Following The Great 10.4 Wish List, I decided to put my very own wish list online.
Thanks to Hiroshi Kobayashi for his comments.
Preliminary notes
- Adapted/updated from my original French version.
- I tried my best to write correct British English but I know I failed. Please be kind on that point (or correct me by mail, I always appreciate it).
- Lined-through text= functionnality added
- When I’m asking for a functionnality that already exist anywhere else, I write the name of the OS at the beginning of the wish.
Voir LinuxFR pour pas mal de suggestions.
Table of contents
Wish list
Installing
- Following the thread for custom installation right from the sources, any installer should follow the “localisation guidelines” for this machine; that is, only installing the languages the administrator/user asked for.
- On the install interface, the button showing the progress of the installation have an “old-school” appearance (outset). They should be changed to comply with the new (post-Jaguar 10.2.3, if my memory serves me well) appearance : inset buttons.
- It is almost possible to install update only with the keyboard. Almost. The only time when I need to use the mouse is for selecting the partition (even if I have only one), that is a pity. The Java142Update1.pkg is the first one to automatically select the partition. Then this install can be completely keyboard-driven. Please do the same for the following ones.
System
- A better swap manager: I was forced to reboot after 9 days because of the lack of swap. I happened to have 208 Mb left (i tprevented to burn a CD and after reboot… 2.24 Gb
- Mute the original welcome sound upon starting. It is beautiful, but there are situation where you don’t want it (starting up your laptop during a conference).
Network
- A mail server for dummies (like the Web server is)
An up-to-date and easily configurable PHP- Read/Write for NTFS disks/partitions
- Windows. No more
.DS_Store if they are not explicitely prompted; Applescript is but a partial solution (prevent, don’t patch)
- Windows. Something like
Alt+presentation mode when you want a particular view but don’t want this change to be saved on disk.
- FTP upload (not only download) from the Finder
Aqua
- Unix. Focus follow mouse as an option, not only for the Terminal. Making the focus foreground with spacebar (like for Exposé) would be a plus.
Exposé
- UNIX. Contrary to the OSNews article proposal, I believe the simplest thing should be to allow a certain time before activating the active corner : it is had been done that way for virtual desktops.
Dock
Finder
- Windows. An “invert selection” command.
- OS 9. Support for accentuated characters on ISO 9660
- Windows. An image viewer as powerful as the one built into Windows XP or as ACDSee for Windows (both Preview and iPhoto are too limited)
- Open with is not synchronised with default Web browser: I can select a new Web browser, my local HTML files are still associated to the old one (Omniweb as default browser, but Safari is still the one wich opens local HTML files)
- It seems very buggy. When managing a lot of files, it is very easy (too much, actually) to make it run a continual, 100% CPU, loop. I’m then force to restart the Finder. It may comes from the fact that my Trash contains 24082 files; anyway, it is not a regular behaviour.
- Live search from the Finder seems to be limited to a little bit more than 500 results (the exact numer varied during my tests).
- Save an unsaved document by just dropping the proxy icon on a location, by drag-and-drop (now, I save on desktop then move the files manually)
- Select and copy text into textclippings
- Windows. A module for comparing files in case of overwriting (dialog box with name, size and date up to seconds). It could be a GUI event powered by the
diff UNIX command (wich helps integrating UNIX and Aqua)
- Paste text in the label prompt when burning a CD
- Remove any file associated to a software, useful when uninstalling
- To be able not to display a preview for file greater than a certain size (DivX en columns view…)
- Look at Path Finder: a Finder a bit more complete (displaying invisible files, double Finder for moving files…)
- To be able to resize every windows (for instance the Save window)
- A Terminal-like (
ls) view with Finder
- Label-inheriting aliases
- Windows/UNIX. Merging Safari and Finder (like Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer or KHTML and Konqueror)
- UNIX. Gzip, BZip2 and 7zip support, all read and write
- Tune image resolution when creating PDF from the Print menu.
- A new metadata for preventing deletion while still allowing modification/moving (hence, read-only/locked is not OK). Usage: preventing accidental deletion.
Interface
- Customisable interface:
- Windows. Different levels of detail for better reactivity, even if it means having System 6-like visual effects
- Less flashing, more eyes-friendly
- Windows/UNIX. Change it totally. See Talisman or LiteStep (example: an hyperlinked apple).
