What Features would you like to see in Leopard?

[RGrphc2]

I'm surprised nobody did this with the announcement of Leopard at the WWDC, everyone was all caught up in the Intel switch. Well here's what i would like to see in OS X 10.5

1. More colors in the appearance pref pane. Getting sick of just Aqua Blue and Graphite.
2. If you've used Linux you know about the virtual desktops you can have up to 16, and Linux is based on Unix and OS X is based os Unix so i don't see why Leopard couldn't have these features too.

[Decado]

1) i want all graphics to be postscript so you will be able to zoom without jagged lines. if at least the text was resolution independent i would be happy.
2) i want proper voice recognition and pronouncification in a lot more languages than english. and better!
3) i want Susan to replace the metal in Finder and some other places (like iCal etc).
4) i want to be able to flip all my windows, not just the dashboard windows. (dont know why yet. :-) )
5) i want there to be a toned down Aqua blue color for us that think the new spotlight blue is a bit to bright and graphite a bit to boring. if i could get graphite but keep the red/yellow/green buttons i would be pleased.

[Mikuro]

• I'd like to see far more multithreading in almost all apps. For example, I shouldn't need to wait for a page that's loading in a background tab in Safari to finish before I can scroll the page I'm actually looking at. Same goes for Finder windows and a LOT of things.

• A Finder rewrite, from the ground up. Thankfully, this will almost surely be done, since the Finder is currently Carbon and thus not very easy to port to x86. I think we'll finally get a pure-Cocoa Finder in Leopard. I just hope they don't @#$% it up even more, which is a distinct possibility. I mean, the Finder's a lot worse than it needs to be as it is, so there's no saying all its design flaws won't transfer right over to Cocoa. Specifically, I want the toolbar to stop popping up when I don't want and start popping up when I do. As it stands, it's utterly nonsensical (from a user's perspective) when it does and does not appear. I should be able to set this persistently on a window-by-window basis, and set whether I want it to appear for new folders and mounted volumes. And it should DEFINITELY NOT APPEAR when using spring-loaded folders, especially when I'm going through folders that would otherwise not have the toolbar.

• The return of popup windows in the Finder. It's been like 5 years now, Apple. It's time for OS X to catch up to OS 9. Please!

• Real Mac-like widgets. WHY, exactly, are widgets based on JavaScripts and PNGs? Who thought this was a good idea? They're bloated, ugly, and inflexible. I'd much rather have the actual Calculator app accessible through Dashboard. There's no reason the Dashboard paradigm couldn't be applied to real applications. And it would make it far more useful if it was!

• Smarter Smart Folders. A LOT smarter. At the very least, they should add an interface to access Spotlight's "hidden" features like nested boolean logic, and add some kind of caching system so that it doesn't perform the search all over again every time you open the folder. It should be smart enough to know when it NEEDS to update, and never update when it doesn't. Or at least make such updates rarer.

More to come when I have time.

Originally Posted by Decado

1) i want all graphics to be postscript so you will be able to zoom without jagged lines. if at least the text was resolution independent i would be happy.

Good news: This feature is already under development in Tiger. It wasn't finished in time for the final release, but if you have the developer tools installed, you can play around with it using the "Quartz Debug" app. Most graphics are still bitmapped, but all text renders beautifully. It's still a bit buggy, though (which is why it's not a publically-available feature yet!).

[Giaguara]

And get it back to the SIMPLE ... if you select only selected languages for installation, keep only those languages for the updates too. That is, if you select to install your system in English only, you will not get all the updates in EVERY single language OS X install in.

[Lt Major Burns]

Originally Posted by Decado

4) i want to be able to flip all my windows, not just the dashboard windows. (dont know why yet. :-) )

How about app preferences? instead of in the program menu, flip the window?

i agree with more fleixble schemes - OSX is known for being amazingly customisable (to the point where most people can't use another's mac, as it is so different to theirs) and yet all you can change is 'BLUE' or 'GRAPHITE'

i also want to see them moving their idea of a file + folder-less computer further. my impression is, they want the whole OS to mimic iTunes and iPhoto - all files in the system sorted in one window, all searchable, all sortable by columns, with a source bar on the left with smart groups, a preview pane etc

this way, eventually, iTunes and iPhoto (and an iVideo etc) will be developed into it and they become one. in the source, you select "music", or "images" and it'd switch to the iphoto tiled images view, or the itunes audio tags artist album etc. Applications would also be in the source, as would be documents. spotlight is just a very early beta for this, i feel, as is the current finder (source pane, search area, looks like itunes already)

[Mikuro]

A couple more far-out ideas (hardly original, but never actually implemented in any OS AFAIK):

• Dynamic folder (and possibly file) icons. Generic folder icons are useless, and really cripple the usefulness of the Dock. Hardly anyone will (or would even know how to) go to the trouble of making custom icons for their various folders, and without custom icons, you can really only put one or two in the Dock before it gets way too confusing. Same goes for files.

