Official OS 10.7 Wish List :)
 

I thought I'd start a wish list thread because not too much 'new' stuff has come through on 10.6 yet. So post some wishes here if you wish (sorry!) and let's tell Apple what we want.

* FINDER: Tabs!!!!
* New theme
* More AppleScript support (Preview and Dictionary, for instance)
* Growl-like stuff and integration with Mail, iTunes and all that
* Cocoa iTunes
* More built-in chat networks in iChat (like Adium)
* Window manipulation apps like Witch or Optimal Layout
* More defaults hacks
* New Dock with more customizing
* New UNIX shell?
* AppDelete or TrashMe-like uninstaller (clears Library)
* Better compression support (StuffIt decompression, for instance)

Your imagination picks up here…

Personally, I still miss the trash on the Desktop :D

on a similar note, its not a big thing, but it would be nice if you could hide the desktop (icons and all that) without quitting Finder. In Windows 7 you can just right click on the desktop and select to hide the desktop icons, and I know in Leopard at least the only way to hide the icons is to quit Finder or use some third party tool. I don't know if Snow Leopard is any different since I only use it at school, but like I said, it would be just a nice feature to have.

cd ~/Desktop; ln -s ../.Trash Trash

Voilà!

Some of these are not going to happen.

Apple won't make the interface visually customisable -- it wants a consistent experience across all Macs. So no themes or options for flowers round your windows or Dock.

I doubt that Stuffit would licence its Expander to Apple. In any case, .sit is proprietary and should be discouraged. I'll agree with more options for the built-in Archive Utility, like using bzip, gzip, etc.

New Unix shell? You've got bash, sh, tcsh, csh, zsh, ksh. Most of the others are considered 'exotic', but you can probably install them if you want.

What 'defaults hacks' do you want? Either an app has/needs preferences, which can be configured using the defaults command, or it doesn't. Better documentation of prefs would be useful.

@Felix: I'm not sure why you would want to hide all the files and folders on the Desktop. What would you do then? Admire the picture? :D
It's advisable not to have too much stuff on the Desktop in any case.

If you do want Apple to hear your voice, then you can always leave a message on their feedback page.

@Felix:
Don't forget that 0 is replaceable with 1 to bring it back. In fact, I'm using that hack at this second.

The trash on the Desktop? Amusing - I submitted a hint a few days ago on this subject. You can also copy the icon using the Get Info method. (Honestly, I think this should be added to wish list: being able to copy icons more easily than that, perhaps by using a right-click or whatever.)

Oh, and speaking of icons, I'm wishing Apple would implement the icon family class (from the sdef: NOT AVAILABLE YET). It would certainly be useful to create an icon with AppleScript -- just drag, drop, and have the whole process at your fingertips. As soon as it happens I'll work on a droplet in AS to take dropped files, find out their dimensions (Image Events) and export them as an icon family. Or did I speak too soon? :-P

Does anyone agree that making a Growl-ish system available by default would be useful? Apple could add something along the lines of 'Notifier' to display iTunes track changes, Mail arrivals and all that stuff.

Last but not least, I'm still waiting for a Cocoa iTunes, DVD Player and more. I don't like iTunes' current state because it's modal (Preferences, Info) -- something the  isn't supposed to do…

Fix DNS, that is my main request.

Hi R

That's curious that you'd like a new UNIX shell. Do you really mean a shell (like bash or csh), or a new Terminal? I personally like Terminal a lot and I think he's as easily as good as Konsole and other Linux equivalents.

However, I'm not at all enthusiastic about a new shell. bash is horrible - however it's standard horrible. There are lots of other (also standard) horrible shells such as csh, zsh, ksh and who knows all what. Adding ash (Apple Shell) to the soup sounds like a step in the wrong direction to me.

I'll resist the temptation to rant about the absurdities of bash. bash bashing's become boring.

I'm sure in 10.7 we'll see lots of enhancements to (the already very nice) Finder. Coverflow is simply beautiful. I hope Apple have another beautiful gem up their sleeve.

Just curious why do you hate bash? I've read plenty of bash bashing on the Unix forums, but I never really get a solid answer why.

In OS X you can use any alternative shell if you so choose. Korn, cshell, shell, bash, zshell, etc should all work.