- Select “small icons” for all toolbars, not one application at a time
- UNIX. To be able to change the size of one icon in particular (for instance, to put a todo on the Desktop). This mecanism follows the same idea as labels et complete them (see Konqueror)
- UNIX. Virtual desktops.
- Compact the UI! (Finder Windows)
Trash
- Windows. Open files in Trash
- Windows. Trash something while trash is opened
- Windows. Selectively delete files
- Windows. Restore files to their previous location.
- OS 9. Display Trash size when purging it.
A real politic of contextual menus:
- Totally parameterables (scriptables…)
- Use them for
recent elements (to open with… a recent element)
- Windows. Use of contextual menus in the dialog boxes, not only “New Directory”
- OS 9. “Double-clicks soutenus” on folders.
Search
- Harmonizing the search engines throughout the system : iTunes’ smart playlist doesn’t use the same search pattern as Finder, for instance. As a consequence, the system looks cluttered and we have to learn different search engines
- The help menu should be a GUI for
grep (power+integration with the UNIX layer).
- VTwin: phonetic searches, several terms (poisoned or poisonned) like with Tri-Catalog’s ignore case/diacritical.
- VTwin: a better granularity for searches (up to the minute)
- VTwin: boolean or grep-like searcheds. At least the exclusive function (doesn’t contain)
- VTwin: a content-searching that actually works!
- VTwin: ability to search size in any multiple not only kilobytes
Safari
- An option for disabling image animation, (like Opera or Omniweb).
- Offline browsing (cache/history-browsing). This has several advantages:
- It makes possible an Opera-like session manager: Opera is able to remember the last configuration including the page you were currently browsing on, even if you now are offline (the Finder alredy does it, by the way and several Firefox extensions — such as Session Saver — allows it, too).
- When Safari crashes (and it often does), one would be able to still read the pages (useful for laptops or modem connections)
- If you have to restart the computer, once again you can read the pages
- Syntax-coloring for the source! Look at Omniweb here, not Mozilla.
- Specify the duration/size of the cache and history
- Search is not cas-sensitive
Fonts
- The fonts Webdings, Wingdings, Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3 are replaced by LucidaGrande, so are not usable.
- The Recently Usedcategory in the Font tool had not been localised in French.
- The Optima font doesn’t have the
č, ć and đ characters, while having š and ž. These characters are often used altogether, belonging to the same alphabet. No need to speak about the bad result…
- Fontbook: To be able to create directories (specific language/CJK/Chinese/).
- Fontbook: As for iTunes, to be able to know in wich category(ies) a font isable to create directories.
Textedit
- To be able to cancel (cmd+Z) even after saving (cmd + S)
- Automatic doesn’t recognize UTF-8 with non-English characters (try with French); as a consequence, I have to force UTF-8 for opening files, wich means I have to manually change preferences when receiving non-UTF-8 files (wich means almost all that are not done by me). It is especially damaging when you consider Mac OS X is supposed to be
native UTF-8
…
- An automatic (multiple) backup, à la BBEdit.
Stickies
- It is resource forks-based. I twice lost all of my data because of this behaviour.
- The “wrong spelling highlighting” doesn’t work with stickies (but it still proposes me different corrections: only the highlighting doesn’t appear, the Spell Service still works).
Speed
- OS 9. Can still be faster
- UNIX. Machine-specific compilation like Gentoo/SourceMage/apt-source. No bloat (unused drivers…) and faster.
iTunes
- Support for Lyrics:
- it exist and is usable in id3 v2.4
- I use it
- The comment field is not large enough.
- Use of CoreText for tagging, so that I have spell checking, EMACS shortcuts…
- Twelve seconds of crossfading is not enough (for DJs)
- Windows. Support for audio trackers, like Winamp does:
.mod, .s3m, .it…
- The album picture’s pop-up (not only the one in the main window) should change when changing the playing track, (if one have chosen “playing track” of course). Good for demo mode.
