A feature list for OSX 10.4...

[Blackheart]

2... tabbed finder windows

Tabbed finder windows would be badass. I don't know about anyone else, maybe it's just my slow comp, but safari is getting unstable. Also, you can ctrl-click a minimized finder window to close it, how about other app windows?

 

[aswitcher]

I want to be able to take my iBook with me, change stuff (files, Mozilla settings, whatever) and come home and have them reflected on my PowerMac.

I don't want to pay for Server for this (which only works on the LAN anyhow).
I don't want to pay for .Mac for this - I've got a bleedin' modem connection and a fast ethernet LAN.

Basically, iSync for homedirs. Home on iPod would sort of work, but I don't want to have to bring the iPod just for this.

That would be pretty cool. A iDisk type arrangement for all your computers, and I suggest backup drives. Also R/W CD for backup updates...

 

[TigerPRO]

2) Remove non-stretched resolutions from the monitors pane. What are these good for??? Some games switch the resolution automatically and they always pick the non-stretched ones. This one's becomming a big peeve for me.

Not this again...

They are very useful for simulating different resolutions when working with website programming. Additionally, if you are using the video out on your Mac, you need these to be able to see your screen properly when doing an export to a non-wide-screen devices such as an "old" TV. Other other questions? I hope I've cleared this up.

 

[cb911]

i'd really love to see a better way of OS X handling the VM swap files.

right now i've got 1GB free on my Panther partition (a bit low on free space i know...) but even if i've just got Phtotshop open and use thet for a few hours it'll fill up my Panther partition, even though i've got it set to use different partitions for the scratch disk.

there is a tutorial here for setting up swap space for OS X in another partition... but it would be nice to see it included as an option. 🙂

i guess not many people would worry about this though... and it is kind of a weird request. 😛

 

[yamabushi]

11. Fast and accurate dictation using speech/textedit.

12. Voice passwords.

13. Linux application support (as requested above).

14. Better support for (and marketing towards) business and government users.

15. Some form of support for PowerPC hardware made by IBM and possibly others. Sell Licenses for the OS and a generic boot ROM of some kind. Clauses included in the contracts can diminish the threat of market share loss by limiting advertising methods and/or product pricing. Television and radio ads in particular would benefit both parties.

 

[phrac]

3) Live file / folder updates in Finder!!! Sometimes I have to close a folder and reopen to see a newly added file, WTF??!

Yes, this is very annoying. I would also like to see this.

I would also like to see the ability for multiple virtual desktops (although this is less important with expose. I still like to keep similar type apps on different desktops, keeps things neater, especially on a 'book.

 

[wdlove]

11. Fast and accurate dictation using speech/textedit.

12. Voice passwords.

Those two items would be awesome. Instead of voice being a play thing. It would be great to be able to use the Mac by voice, typing text, surfing, and posting.

 

[cesar]

my requests, so far...

1. tabbed text-editor and tabbed terminal, like gnome's
2. Syntax Highlighting in textedit
3. Code Folding capabilities in xcode, like in kate.kde.org
4. a GUI for changing the login screen.
5. an add-on to iChat to be compatible with T.120 and multi-user videoconfs.
6. a Graphical Code Analyzer like SGIs for Xcode http://www.sgi.com/software/irix/tools/prodev.html#B
7. A cross-plataform Apple Remote Desktop 2. Tinny client app needs to be installed on UNIX, Linux and Windows boxes.
8. Add a direcotry service for iChat to 10.4 server. Offices can use iChat with a local server, instead of conecting to AIM or .mac. Use office login as iChat screenname and user info taken from login data. <-- this is would be great!!
9. More SDKs and frameworks from apple
10. just iLife apps with metal interphase, other apps (iChat, iCal, iSync, AddressBook, and so on... ) with aqua look

 

[thecow]

I want a way to make all of the windows from one application or all of the windows open fit onto one screen but have them all active unlike exposé. For example in safari if I am comparing 2 web-pages that are longer than the screen I would need to manually drag each of them to fit half of the screen. This is annoying.

 

[vniow]

Hibernate support!

I love this feature on XP, its great for those of us who have or want to turn our computers completely off instead of sleeping.

 

[DVDSP]

Hibernate support!

I love this feature on XP, its great for those of us who have or want to turn our computers completely off instead of sleeping.