My buddy who is a web developer wrote a few back end shell scripts once and he got me on chat while doing it and said bash is ugly to code. It is my main language I use for coding since most of what I do is shell scripting, so I am used to it I guess. I use bash.

Hi T

Oh, I don't hate bash. Quite the contrary, I also use it every day and find it very useful. I made the switch from csh to bash 2 years ago and was rather surprised that two 'standards' should have very different syntax for the same thing. For example: defining environment strings. csh: setenv variable value bash export variable=value

My main gripe about bash is the ugly and inconsistent syntax. For example:
for var in bla dee bla; do .... done
if [ condition ]; .... fi
case .... esac

Why is done not spelt enod just as fi and esac are conveniently spelt backwards?

There was a paper written years ago entitled "csh programming considered harmful": http://www.ooblick.com/text/CshProgr...edHarmful.html I'm sure something similar could be written about bash.

However I find bash very useful and I have many scripts that work fine on Mac/Linux and Cygwin (Windows). Adding a new apple-only-mac-centric shell language is unlikely to be something I'd find useful. Others of course may disagree.

On my way to work this morning, I thought of something I'd really like in 10.7. I'd like the Menu (and/or) the Dock to be duplicated on my twin monitor Mac! Maybe it's there and I've never discovered it!

Yeah, I probably won't use that one since it's been done before, a lot of different ways. I think I've had the trash on my desktop since Tiger, at least. I did mine with a Folder Action. If someone came up with a way to animate the icon during the process, that might be hintable. :)

With you on the tabbed Finder, though.

I want a 3D navigable interface! One that I can use 3D glasses to view and acceloramator positioned gloves to manipulate! That, and I want it to accept bio feedback, so that it can comfort me when I'm depressed or something. Oh, and if it could bake cookies, I do like cookies. That would also be good :).

I don't use c shell, but my understanding is that it was created to help C programmers adapt to shell, so it is a lot like a C environment.

In fact, I haven't really fussed with any shells outside of bash. Bash is the defacto shell on almost all Linux distros.

A new Front Row! One that doesn't take minutes to scroll through (Yes I have a lot of stuff on it.)

How about making it so iTunes doesn't spinlock while an iPhone/iPod/iPad is restoring? I can't even play music while iTunes is restoring an iPod and it's really irritating.

I think that OS X needs to be more like an iPod--simple, and everything that I believe Apple always wanted users to understand. The iPod was a huge success, even something that the Windows and Linux users can't deny--so why not change Macs to be more personal? OS X, in my opinion, is sorta becoming like a PC, and Aqua has dramatically changed since OS X's beginning.

I'd really like free upgrades (like 10.3 -> 10.4 -> 10.5 being installed with Software Update). That would be cool. :) Another thing that would be super neat would be to run iPod touch and iPhone apps natively in a format all Apples could understand. For instance, like how G3/G4/G5 and Intel apps can run on any Mac universally. Another thing--I know things are going web, but I like computers being simply personal level without the hype over Internet.

I wish the shell were more English. Right now it's horrible as robinwmills says it to be. I think Terminal needs a bit more AppleScript support (sorry if all this AS talk gets on anyone's nerves -- it's my main workflow) and tabs support too. (Tabs, currently, aren't even switchable using the keyboard.)

iTunes should be written in Cocoa. Definitely!!

It would be nice to perform file-conversion tasks in the Finder, like using sips or textutil. Also appreciated would be something like Squeeze (http://squeezeapp.com/). For the moment it sucks to have to use a third party app, or to use ditto --hfsCompression.

I'd really like it if iTunes got cover art regardless of whether you're a member. Using TunesArt's a fine alternative but not really appreciated.

One of these days the Finder's going to support icon family and it might be doable to set the icon.

Some changes are going to be made. I.e. if the keystroke to make a new Finder tab is Cmd-T then what's going to happen to Add To Sidebar? (Hint: Shift-Cmd-T adds the selection to the Dock.)

The terminal in 10.5 and 10.6 has tab support and I think you can use hot keys to switch between them.

I'm not so sure that introducing English into a programming language is helpful. I like the precision of the C descended languages - every byte means something. The language is short, consistent and very deterministic.

