Mac OS X 10.5 ideas

parb.johal@ante said:
please please apple do something with .mac... it could be so many great things... its on the brink or greatness - it just needs someone at apple to give it a nudge. to make it the 'must have'. if you've got a mac - you've GOT to have .mac.
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I agree wholeheartedly, it could be so much more.

also, why has apple never added the gui switch to place both scroll arrows at both ends?
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You're right. Its one of the first things I change on any new Mac OS X major release, I'd forgotten that it isn't actually a standard option in the prefs.

is far too {QUIET} for ME. I miss the sounds!
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I don't miss the noisy interfaces of the late nineties. But it would be nice to have a little bell icon appear at the end of each progress bar in any program, which would be off by default. That way, if you start a download or a CD burn and notice its going to take more than a few minutes, you just click the little bell icon, and when the progress bar completes you'll hear a "ping".

i dont want my Quicktime movie to be a page turning icon. i want it to be like a film strip
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I 100% wholeheartedly agree. Video files should appear like a film strip with a preview image of the keyframe. So many things have icons that look like "a page" "a piece of paper" or "a sheet of paper with a computer drawn on it" that we really need to rethink about half of our icons. I've always said Microsoft fly in the face of design commonsense by making their icons "W" "X" "P" and "E" letters, which mean nothing to someone who doesn't know what the applications actually are.

Apple tends to get it right more often than most software companies - their mail program is the only one out there that has stamp and envelope icons associated with it. Sure beats the Windows world where there might be 10 icons in your Quick Launch, none of which have any actual symbolic meaning whatsoever. A lot of the symbols, though, are too technical for most everyday users to recognise (such as the hard disk drive icon).
 
I also agree with the last paragraph of Symphonix. Some icons are really hard to understand if you are not so "technical".
Ferdinand
 
i think that they should intregate a bit-torrent client into safari or even have something to go with the trend like 'itorrent' that would be the best because none of the bit-torrent clients for macs arent very good
 
Well, there are rumours that Apple might integrate Bittorrent technology into iTunes in order to leverage bandwidth costs for iTMS. While I think this should go with bonus points (i.e. if your upload rate is good, you should get free songs for a couple hundred MBs), I think this might be rather tricky for Apple to pull off. Bittorrent uses your network's bandwidth _heavily_, and if Apple uses your bandwidth and CPU, they should certainly pay for this service. ;)

But I don't see Apple integrating Bittorrent into Safari or creating a specific app for torrents, because at this moment, supporting Bittorrent can't really be in Apple's interest of wooing the biggies in the music and movie industry.
 
on the subject of torrents...

are they really all they are cracked up to be? unless you are a torrent 'fan' and eagerly awaiting someone to upload the latest 24 or lost etc youre pretty much at a loss. if you can find the first season of 24 as a torrent theres not a chance in hell you'll be able to download it, as no-one is 'seeding' it because its old...

torrents are pretty useless as a long term strategy to keep a rolling agenda of software updates / music / movies / etc.

so the 'regular' consumer would have a terrible time / experience with torrents - something i can imagine apple would want to avoid. in fact - i dont think we'll ever see a system level torrent service in any OS.
 
Well, with a company like Apple, THEY would always be seeding, just like they are always hosting their web sites. The only difference is that other people would upload, too, to take a bit of the load off Apple's servers.

Personally, I love BitTorrent. But then, I don't really use it for things people use other P2P software for. I use it mostly for fansubs and other "current" things. If you're looking for a way to download a few songs or apps, BT is not for you. But it's great for what it does.


That said, I don't think Apple could use something like BitTorrent for iTMS. Isn't each user's copy of an iTMS song/movie encrypted with DRM? If not, I'm sure there'd be a million and one quick & easy ways to strip the DRM. And if so, then it means there would be very little shared data among users, so anything like BitTorrent would be useless.

Apple could make a BitTorrent tracker for things like software updates, though. Each update to Xcode is about 800MB. BitTorrent would be well-suited for that. Then again, Apple's web servers always scream. I get 500-600K/sec from Apple, which is the best I get anywhere. They don't need BitTorrent. If they implement it, it would be as a cost-cutting measure more than anything else. And the result would probably be a slower, more complicated experience for users.
 
mikuro - your last paragraph sums it up nicely. they simply dont need it.

when was the last time anyone had any serious trouble downloading anything from apples servers? from music track to widgets to pdfs - apple's downloadables are quick. bit torrent would have a detrimental affect on that.

to add to the list of what we'd like to see in 'leopard'... today at work i had to fire up OS9 to use an older version of adobe illustrator... and you know what? at the same resolution that OSX was running at - the menu and finder lists etc were just a lot lot tighter. there was more screen 'real estate'. there seemed to be a better management of screen space as default. so with 10.5 i'd like to see that same tightness in design and implementation.

also - OS9 actually felt really good to be working in!!! though i missed expose!
 
yes, OS 9 was simpler, tighter and quicker. I guess we'll never get these things back, though. It's something you learn over time. Look at cellphones, for example. Task: Go to phonebook, select a contact, initiate a call. I'm pretty sure my ten year old Nokia 5110 would beat my one year old Nokia 9500 in speed. Sure, the communicator has *much* more features etc., but for basic stuff, the much older phone was actually better. Maybe there comes a time when phones get simpler and quicker again, but I guess for OS X, the tendency today is "more 3D, more effects, more features". I'm sure we'll hear about the "250 or 500 new features in Leopard" soon. :/
 
When you put it that way, 250 new features sounds akin to "10% off your performance!".