There have been many ideas on how such dynamic icons ought to work. One obvious method is for folders' icons to have visible files popping out the top, and have the number (and maybe appearance) vary based on the contents of the folder. Another idea I've heard (sorry, I forget where; probably from either Bruce Tognazzini or David K. Every) is to have something like a spider web or "dust" accumulate on icons to show the time it's been since its last access.

Another logical idea is to have a folder's icon change depending on the TYPE of file it mostly contains. I admit it would be hard to make such a system really smart (for example, my Applications folder should certainly have an Application-related icon, even though the majority of files in it are not applications), but it certainly shouldn't be impossible. It also wouldn't be terrible to have an easy-to-use system that requires some user interaction.

• File tags. Labels have always been great, but the problem is that you can only apply ONE to any given file. I'd like to be able to create my own tags and apply any number of them to any file or folder. This would be similar to the way Gmail handles things. Apple has already begun implementing an infinitely-extensible metadata structure into the HFS+ file system (it works in Tiger, but only at the BSD level; there are still no high-level APIs for using it). I expect it to be complete in Leopard, and I really hope Apple uses it. A LOT. It has a lot of potential, and would make Spotlight all the more appealing.

If these tags could be represented on the file's icon, that would also help the issue I mentioned above. I'm imaging a little "stack" of labels hanging on the icon, and with a particular action, you could have than fan out so you could see the exact contents. It would be very useful, and would offer some great eye candy, to boot.

• Auto-naming of "untitled" files. This can't really be done completely on a system-wide level, but Apple could at least make it easy for Cocoa developers and blaze the trail with their own apps. For example, when I create a clipping, it's automatically given a meaningful name. The same should be true of all text files. I'm not asking for much — just a meaningful name in the Save dialog for newly-created files, based on the content of the file at the time of saving. As a programmer, I can already imagine the neat little hooks Apple could build into Cocoa to make this easy for developers, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

• The return of WindowsShade, or something like it. The Dock-based minimization, while neat and useful in its own right, has NEVER been a true replacement for the OS 8-style WindowShade feature. I realize you can get it with WindowShade X, but the idea of paying for a feature I got for free 8 years ago is just sad. And Apple could take it one step further: Make the collapsed windows their own KIND of Window, not just a standard title bar. Make it so for existing apps, it would behave just like a floating title bar, but give developers the ability to use this collapsed-state window to show vital data about the window itself, e.g. a progress bar or status report.

• While we're on the subject of long-lost Mac features...what ever happened to tear-off menus? Like the Application menu in OS 8/9, or the Tools menu in HyperCard. This could be a standard feature for all menus (or at least provide the necessary hooks for programmers to do it themselves; AFAIK it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to do this in Cocoa as it stands). Sometimes I want quick access to my menus, and I know a lot of people avoid using menus like they avoid getting root canals, because for those with less mouse dexterity (like my mother), they're just painfully frustrating.

• A fourth Exposé mode: Scatter the current application's windows. A lot of the time when I'm in Safari, for example, I want to quickly check the status of, say, a video I'm encoding in QuickTime. It'd be nice to get Safari out of my face for just a second.

• Icon-by-icon size options in the Finder. I think there was a hack to get this done in 10.0, but I guess it's not possible anymore. It would be very cool to be able to make the really important or most-used items in a folder larger than the rest. There could even be some user-definable default rules for this. (Although I don't expect that, because Apple has become quite cowardly in recent years when it comes to interface design, and this would represent a real design challenge. But then again, I would have said the same thing about Automator before Tiger, and they did a pretty good job with that. Maybe things are turning around.)

• The ability to transparently open zips and other archive types like folders (or perhaps disk images). This would really not be that hard to do; they already do most of the necessary gruntwork with compressed DMGs, after all.

[Ceroc Addict]

Originally Posted by Lt Major Burns

How about app preferences? instead of in the program menu, flip the window?
How about app preferences? instead of in the program menu, flip the window?

And why stop there? - I'd like to be able to flip the Desktop to get to Desktop pictures and Screensaver.

Kap

[Sirtovin]

Why can't they go to OS 11... why do they have to go from... 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, and now presumably... 10.5... why not OS XI