I'm not sure that metaphors are useful in UI. The computer, my wife and the car are all incredibly helpful, useful, elegant and different. I interact with the my wife in English. The computer has menus, command-lines and code. The car has pedals, a steering wheel and all manner of bizarre switches and levers. I don't think menus would work well in a car. For sure a steering wheel wouldn't enhance the interaction with my wife.

I hope you get the idea. Leave English out of programming languages.

However I'd like to pose some simple and obvious questions. Why would Apple spend their R&D $'s on a non-standard apple-only shell? What benefit would this bring to the Apple User Community? And "the bottom line" question: Would an apple shell cause more people to buy Apple computers, iPhones and iPads?

I find AppleScript as a (programming) language is pretty easy to understand. It's the basis for Automator -- someone, a while ago, decided they were going to make automation easier. And you wrote actions using AppleScript before 10.6.
Still, it wouldn't hurt to make 'cp' into 'copy' and 'rm' into 'remove' and all that.

You can always make your own aliases for stuff like that.

I wouldn't mind seeing Apple just finish what they started with updating the various OS components and applications. In this day and age, getting a spinlock for some every day thing such as just clicking a menu items is not really acceptable.

You get a spinlock just for clicking a menu!? You must have an OS 7 machine :D

Um... as much as I was mentioning the Mac being as simple as an iPod, the shell is the underlying "real" OS X. And personally, and some may not like this, I like Terminal with it's current C, Obj-C, and C++ compilation and program building support, along with the Unix base.

Switching to AppleScript in OS X 10.7 would be downright horrible. If you really don't want the OS X shell app or like it, just use the GUI. If you're a programmer, the Terminal app is what you want to use. What makes Mac simplisticity for users easy was built in hard work by others.

On a more positive note, what if Spotlight + Finder + Time Machine + iTunes merged? That would be sweet!

I don't mean just a search bar. I mean the graphics of Time Machine with background music support of iTunes, with files/folders literally done away with, replacing it with a virtual OS with Spotlight. Files would be completely visual with previews on the fly. It'd be radical, but it'd be a major step forward from all the other operating systems out there.

And, what would be better? Add dynamic backgrounds to this Finder concept--your own videos, or professionally done Apple vids playing in the background of your files.

I like AppleScript. I'm using it less now since I'm learning Objective-C but it's useful for small tasks. Besides Terminal supports osascript.

I don't quite get your idea of a 4 way merging. Right, iTunes is boring to have to keep open separately. Time Machine and Finder, if indistinguishable from each other, would be confusing. And for my machine, Spotlight is often imprecise and slow.

A vid in the bg would be confusing.

I'm not keen on the Finder-Spotlight-iTunes-Time Machine merger, either. I want things to be simple, with less distraction, not more. One app, one task: that is the unix way.

Any speaking of which, I don't like the way that iTunes is essentially becoming "iSync".
Give me an app that plays and organises my music.
Give me another app that displays ebooks and PDFs (with or without a central library).
Give me another app that syncs these thing to my iDevices.

iTunes is becoming way too bloated and critical.

@Red Menace: if you're getting spinning wheels, then there's something wrong. Enough Ram?

Well, I'm thinking of a Finder that lets you create simpler Services. The Automator way is bloated and slow. What if I want to just create a simple service for, let's say, creating an executable file with a header #!/command/path, then enabling it with chmod +x and finally opening it in nano. Using Automator is cumbersome. The bash way is about 5 lines I guess.

Not sure - I have 2GB, which used to be OK, but it seems that anything that needs to shuffle memory around (like rebuilding the menu displays) gives me the spinning wheel. Page outs look OK, right now about 2MB after 2 days uptime - typically running Safari, Mail, Xcode, BBEdit, Automator, Script Editor, with about a quarter of the memory free. The original Snow Leopard install was fairly zippy, but it seems that every update clogs it up a little more.

I don't know if it's the answer, but Safari has been awful flaky lately. I seem to have most of my problems when I am either using Safari, or have it open in the background.

Jay, do you have a Flash page open? :D Congrats on 3000 posts.

My wish would be a more integrated Time Machine. I could have keystrokes to go back to Last Change, Yesterday etc. I committed a major gaffe when I accidentally deleted half of my desktop… on vacation, far from TM.

One hardware thing I'd like is a gap between a MacBook's body and a platform, like this:

That way the processor wouldn't burn a hole in whatever's below it.