to-speech
– Spanish voice recognition
– Spanish voice over
– Spanish dictionary (Royal Language Academy and María Moliner’s Use of Spanish would rock)
bla, bla…
Those are not the most exciting features that will bring tones of sales. I do acknowledge that.
I think the list is pretty good.
I would personally like to see Spotlight go away, that way it makes it less likely that apple will ever get ultra-dumb and do away with finder and require users to have to use spotlight to find stuff verses just going to it.
I suppose some people find spotlight useful. I’ve probably used all of few dozen times since Tiger came, and that was only because OSX put a file someplace without me knowing where it put it.
Dashboard needs a lot of work. It definitely needs what the author mentions. Let things stay on the desktop, and let there be widgets that pop up at times when something happens. There are so many widgets that are pointless if they don’t stay on the desktop. Like itunes remotes, weather/temp info, clocks… those are things to stay on the desktop full time. Otherwise they have saved you nothing.
Safari needs some tweaks. We need a safari 3 that brings things like more buttons you can setup on the title bar, such as “new window” “new tab” so you can actually work efficiently. A smart bookmark system that lets you create a new folder and place it on the fly when creating a bookmark without going into the whole bookmark editor, bigger Xs on the tabs for closing them. Move page forward page back and other buttons away from the close window button. Of course this is a OSX flaw, making it so easy for people to close a window by accident because apple things controls and menus show be right next to the kill button.
Furthermore fix the webkit memory leak. Safari daily crashing and grinding the system to a halt is not acceptable. Furthermore it makes dashboard worthless. Since after the first time you launch dashboard when you launch it again, it crawls to respond.
Fix application launching. If I click on the safari icon in the dock, it should launch a new window, not bring up a minimized safari window I already have open. If I wanted that window back open, I’d just click on it. Clicking on the app icon means you want a fresh window. This is a flaw in apples HIG, and probably the most frustrating flaw of the Mac OS interface.
Make USB 2.0 go faster then 3-4MB/s, same for FW which isn’t much faster. This could be a defective mac on my end, but when it was new, it was fine, since tiger, USB has been horrifically slow.
Fix application launching. If I click on the safari icon in the dock, it should launch a new window, not bring up a minimized safari window I already have open. If I wanted that window back open, I’d just click on it. Clicking on the app icon means you want a fresh window. This is a flaw in apples HIG, and probably the most frustrating flaw of the Mac OS interface.
That’s not a bug, that’s a design decision. I personally like that particular feature of OS X’s dock. Having a preference to determine the behaviour would be alright though.
The system restore function is in my opinion nonsense. System restore in XP is being used to recover the registry (reload last working settings). Since OSX does not have a registry….
This is for me one of the main reasons not to use XP. Microsoft must take all kind of absurd measures to correct a wrong system design, UAC is another example. I don’t appreciate these kinds of ‘features’.
Some users have had big/small problems with Apple builds 10.x.x etc…
Leopard should include file shadowing, so that any system files replaced by updates are shadowed and can easily be rolled back without any hassles. System Restore is an architectural mess, as well as being a safe heaven for viruses, it doesn’t always succeed in restoring and it eats drive space like nobody’s.
I will be delighted if Apple should give us the possibility to turn the annoying boot sound off. I rarely reboot but in the few occasions I have to do it I’m invariable caught off guard. What if I’m in a meeting? Or about to have sex (and just need to check sth on OSAlert before that
Another, and much more useful addition, would be the possibility to burn ISO/UDF DVDs. Maybe it’s already there but I couldn’t find it (I tried to create an image in CD/DVD master format, whatever that means, but to no avail). By default it burns them in MacOS extended. That is so brain-dead! What if I want to give it to one of the other >95% of computer users in the world?
And finally, make the keyboard shortcut for switching the input method work after a reboot. I always have to to go to “International settings” and turn it off and then on. It’s annoying enough that the Command-Space shortcut was hijacked for Spotlight (so I turned it off there, obviously) but maybe it still steps on the Input method toes. Aaaargh!
The Finder does have problems. They might not be that big of a deal, but there’s room for improvement and it’s an important part of the OS. It sort of gives me a warm tingly feeling since (at least on the surface) it hasn’t changed much since the ’80s
Safari is freakin’ awesome (it’s faster than Firefox now, at least for me). However, it could use some work to prevent really crappy websites from crashing it. I don’t expect it to accept shitty code, but I also don’t want it to crash. Actually I think the problem might stem from video plug-ins, so maybe it’s QuickTime, Flash, or that WMV plug-in that need the work. I was never able to get performance out of Flash on OS X web browsers, but maybe that’s just me.
This isn’t really related, but listen to what I managed to do to myself:
I was exporting a small video clip from QuickTime frame by frame (generating hundreds upon hundreds of screenshots, more or less). Needless to say this was pretty slow but working fine, except I decided to do it to the Desktop (idiot) and accidentally increased the image preview size to maximum.
I couldn’t access the Finder preferences to change it back, and I couldn’t do crap while my poor G4 Powerbook tried to generate hundreds of large high quality image previews while still creating hundreds more. After it finished exporting the movie I tried to reboot – big mistake. Now it started rendering the previews from scratch. I tried everything, even opening up a Terminal and deleting the images before they rendered but even simple UNIX commands were executing slowly. In the end I just had to wait it out, they did eventually all render and I moved them to a folder with list view. I wish there was some way to temporarily freeze that kind of activity.
I would like to see more support from 3rd party vendors for Macs, not the other way around. Logitech is driving me crazy by not making Mac drivers for the G5 (correct me if I’m wrong here). I e-mailed them but ended up with some random IT woman who didn’t understand what I was saying.
Edited 2006-06-30 13:15
Where the writer seems to have NO CLUE what Bootcamp is, what a VM is, or how interoperability between operating systems should work…
Although I’m half surprised Apple doesn’t just port WINE and be done with it – but I imagine after the OSS hissy fits about them ‘not contributing back to Konqueror’ and the even bigger keniption fits over the source to x86 Darwin, Apple is probably a bit leery of Open Source at this point.
You’re right that the author doesn’t get the point of Boot Camp…
I do think it’s unfair to say that people are having “hissy fits” beacause Apple seems to have decided to stop developing OSS. Yes, people are upset beacuse its not a nice thing to do,but I don’t see anybody having a hissy fit either.
Explorer style file paths in a text field – so that they can be copied. Like in those fake screen shots that popped up last week. Why-oh-why do you think this is a superfluous feature, Apple?