So what are YOU looking for in OS X 10.7?
So earlier this week Apple sent out invitations for its Back To the Mac event, set for next week. I’m not sure where our invite is (they always seem to get stuck in our spam filters I guess) but the point is it looks like Apple is ready to pretend it cares about its Mac business unit again, and will likely be previewing OS X 10.7. It’s always a bit of a fool’s errand to try to guess what Apple intends to show off based on their invites, but let’s take a looksee anyway.
OK, all I really get is that 10.7 will probably be called Lion, which is both a good and bad thing. The good is that the Lion is the top “dog” as it were, in the cat community, so to christen 10.7 Lion means Apple must be pretty high on it, unless they plan to go for some high tech mutant cross breed like “Liger” for 10.8. The bad news is, I don’t really like the sound of “Lion”. Panther, Jaguar, Tiger, Leopard… they all sounded cooler somehow. It will take some getting used to. But back to the invite.
So, aside from the Lion, it doesn’t look like there’s all that much more to get out of the invite… or is there? While at first it looked like the smooth flat gray might be meant to look like a closed MacBook, there is no white Apple logo to be seen. What it really looks like is a trackpad. And what it really looks like is maybe someone PUSHED on the trackpad to start the flipping of the Apple logo and reveal the rich, creamy Lion inside. Given Apple’s love of touch interfaces in its gadgets, its recent release of the “Magic” Trackpad, rumors of iBooks coming to the Mac, and the fact that there’s really not all that much more to do to OS X, we’re hardly going to call ourselves Nostradamus in predicting that we’re probably going to see some touch-gesture features fairly prominently in the new OS.
But is that enough to warrant an update? Especially one as presumably grandiose as to earn the moniker “Lion”?
Earlier I said that there wasn’t all that much more to do with the Mac OS, and while I realize that’s somewhat short-sighted, I am personally having a hard time thinking of any blatantly missing feature that would either A) make my life easier, or B) impress my Windows using friends enough to make them jealous (these are of course the two criteria I use to judge all Apple hardware/software releases). To be honest, Leopard didn’t give me too much new stuff that I didn’t already have, and Snow Leopard just gave me the speed Leopard should have had (while ruining QuickTime). Sure we can break out a couple individual features here and there, and they’re all nice and I wouldn’t give them back, but as far as saving me valuable seconds a day… well, let’s just say I have yet to see ANYONE using stacks in an efficient manner, and I refuse to touch Spaces until Apple lets me add different backgrounds to each Space.
But the very nature of technology is change and evolution. So, what is missing from OS X? What do we need Apple to give us? To be honest, if the demo next week is all about touch screens, I am going to zone out because as much as I like my iPad, I can’t work 1/5th as fast on that as my laptop. Sure, the movies have told us we all want to work while standing, in front of large transparent pieces of glass and flinging documents around, and I get that to get to that point we need to take baby steps and all, but there better be SOMETHING else awesome in Lion for me to get excited about, and I really WANT to believe there will be… but I just can’t think of it. So help me out. What is the feature you REALLY are hoping to see in Lion? What’s going to make it roar?
The re-introduction of the PowerPC platform, Apple deciding that Intel was a bad move – just bringing out the retro love!
I just really hope they have a new GUI. I’m tired at looking at Aqua for the past 8 years.
Things that I would be happy to see….
Something similar to Hyperdock integrated native (Yes, I do enjoy Windows 7’s new taskbar).
Total MobileMe integration (and given away for free)
iOS Apps to be ran also as lightweight desktop apps
(Would also love to see Mac OS X be allowed to run on other hardware outside of Apple’s… just tired of my hackintosh not running at native resolution due to the kext’s not working on my ATI 4850×2 (the x2 part totally breaks it).
Update the MBA… give it some unique features!!! Cause I am going to buy one~
No more iOS pls…
MBP 13″ hardware is bEhind… way behind… retire the C2D pls… I dont really care the “CPU speed” but not GPU!
– Blu-ray support.
– Better support for non-native file systems like NTFS (is it too late to wish for ZFS?).
– Some way to run iPad/iPhone apps on a regular Mac would be cool.
– Time Machine improvements. Support network backups (possibly even off-site backups in some limited way), suppress backing up while the computer is busy with something time-critical, etc.
– Make Spaces more useful (e.g. allow a different instance of the same application to run in each space).
– FaceTime integration.
– Fewer spinning beach balls. I don’t mind them so much when the computer is doing something useful, but sometimes I see the Finder or some other app just freeze for like a minute until something times out, and that’s just aggravating.
– More built-in firewall features like what you see in WaterRoof, Little Snitch, etc.
I see Apple making it only available on 64-Bit machines. Other than the Mac Mini, Apple has only sold 64-Bit machines now for the last four years. ( I really dont care if they do this, just a prediction)
More MobileMe integration would be awesome!
I agree with the first poster that the dock needs to be more like the Task bar of Win7. Very Useful!!!
The finder needs a some work……Cut/Paste please!
Overall just make it more and more of a Tank that doesnt crash.
