What Features would you like to see in Leopard?

you can't add themes to xp without hacking, so the situations the same. ShapeShifter is third-party theme changing, with some quite nice skins out there, very tasteful.
 
- The ability to manipulate any window anywhere within that window, be it an app, or a finder window's scale and move with a linux style alt+left or right mouse button, instead of finding the small square at the bottom right of the window to scale and the top bar to move.

- ffm focus follows mouse: I WANT IT! I dont care what others say, I think its great!
 
I've never used real FFM, but that reminds me of a feature I'd like that's currently in the Finder, but few other apps:

• The ability to use my scroll wheel to control inactive windows. Since the scroll wheel already follows the mouse (obviously, it has to), I don't see this as having any downside. There's no reason it couldn't be done on a system level. I find it VERY useful in the Finder.
 
• A "Date Added" field, in addition to Date Created and Date Modified, showing when a particular item was added to its folder. This would be especially useful for keeping track of items you downloaded or copied from external disks.

• Drag-n-drop and spring-loaded functionality for Docked folders. It's always seemed incredibly backwards to me that I can't drag a file into a folder I have in the Dock. I want to be able to drag a file onto a Docked folder's icon, and get the same spring-loaded folder effect I get in the Finder.

• FULL scriptability in the Finder. Tiger went a long way towards addressing this, but it's STILL not complete. How long will we have to wait for something so basic?!? :mad:
 
Ability to create a smart folder in spotlight without leaving the search results window. If the Finder eventually becomes Spotlight than that would be peachy.
No themes. Once you add the option this opens the door for inconsistencies. If they do, it should be developed by unsanity for Apple.

::sleepy::

the best features are the opposite of what we want and are usually unexpected
 
i stand by:

- The PostScript, entirely vector OS, no more rasterization.

- Eradication of the File+Folder, Folder Tree Paradigm. you have files. on a hard drive. Spotlight to find, or browse through like itunes. Smart 'Sections' to organize

It's the fundamental things i want to see
 
Lt Major Burns said:
- Eradication of the File+Folder, Folder Tree Paradigm. you have files. on a hard drive. Spotlight to find, or browse through like itunes. Smart 'Sections' to organize
Click to expand...
ERADICATION?!? Are you mad, man? ;) Options are good.

But I agree, I absolutely would like to see such a feature (as an addition, not replacement). I mean, right now you can theoretically get it done using Smart Folders and the Finder's sidebar, but Smart Folders are currently WAY too slow and unoptimized for such a system to be really practical. Apple needs to beat themselves up squeezing every ounce of performance they can get out of the Smart Folder concept. A decent caching system would make a world of difference (currently, AFAICT, smart folders don't use any kind of caches at all), and there are other, more aggressive tricks they could pull if they really wanted to. The Spotlight/Smart Folders concept has mind-blowing potential, but its implementation is still very primitive.

I want Smart Folders in the Finder to be as seemless and smooth as Smart Playlists in iTunes. I know, I know: never gonna happen. But I can dream, can't I?
 
One more thing I desperately want:

• The ability to display ANY and ALL Spotlight metadata tags in the Finder's list view. The data's all there, and I want to be able to sort my images by their width, or my web downloads by their original URLs, or my mp3s by their artists or albums or whatever. Spotlight could be used for so much more than mere searching.
 
to the two above posts:

Mikuro: what you are saying is the next step toward the "itunes style finder", a replacement to the folder tree paradigm

also, you answered your own question in the eradication post. obviously i don;t want it straight away, it won't work, nothing ever does first time. but slowly, over time, spotlight will become the way of working. you are right though - spotlight must be used more than searching. spotlight is, at it's very core, Your Hard Drive, Indexed (tm)
 
This is a really minor thing and I don't know if it's been fixed in Tiger already. On the download status bar, page load status bars etc where there's a little blue barthat gradually gets full as the download gets closer to finishing. I think they should curve the ends instead of having them cut off like they are now it looks a bit off to me. Stupid but I notice it all the time.
 