- New importation option: auto-convert id3 tag to a given version (id3 1.0 to id3 2.4)
- Finder cannot display the lenght of an AAC, while it can do it for an mp3
- Smart playlists:
- New criteria: hour of playing (one doesn’t listen the same music at 7am or 11pm) - alternativaly, BPM could work also but we need a way to automaticaly detect these BPM
- Support for disk number
- A way to be able to isolate every non-complete album (5 tracks on 7)
- Better integration with system: I disabled interface sound in System Preferences but it doesn’t work for iTunes. As a consequence, when I’m playing music as a DJ and something occurs in iTunes, everybody can hear an audio notification. You’d agree that it is not such a good thing…
- Windows. When trying to burn a CD with almost too much data (e.g. 699 Mb on a 700 mb before adding the Mac-specific informations), the burn fails. On Windows, Nero says that there is not enough room left for administrative (=OS-specific) information and that one have to remove some data. Nothing like that in iTunes. Most importantly, the CD is unusable after, because it had already being burned. Request: checking the actual capacity of every CD before burning.
- Tags: when selecting multiples tracks for tag-editing, there is no way to tell between a list of empty tracks and several different tracks: in both case, the box appears empty. Suggestion: a grayed, fligraned text saying <nothing>
- The
+ and -buttons of the smart playlist building dialog box looks more Puma than Panther.
- Optionnally rescanning files for volume equalisation after first import.
- When removing several occurences of a file, change the name in order to remove the “ 1.m4a” “ 2.mp3”… (Should I Stay or Should I Go.m4a, Should I Stay or Should I Go 1.m4a. When removing the first one, the second should be renamed to lose the final “ 1”, since it is now pointless)
- An option to switch between “real length” and “shortened length”. Useful when marking the start and the end of a track (Get Info/Option).
- To be able to select not only equalization but also “shortened length” and fading when burning an Audio CD.
- The Grouping feature is good but it should override the fading feature
- “Create a playlist with the selection” should be able to name automatically with the genre (when nothing else).
- More powerful search: excluding (
-something), expressions ("The Hush"). Hush -"The Hush". Inspirations : Google, grep.
- A way to select instrumental music without having to add instrumental in the title
- Add comments to a track but not in the tags or in the database, but just on a plylist (ofr example, taking note for DJ).
- Windows. A fadeout when leaving iTunes, like in Winamp (or iPhoto)
- Templates like in Addressbook.
- If you drop a folder on iTunes, the aliases inside won’t be checked. You have to drop the aliases themselves.
reverse logic
for relations between persons (father in one card automatically create son in the corresponding one).- Option for auto-resizing all columns
- Autocompletion of countries
- UNIX. Support for Ogg/Vorbis (by now, you have to hack you way in)
- Alarm clock function, integration with iCal
- Why is the CPU use so high when editing a tag? It looks like a bug.
- An option for auto-ejecting the CD after importing.
iPhoto
- Better integration with Preview : for instance, copy the selection and create a “New picture from the clipboard”, like with Preview
- A “show in Finder” command when right-clicking a picture
- Slideshow: a way to adjust the lenght of the music with the one of the slideshow : display the length of the slideshow and the one of the music with highlight when almost the same, ability to change the pitch for adjusting…
- Slideshow: play several musics in the same sequence
Preview
- Select the default mode for the mouse : I most often use the mouse for cropping than for moving into the picture.
- While Finder sorts alphabetically (1, 2, 14, 20…), Preview does it the ASCII way, wich is not as good (1, 14, 2, 20…). Open multiple document to check it.
- A bug in Preview (and in Adobe Reader too): a document with non-ASCII characters (Vprašalnik) can't be opened. I have too alternatives: either I remove the non-ASCII character or I install a resource fork (for example, by hiding the extension of the file). None are satisfactory, as I expect Mac to behave the same way with every language. I suspect some Carbon code somewhere.
Video
- Support of XviD by Quicktime.
- iMovie: alphabetical sorting of iTunes’ playlist
Filesystems
- When a device is busy and cannot be unmounted, to have a way to know what uses it
- UNIX. No more HFS/HFS+/UFS and take the case-sensitiveness route. Go to XFS, ReiserFS or BFS (see The Great 10.4 Wish List).
- Windows/UNIX. Why must I erase the whole disk when I want to modify just a partition?
disk A has three partitions, A1, A2, A3. If I want to change A3’s FS, I have to erase A, not only A3. Same thing if I want to increase A2’s size. I can not just delete A2 and A3 (without modifying A1 wich contains my system), I have to erase the whole disk.
- Windows. Check (and repair) the boot partition on startup.
Mail.app
- Look at TheBat! (Windows) or Mulberry
- To be able to unsubscribe from some IMAP boxes
- To be able to add specific certificates in the base (my auto-signed mail server certificate must be accepted at each connection, I cannot accept it forever, like Thunderbird do)
- Print mail without header. Drag mail to the Desktop like textclippings.