:-/
 
Giaguara said:
On top of my wishlist would score the encryption with contextual menus. Built in system, not as a software addition...
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Yes. I miss those features. More radical idea is a tab dock. One could label each tab, and have it as one continuous Dock, kinda like in Gnome.

As rumored, I like the idea of ical and mail all in one.

I would like to see more customizing. As some one mentioned, the return of sounds like in OS9.
 
A couple quick suggestions...

Mail: Display not just email but also chat histories and other communications. A plug-in architecture of some sort would do the trick nicely. Third party developers could keep their files where they want and with a program have access to them in both Mail and that third party program. This would go for textual chat logs (from, e.g., iChat, Adium, MSN, Yahoo!, etc.) but also audio and video logs (from, e.g., iChat via Ecamm's Conference Recorder, Skype via Ecamm's Call Recorder, Gizmo, etc.). It could also note calls from a Bluetooth phone even if no log is there. Then I could see everything that went on between me and person without flipping through half a dozen different apps to see the last place I communicated with them.

Address Book: Along this line, Address Book could add a pane to the window (perhaps a 4th pane all the way on the right?) that contains what is basically an advanced Spotlight search of the contact. Open up a contact, and bam, right there are all your emails, chat logs, pictures, files, etc. that are related to the contact. No need to bumble around trying to find something - it's all right there.

Facial and other image recognition: If Riya.com can do it for pictures you upload to their website, why can't Apple do it in OS X? Or why can't Apple just buy Riya.com? Combine this with by Address Book suggestion above, and you go to any contact and have a complete list of all the pics they are in right there. And while we're at it, voice and facial recognition for movies (seems simple enough if you just take frames and use them as a picture) should be thrown in as well. That will take care of the need to figure out which of the 6 people who lived at your home called you at work in your audio chat log.

Uniform use of folders: iPhoto, iTunes, Mail and Address Book all take different approaches to handling folders and nesting. In iPhoto and iTunes, smart and regular playlists/albums can be contained in the same folders and display all items contained within. In Mail, smart mailboxes can't go in folders and nexted folders behave like the Finder, only showing what's in that folder and not what's below. Address Book doesn't even have folders (and storing one group within another is a poor substitute). These should all be unified to behave like iTunes and iPhoto.
 
I would love if they add "Fast OS Switch" similiar to "Fast User Switch" So we can switch to different OS without shut down and make choice which OS. That what i am suspecting that Apple is working on it.
 
I love the iTMS, but one thing that defintely seems to be missing is a customizable User page. It would be really neat to have on the right side of the Home page, a link to a page you customize and put your favorite artists and genres and have the latest songs and videos you like in there. I don't know the best way they could design in, but I just imagine that on every artists page, a link will say "Add Artist to your page".

One little gripe I have with the iTMS is that some of the artists pages need to be updated ever since they added videos. Some have an extra link to a single video thats broken. and whats the deal with people with iTunes essentials that havent even made that many records?? i could see it for people who are long retired and have made a crazy amount of hits. lol buts thats just me complaining. so yeah a nice little user page would be kinda a neat feature.

oh and one last thing, i just was wondering what people thought of the JUST FOR YOU beta. its useless to me, but is it a nice feature for other people? jw
 
I like the idea of a "Super" Application for Address book, but what I would like is ADVANCED music editing for Garage Band. what would be awsome would have iTunes music be able to transfer to Garage Band and then Garage Band can edit them. its like Garage Band's "Export to iTunes", so it would say in iTunes "Export to Garage Band".

the tech to do that probably exsits when there are scanners that can turn your hand written note book notes into Word documents on the computer
 
That's not quite the same thing, cyprusmacman. :) ... You _can_ take any song from iTMS and use it as a sample. (Through burning it to a CD and then importing that somehow. But then you can't change it. And you're of course in legal trouble if you want to actually _do_ anything with it. But to _change_ it would mean to have the single tracks from the song. No can do, really.
 
MacFreak said:
I would love if they add "Fast OS Switch" similiar to "Fast User Switch" So we can switch to different OS without shut down and make choice which OS. That what i am suspecting that Apple is working on it.
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That already exists. In the System Preferences, go to Accounts and then Login Options. There you can enable Fast User Switching.
 
MacFreak said:
I would love if they add "Fast OS Switch" similiar to "Fast User Switch" So we can switch to different OS without shut down and make choice which OS. That what i am suspecting that Apple is working on it.
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Your definatley onto somthing there MacFreak. This would be a real top seller for macs too, and people would have somthing like "two for the price of one". If Apple does implement this it will strategically position them as the real leader in the computer industry because they will have an advantage over other computer/software manufacturers offering two operating systems (providing customer chioce) for the price of one. And without any emulation software, etc.

Let's see how Apple goes with it. Like i've mentioned before Boot Camp is only a baby now and is surley bound to flourish soon, its too good of an opportunity not to. Just like the pre-iTunes music player included into MAC OS X 10.0 or 10.1 and then evolved into the iTunes as we have it today.


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