• Advanced user-definable keyboard shortcuts. The current Keyboard Shortcuts feature (in the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane) is a good start, but still too primitive. I can break down what I'd like into a few parts:

° App-by-app and system-wide shortcuts for AppleScripts and Automator workflows. The current Scripts menu is great, but it's incompatible with the Keyboard Shortcuts feature. Which brings me to point #2.

° Support for menu extras. If it's in the menu bar, and brings up a menu when you click on it, then it's a menu! I'm not sure what all would need to be done for this to work; possibly menu extras would need to be rewritten. Whatever it takes, do it.

° Non-menu-based shortcuts. This would require apps to be specifically written to support it, but it would not be hard to do. AppleScript was a step in the right direction, but is still a liiittle too hard to use, for both users and programmers. Same with Automator. With Cocoa, you already have a very, very easy way of sending actions by name. I want to be able to arbitrarily execute any Cocoa selector (sorry if I'm getting too geeky here) from a shortcut. Of course, developers would need some way to specific mark which selectors would be available for this kind of interface. It wouldn't take any more than a few lines in a plist, though.

° Macros. Automator's a great step, and AppleScript's great, but Automator is still very limited and AppleScript is a terrible hassle, especially for average joes. Give me a simple way to simulate keystrokes and mouse clicks, with recording abilities.

• While we're on the topic of keyboard shortcuts, let me change this from "what I'd like to see in Leopard" to "what I'd like to see in the future of the Mac": MORE FKEYS! PLEEEEEASE. Back in the old days, fkeys were supposed to reserves strictly for the end-user's customization. Then third-party apps started hijacking them. Then APPLE starting hijacking them, with everything from Exposé to brightness control to bloody VoiceOver (okay, that's not a raw fkey, but still). Bottom line: the software has evolved beyond the 15 fkeys. WAY beyond. Give me a whole other row, and make it cleat than at least some of those are strictly for the user to program (most likely using the advanced keyboard shortcuts I'm asking for).
 
If nobody stated it yet, bring back the "put away..." command (Cmd-Y) that was in OS 8 - 9. I still find a use for it sometimes, yet can't use it in OSX.
 
I think the whole Vector interface for text is extremely versatile and worth it. Accessability wise, text will be much clearer for users when using zoom and also text globally will be extremely clear. Also since vector files are usually quite minimal in size, this should probly increase system performance that was slowed down by the GUI.

One feature i thought of this afternoon while using quicktime, is that with the new in motion movie scaling, this should probly be adopted globally for windows when after pressing the zoom button. For other programs such as iTunes where the zoom button changes to mini mode, a fancy transition maybe could be put in place.
 
smithy said:
I think the whole Vector interface for text is extremely versatile and worth it. Accessability wise, text will be much clearer for users when using zoom and also text globally will be extremely clear. Also since vector files are usually quite minimal in size, this should probly increase system performance that was slowed down by the GUI.

One feature i thought of this afternoon while using quicktime, is that with the new in motion movie scaling, this should probly be adopted globally for windows when after pressing the zoom button. For other programs such as iTunes where the zoom button changes to mini mode, a fancy transition maybe could be put in place.
Click to expand...

vector files are smaller than their raster counterparts, but the decoding and rendering is the compromise. a vector is a mathematical path, not just a coloured dot. it make the computer think more. this is why bitmaps were used in the first place.

i do agree with the zoom thing though. although i think the zoom needs more thought anyway - in most apps it just changes the window size to something even more inconvenient. i never use it
 
I find that Finder crashes more than any other App, so I'd like to see a completely redesigned Finder or something new, proper consistent file/image previews in icons, icons which don't corrupt once every 24 hours, which plague my mac despite several re-installs. THEMES, I LOVE brushed metal and want MORE MORE MORE, but I know some girls blouses don't like it, so Barbie Pink for them. I also reckon, that dark colours and metal is the way to go, look at the colour scheme creeping in to the Apple site, and Microsoft are ripping it off for that Vista effort which may come out one day. The Dock could do with drawers and maybe multiple docks. But apart from that, OS X is so good that perfecting perfection is hard, if not impossible.
 
Someone please just fix malloc, there has been a heap overflow problem in it since the initial release of OS X. It has been exploited in safari already and with just a little bit of code one can easily crash the browser...its just annoying and should be fixed!
 
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