Please explain Hibernate, until now I always thought that it WAS sleep, just with a different name.

 

[rice_web]

Please explain Hibernate, until now I always thought that it WAS sleep, just with a different name.

Hibernate actually turns the machine OFF.

However, all the memory is written to disk before shutting down, allowing for quick boots.

 

[mms]

I'm still not really sure what hibernation is. If the machine writes to the hard disk before shutting down, wouldn't it take as much time as usual in starting up because it has to start up the system and start spinning the hard drive?

Also, I believe I have heard about numerous problems that cropped up from PC users using hibernation. Maybe it's just becuse it's Microsoft, but I wonder if it is a flaw with the concept itself. Perhaps Apple could make a better implementation of it.

 

[vniow]

rice_web got it. Hibernation freezes everything like it is, saves the state to the hard drive and shuts the computer down where no power is required to keep things in memory, unlike sleep. I use this on my PC all the time, its boots a little bit faster but its main use is being able to save everything like you had it in the event where no power is going to the machine. I'm surprised that it hasn't made itself into OS X yet, its quite nifty.

 

[WM.]

system lock down similar to XP Pro. in some settings, the administrator can allow CTRL+ALT+DEL to give a menu, by clicking "system lock" or hitting Enter, the system can be locked down with having just a small login window. no other user can log in other than the one who locked it.

Open up Keychain Access and select "Show Status in Menu Bar" from the View menu. Or, if you want to be 1337, you can go to /Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access/Contents/Resources and double-click on Keychain.menu. You'll get a menu extra with a padlock icon, from which you can select "Lock Screen". Your Mac will then go to its screen saver and require a password to unlock the screen. If you have Fast User Switching enabled, I believe you can also switch to another user to unlock it (not sure about this though).

HTH
WM

 

[WM.]

Improvements to the Finder.
There's no reason why it should not be easier to make shortcuts on the desktop or send files as email directly from Finder Windows.

Select a file. Go to Finder ---> Services ---> Mail ---> Send File. Bada-bing!!!

Better window scaling performance.
This is probably the most glaring problem in Panther.
QE works very smoothly for other functions, so I imagine why it could not be utilized for this purpose as well.

I'm constantly amazed at what people think QE is and isn't--and I'm not even a developer!! Look, it's pretty simple. Quartz Extreme is a hardware-accelerated compositing engine. Nothing less, nothing more. Resizing windows does involve a fair amount of compositing, but I'd have to guess that most of the performance hit is in re-laying-out the contents of the window, like the text of your IMs in iChat or whatever. And that is not compositing, nor is it something that (AFAIK) is easily accelerated by the consumer video cards out there.

In other words, quit yer bitchin'. 🙂 Things did get quite a bit better with Panther, at least on my old-school iBook (not even a Rage 128 over here...).

Sidebars in Safari, similar to those IE.

YUCK YUCK YUCK YUCK YUCK!!!!!! I hope not!! Unless they can be turned off...

Window focus.
Moving the cursor over a window should bring the window to the foreground without having to click.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is an option system-wide at some point, considering that you can do it in Apple's X11, and for all I know implementing that might have laid the groundwork for doing it throughout the OS...

WM

 

[WM.]

Cocoa Finder

Why?

 

[WM.]

1. Total stability.

2. Far more options for customizing the user interface.

3. No more problems with broken permissions.

4. Advanced self healing properties so that even the worst crash will always end with the user at the desktop.

5. Tighter security. Put both Windows and Linux to shame.

6. Better tools for developers built in. Easy to use and powerful OpenGL and Quartz Extreme tools. Built in support for more programming languages and compilers in XCode.

7. Improved user troubleshooting and system maintenance tools.

8. Peripherals should never cause the system to become unstable.

Not a very demanding person, are you... 🙄

9. Bad memory should be detected automatically.

It's called ECC, and it costs $$$$. Not that much, but it's something, and there's very little demand for it at the consumer level. We may see Apple introduce it on the Power Mac sometime soon, though, since U3 (now) supports it.

10. The user should be informed of the source of the problem and how to fix it. Professional service by a technician should be a last resort.

Again, not very demanding, eh...

WM

edit: BTW, about the OpenGL tools thing: you may want to check this out.

 

[WM.]

Heres the list

1) Better windows networking

Being able to read and write to post fat32 file systems would be nice

Panther added read-only NTFS. It's a start...