- Toggle “immediate send” (like Eudora)
- To be able to specify the kind of ”message hierarchiser” (changing
> for | “hierarchiser”).
Addressbook
- Choosing between several phone formats according to the country. Great for travelers who have several phones and buddies around the world. OD4contacts permits it.
Automatically adapt the address format when entering the name of the country, instead of having to change it manually.- Text (csv) for backup, no binary (pixmap could be used for pictures)!
- New entry: opening hours, integrated with iCal (displaying an alert when scheduling out of office hours, plus proposal for adding it to the earliest free opening hour)
- Where is Serbia and Montenegro?
- For French localisation : Grande-Bretagne (Great Britain) is not a country, Royaume-Uni (United Kingdom) is.
- E-mail addresses are case-insensitive; as a result, Addressbook should accept any case as the same.
someone@example.tld is not recognized as Someone@Example.tld
Room for birthdays and anniversaries (OD4contacts does it already). To be able not to autocomplete the year. It often happens I know birthday but not year of birth. Autocompleting with current year is definitively not a good idea.- Same interface for synchronisation for iSync’s conflict catcher and Address Book’s address synchroniser. Favour the Address Book one, wich is much better and flexible.
- There is no autocompletion of assistant/father… with one already in the database.
- Windows. Linking two person together is not two-way: one have to repeat the task with the other person Mary is Carson’s mother. When I enter Mary in the mother field in Carson’s address, Carson should be entered as well in the child entry of Mary’s address.
- Low-priority: a gender entry would be good, especially when the name doesn’t give any clue (foreign names) or when considering the example above, where child could be automatically switched to son (in the same way, father and mother entries could be replaced by relative.
- Localisation error: French tooltip for deleting a phone number is “Supprimer cette Téléphone” and should be “Supprimer ce numéro de téléphone”.
- Alphabetical ordering: slavic letters are not sorted the proper way. Names starting with Č are sorted with the one started with C, while they should be sorted between C and D.
- Smart list à la iTunes (with right-click list of all smart list this address is in too, once again à la iTunes.) One example : adresses that belongs to no category.
- Some utilities for managing your database: duplicate checker, mass renaming by fiel and regular expression, for instance.
iCal
Code
- less Classic and Carbon, more Velocity Engine
Calculator
- Cannot find Croation Kuna in currency converter
- No number separation for thousands, even if it is possible in the International System Preferences
Startup/Shutdown
- I don’t want to reboot after a non-kernel update
Graphisms
- OpenGL optimised
- Make use of SDL
- Better support for graphic cards.
UNIX
- The most powerful and most recents on the UNIX side
- Shorten the Mac/Unix duality (example : Finder’s copy/paste with
cp or ditto -rsrcfork). X11 as a native layer (inside Quartz). Fink is not that good
- A better optimisation of the Darwin kernel
- UNIX. Adopt the
-h et --human-readable toggles from Linux, wich are not present on *BSD.
Terminal
- Integrate the
--color option in ls.
- Multilingual support, as such as NextStep 3.3J.
Help
- A "Power-User” help (and why not some kind of a collaborative one) à la MacOS X Hints with the mandatory “We do not assure any support to these features” flag
- A better organised help, a better table of contents, something more than just a search box! No unrequested Internet connection
- Windows. THE reference: the Opera help
Energy
- Windows. Hibernation (especially important for laptops). I still have to check if Instant On is the Apple’s hibernation (it doesn’t seem).
Text engine
- in French, accentuated capitals are not suggested when something wrong had been written (Étonnament is replaced by Etonnamment instead of Étonnamment)
Hardware
- Software overclock
- A three-buttons wheel mouse
- A two-buttons trackpad
- A digital sound output for laptops (for DJ).
- A more permissive optical drive (PowerBook 800): a lot of my CD-R cannot be read on my drive, but are perfectly OK with other optical drives. In the same way, I cannot burn some CD-R, while other burner can burn them with no problem. Finally, I would like to be able to burn CD-R 90 and CD-99.
Apple quality
?
- Not related to Apple hardware: an easy way to differenciate right and left headphones with the touch (useful when putting an headset/headphone in the dark, without having to open sound preference and play with balance).
