Some changes for 10.4

[Arden]

I'd like to see a free application, possibly as part of iLife, that lets you use your Mac's microphone and speakers to dial telephones over the Internet. Telephone sound quality isn't that great to begin with, so this would be possible even over 56K.

Remember, these are changes that we'd like to see built right into the operating system. Many of the things people suggest here are achievable with 3rd-party apps/hacks, but we'd like these features without having to rely on external sources.

[Trillian]

Add in the native qt/mac package now that it is out- it would make things alot easyer to port some *nix apps to mac, something which, I think, they have said is their goal to help (somewhat) along.

[Trillian]

I doubt that it will die, just because of the fact that it is free, and there for very popular with developing contreys(sp?). It is also fairly easy to use, as long as you find a distro that suits you.

[Arden]

Originally Posted by octane

You know, Arden, you got me thinking. Apple have a damn good OS, they can pull feature sets together in weeks what would take Microsoft months if not years to do.

What about desktop-level clustering?

Sounds bonkers, but think about it. Apple have made a consumer version of UNIX although you'd never know it unless you need it, or you were looking for it, it's that well hidden.

What about building on the work done with Xcode with regards to compiling across a network and build this kind of functionality into all of their major processor-hungry applications like Final Cut Express / Pro, iMove and iTunes.

Apple could do this kind of thing in such a way that you'd never know it was there. So any idle macs on a network get used automatically .. even over AirPort!

They could roll this out as a bunch of API's and let other developers build it into their applications.

Imagine Adobe using it for PhotoShop and After Effects.

Now _that's_ a feature I would like to see in 10.4, and I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility...

Bryce 5 (and probably other 3D apps) has the ability to do network rendering. If Apple integrated something like that into its applications (where appropriate: you don't need 5 computers on a network to rip MP3's), it could attract even more people to switch.

And the topic is changes you'd like to see built into the OS (really, anything out of the box, including iApps, Safari, etc.) in 10.4.

[Arden]

Originally Posted by octane

Actually, thinking about it, I'd like Mail to let you right / control click on a link in a message and give you the option to open a link in a new tab in an existing window in Safari.

What happens if you drag a link to the Safari icon in the Dock? Does it open in a new tab, a new window, or the current window/tab? Not being a Mail.app user, I wouldn't know.

[Arden]

Oh, it doesn't bother me, I've been known to derail threads in the past. It's just that the mods tend to yell at me when I do so.

[Satcomer]

I would like to see QuickTime support for more native codecs (ogg, and and a real DivX codec). Plus, I would love for iChat to support more than AIM. Also, I would love Apple to update their speech and speech recognition. I would LOVE Apple to take a demanding lead into speech on the computer platform.

Plus, add my voice to a better integration toward the *nix* and Linux application recompile.

[Trillian]

Maybe they could ship it with some basic *nix proggys like gimp, at the very least. I know that if they fully supported recompiling *nix apps to run native, then I would probably spend more time on os X, and a lot less on linux.

(apple, are you listening? )