Support for quicktime content/screensavers as a background image. Having images fade in and out and possibly pan would would add to the wow effect if done correctly. Although a full movie would be too distracting, a movie that slowly changed over time would be nice, with subtle changes

You can do this already. (It's not supported or very easy, but you don't have to recompile your kernel or anything, IIRC.) Search on Mac OS X Hints.

Being able to switch off eye candy for old machines would be nice

Since Panther, I really haven't had any complaints on my trusty old iBook. I appreciate that iTunes doesn't do live window resizing--it would be nice to have that for more apps (as an easily configurable option).

6) Compatibility

FreeBSD has a linux compatibility layer, why not os x? PPC Linux apps are not as wide spread as x86 but it would add options, especially for none open source linux apps such as DB2 etc.

MOSR (not the best of sources) says it's coming...

X11/Linux apps to be more integrated a la carbon/cocoa and java apps. Make it so they use aqua look and feel by default where possible.

I'm pretty sure the natures of X11 and Quartz make that almost impossible.

Make it so you dont have to open X11 first. Add X11 to System Preferences pane to set the options.

Yeah, those would both be nice...

Add QT and Gnome libs to allow KDE/Gnome apps to work in OS X

It's already being done. Check out http://ranger.befunk.com/blog/.

Add DarwinPorts with a GUI as an optional install or core install.

This showed up in some of the earlier builds of Panther (the WWDC preview until 7Bsomething). I'd have to assume it's coming at some point...

Improve textEdits doc format capability and mails enchange capability.

Definitely.

Allow doc reading/writing to be system wide using frameworks in cocoa.

I think that's already happened...

7) File System

May as well jump on the BeOS file system. I've not used BeOS but i hear its good. I'm reading the guys book at the moment.

He's worked for Apple for the last couple of years now. BeOS-style something is coming...we just don't know what. 🙂

11) iChat

voice/video mail would be nice (to mac only users at present i guess as wont be supported in aol im)

Eh? We already have AV chat with AIM 5.5 or later...

15) Quicktime

Abouttime full screen was allowed for free.

This is my take on an AppleScript that you can find all over the place, including on Mac OS X Hints. It's not the most convenient thing ever, and I barely know AppleScript so I'm sure there's plenty of syntactical or other weirdness, but I use it when necessary and it works fine:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
	set request to display dialog "Select a size, or cancel. If you choose Double Size, you can switch among half, normal, and double sizes using Command-0, Command-1, and Command-2, respectively." buttons {"Cancel", "Double Size", "Full Screen"} default button "Full Screen"
	if button returned of request is "Double Size" then
		present movie 1 scale double
	else if button returned of request is "Full Screen" then
		present movie 1 scale screen
	end if
end tell

Oh, I forgot to mention: I think the script's dialog looks better if you add a line break or two after "respectively." (note the period) but before the end quote.

FWIW
WM

 

[WM.]

A pet peeve of mine is that if I am in one app and I click on an app behind the current app to bring the second app to the front some of the windows associated with that app stay behind.

In this shot I was in Mail and clicked on Safari to bring it to the front, but the Downloads window is still behind Mail. That just annoys me. I want the WHOLE APP brought to the front, not just the window I click on...

I agree that it's not very OS 9-like, but that window interleaving ability can be a life-saver on small screens (like mine). In fact, I was just using it yesterday. When you have a lot of maximized windows (which I have to), it's essential to be able to see more than one app's windows at a time without having to use cmd-tab or Exposé. I think this should be user-configurable too.

WM

 

[WM.]

11. Fast and accurate dictation using speech/textedit.

There was a really interesting article on O'Reilly the other day about the Mac OS speech technology, how it works, and its limitations. Basically, it's not at all suited to dictation, where it would have no idea what you might possibly say next. Instead, it's highly optimized for situations where there are a limited (though fairly large and expandable) number of pre-selected things you might say to it ("tell me the time" or "get my mail" or whatever). It's very good at what it does, but dictation is a completely different kettle of fish.

Now, that's not to say that there's not some incredible dictation technology in Apple's labs. I just don't want people to get the idea that the current technology is easily extensible to dictation.

12. Voice passwords.

Yeah, it would be pretty cool to have those back again...

WM

 

[WM.]