- A thin space key for the French keyboard (maybe alt+space). It is widely used for punctuation signs ( !, ?…) and would save me a lot of
 
- an electric cord with enrouleur.
Printing
- Missing functions: non margin, impression rouleau, paper size (A3+)
- Detection of non-PostScript Network Printers (dot matrix printers)
Hard drives
- An enhanced disk utility for formatting in FAT32, ext3 and XFS and also some checking functions like DiskWarrior 3/Drive X softwares
- Windows. Initiates a bootdisk check from the OS, not from the CD.
Drivers
- Microkernel/nanokernel/no kernel (Hurd): less prone to crashes because of badly-written drivers
Miscellaneous
- Localising Sherlock services: there are useless out of U.S.A.!
- Localised and high quality speech recognition and synthesis (look at Speechissimo for an excellent speech synthesis)
- iChat with multiprotocols support (ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber…)
- Better integration of the iApps in the system (iCal and iTunes, for instance) and optimise it so that they requires less processing power
- More options for DiskBurner (formats, multisession, 80 minutes…)
- A real OpenSource policy [see details]
Details
Uninstalling
I propose an elegant, Mac-style (read: not patching the code à la Windows) way to implement what may be the best uninstaller on any of the “Big Tree” (Linux, MacOS, Window).
First of all, I’m not a programmer; I coul not even write an “Hello world” in Delphi. As a consequence, everything I’m writing is pure speculation. I just tried to take the Apple route: do it low-level and do it well.
For burning a CD from the Finder, one have to throw it to Trash (it is counter intuitive, but anyway…); MacOS X detects an eject event with a to-be-burned CD. If it can do this, so can it for other Trash events.
Proposal : when Mac OS X detects the user is deleting a .app file from the /Applications directory, it should launch a pop-up like this:
The system has detected that you would delete a program. Do you want to:
• Only remove the program (recommended)
Choose this option if you think you will reuse this program some day;
• Also delete preferences
Choose this option if you are sure you won’t reuse this program;
• Also delete preferences for other users
Require administrator password
Your opinion?
The technology already exists (burning from the Finder). In each three cases (wich are cumulatives), Mac OS X will look for dependances by itself. This is simpler and more efficient that Windows (where programs only propose to remove preferences on a case-by-case basis, one of such software being the Moldavian The Bat! email program. Here it would be included right into the OS). The new folder action functionnality may be a way for implementing my proposal.
Obviously, if an application had not been installed in the /Applications directory (as well as all non-Cocoa programs), it won’t work. But my postulate is the programming guidelines will be respected.
We can not hope programmers will write a correct dependancy file (such as .deb packages for Debian, for instance). Choosing an automatised and internal process (i.e. from MacOS X, not from the software to be installed) is choosing a secure way, a safeguard against poor coding or, more importantly, spywares and other hidden files. Mac OS X itself is logging everything.
This being made on system level (wich means full access to the kernel and the filesystem), that means the logging could be operated by the kernel (instead of using such a thing as strace. As for versionning (=updating an already installed application), the filesystem could act as a CVS. That could imply a new filesystem.
Open Source
For those who don’t read French, this guy basically says that Apple is less and less commited to Open-Source. Cupertino tries hard to grab what she can’t from the Open-Source without giving anything back (Safari being an exception; because of the license, they have too and still, they obfuscate the changes to make it harder to port to Konqueror).
Heh, les forums Open Source, c’est plein de gens qui n’ont jamais écrit une ligne de code de leur vie.
Apple au début publiait la majorité de ses pilotes. Entre 10.0 et 10.1, on en a perdu pas mal. Entre 10.1 et 10.2 on en a perdu la majorité. Là avec 10.3, c’est même pas la peine.
Apple ne publie rien comme Open Source. Ils publient juste ce qu’ils sont obligés de publier, comme les trucs en GPL.
Et encore, ils ont modifié les trucs tellement que c’est en général inutilisable (cf. as et les binutils/cctools).
Les gens sur les « forums Open Source » qui sont contents d’Apple, c’est parce qu’il voient des changements dans KHTML qu’Apple est obligé de publier de toute façon.
Ils ne se rendent pas compte qu’ils se font enc*ler à sec pour tout le reste, et que par exemple Linux/PPC a de moins en moins d’info pour tout sur les machines récentes, parce qu’Apple a « oublié » de publier les infos.