7. A cross-plataform Apple Remote Desktop 2. Tinny client app needs to be installed on UNIX, Linux and Windows boxes.

ThinkSecret says ARD 2 will support VNC...

8. Add a direcotry service for iChat to 10.4 server. Offices can use iChat with a local server, instead of conecting to AIM or .mac. Use office login as iChat screenname and user info taken from login data. <-- this is would be great!!

Er, like Rendezvous messaging? (There's a brief description at the link; since iChat has been out, with this functionality, for so long, I think Apple has stopped hyping it very much, so I couldn't find a very in-depth blurb about it...)

WM

 

[King Cobra]

All right. My #1 pet peeve about Panther is the layout of items in the Finder window. Now excuse me for being one of the 0.1% of Apple users that works with 800 x 600, but in OS 9, I could have 7 columns of files in a single finder window that took up about 30 to 40% of my screen. In OS 10.3, the number has been reduced to 2 !! I don't want everything to be spread out a f***ing mile apart from everything else. What happened to the clean/condensed finder window option from OS 9? Or at least the option to set invisible panel sizes between each item? I don't see any such option. (Oh, and in 10.2, that number of columns was 4. What's going to happen for OS 10.4...one column?? Bullsh***!)

Now, how about some sci-fi functionality with 10.4?

[1] Finder search: I want to be able to put my cursor (on-screen) right over the little search query and, without clicking, have a text flasher (you know, the small, vertical line that flashes once or twice a second when you edit text files) right on the search query...then be able to type something and send the query as a search. "Mouseover searching"

[2] Finder folder navigation: I want to be able to have the option of doing a mouseover over a folder for 0.25 seconds (adjustable) in a Finder window and have it act like a spring-loaded folder for as long as I don't move the mouse away from the spring-pop-up. The purpose would be to "peak" inside folders so I don't have to double-click on them (or click at all) to see what's inside. And if I were to move the cursor inside of the spring folder, that folder would stay open until I close it again with command-W (or the "X" at the top left of the Finder window). "Mouseover spring-loaded folder previews"

And I also want an alternative option for a "tool tip" (you know, the small rectangular faint yellow rectangles that replaced the OS 9 balloons) beside each folder that gives a list of the folder contents upon mouseover. I think this would be better.

[3] I want to have the same option for the Dock, with an option for both file view and list view. "Dock mouseover spring-loaded folder previews"

[4] I want to be able to do a mouseover over the Trash in the Dock and know how many items are in the Trash, and what total KB or MB size they consumer. "Mouseover trash information display"

The sci-fi factor in each of these is the mouseover, where you never have to press a button or a keystroke to open an application, sort of like moving your hand around magically in the air on an imaginary mousepad to access a file or a folder.

(Hell, if you're not sure if that's a great idea, then imagine that your navigating through your Finder windows using the mouseover, and when you get to that text file, again mouseover it and it opens in the application of your choice. Try it.)



Other functions:
[5] I want an option to change the color my item text beside each folder or specific folders independent of the folder labels, like, cyan text on a blue label.

[6] Like in OS 9, I want to know how many items are in the Trash, and what total KB or MB size they take up, before I empty the trash (i.e. upon the confirmation dialog).

[7] I want the Finder sidebar to be an option, not a default, for using Finder windows. Also, I want to have Jaguar Finder icon navigation returned (place items on top of the Finder windows).

This probably won't happen, but:
[8] I would like to see the entire Finder GUI dressed in that of the Shinobi theme for OS X. 😀

 

[Indiana Mac]

I'd really like to see a major enchancement to mail(inlcuding better integration with ical, address book, and stickies, ala Entourage) and an ability to blend perfectly as Outlook(I hate it, but you know alot of people use it).

Better, faster burning ability would be nice(including multi-session burning).

Ability to password protect and encypt folders and files(not my whole home folder).

That's about it for now. Probably have more later.

 

[mms]

Just thought of two more.
- Better way to view away messages in iChat. Moving your mouse over the sn in the list and hoping the yellow box shows up is very inefficient and annoying. Maybe it can be part of the "Get Info" window like in AIM.
- Ability to write to FTP servers from Cmd-K "Connect to Server" in the Finder. Right now the FTP is read-only, which is annoying because I am forced to use a separate application. I know I can do it from command line, and that is what I do now, but there should be a built-in read/write FTP support in the Finder with a graphical interface.