My logic: 10.7 Lion will be the wrap up to OS X as the traditional “truck” mouse interface operating system. Apple is all consumed by the touch interface but even by making huge touch changes to Snow Leopard’s improvements (Multitouch trackpads, Dock changes, Resizable screen keyboard palette, etc) its going to require developers to rethink their interfaces from the ground up and that’s going to be OS 11. Lion invokes noble “King of the Kingdom”, top-of-the-line, end-of-the-road sentiments.
What I expect: I expect system-wide, entry-level Apple interfaces and improvements to the apps which use these heavily: TextEdit, Mail, iChat, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, iLife, and iWork, etc. Make the Mac apps resemble the iOS apps as much as possible without losing functionality under a mouse interface. I expect Apple will introduce features that ease some of the problems of iTunes being the hub for everything if new system wide interfaces let 3rd party apps offer syncing and data sharing. I expect huge improvements to the Developer Tools since they will be the foundation OS 11 and iOS apps are built upon.
What I expect won’t happen: OS X 10.7 won’t require a multi-touch screen or run iOS apps (except by developers in emulation). That’s for OS 11, those features have to be done right and OS X is not the right place to introduce them. Daring new features like a newbie-friendly programming environment (like the obsolete Hypercard) might come in OS 11, but that’s a carrot to get people to by new machines rather than a burden to support on old legacy hardware and operating systems.
What I hope Apple includes: Apple needs to keep its promises that it’s used to nag developers with for years; things like a resolution independent interface for screen scaling, more multi-touch support, more universal access features. It needs to finish implementing things like full, bug free IPv6 support which could be required by some before the next WWDC in June. It needs to basically clean up all the loose ends it hasn’t finished so far, before they “leave the old truck behind”.
One more thing: I expect Apple will try to ditch support for tech that’s approaching 5 years of age. It would certainly makes things easier if it could just ditch support for Intel Core Solo Mac Mini’s, Firewire, Universal PPC/Intel binaries, or maybe even 32-bit code altogether. In the future, their developers may have to return to the Lion code base to introduce transition technologies to get people to move to OS 11 (a yet undesigned filesystem, a new networking standard, or a special iOS store or feature to keep people happy before the transition). OS X Lion is going to be about cleaning out the tech closet and dropping as much legacy stuff so they won’t have any expectation of supporting it tomorrow.
Do something about the Finder. Ever since my first Mac in 1984, the utterly fascinating 128, I’ve been wondering, What were they thinking? regarding Finder.
Following up on Josh’s retro idea, perhaps, perhaps it’s time to resurrect the spectrum logo and market Lion with a Pride theme. 😉
Or perhaps I should call it the ‘rainbow logo’.
Oops. One ‘perhaps’ too many.
– Resolution Independence
– Revamped UI
– Touch Screen iMac
– Adding those all together, the new iLife app, something that will involve drawing. Think about the iLife apps… they’re all about creating and sharing media. You can make music, take pictures, make videos, make websites, but what about drawing?
* This new app will be useful for developers to create their resolution independent UIs.
* This new app will make animating drawings easy for everyone. It’s a stab at Flash.
* There’s probably something else huge that I’m missing about this, I’m writing the possibilities as they come to me. I feel confident that this is where it’s all heading though.
– Better integration with iOS, namely:
* Face Time in iChat.
* iTunes won’t be the middle man anymore. There will be another new application dedicated just for syncing devices. Maybe with the name iSync, but it won’t resemble the existing app with the name.
– More up to date technology?
* USB 3.0
* ZFS? IDK much about this, I just hear it’s better.
* Support for Blueray?
Those are my hopes.
I think Apple is pretty happy with their GUI – although, this resolution independent GUI sounds cool! Vector FTW!
If they were announcing hardware, I would say that they are:
– Updating the iSight to be HD – I mean heck, my iPod Touch has better resolution than my computer.
– Adding USB 3.0 ports
– 13″, 15″ and 17″ Retina displays.
– Bigger track pad – maybe just make the whole lower 3rd of the computer a multitouch pad.
– Bluray players/readers/writers
-Wireless USB would always be cool.
Unfortunately their hardware update is not due until the spring.
So I would assume that 10.7 would have:
– FaceTime, twitter, and facebook support in iChat – seriously Apple, iChat hasn’t been updated in years! (And on top of that, the last update was nothing to write home about).
– Someone said that maybe Apple will get rid of iTunes as the hub. I highly doubt that they will get rid of iTunes – they just completely changed the GUI – if they were going to update it in 10.7, they would have waited 2 months – and most likely pissed less people off.
– I think they will add complete support for the new AppleTV – click a button and your TV is now your computer screen.
– more multitouch gestures – three-finger-down swipe to close a finder window, etc…
– Windows has the “drag to edge of screen to fill that half” thing – Apple should add this.
– totally agree with the hyperdock comment – just picked that up a few days ago – LOVING it.
– One thing I want them to fix is Finder – on leopard, I never had a problem, but I frequently get finder errors now in Snow Leopard – I think it has something to do with my hard drives going to sleep, but I’m not sure. Fix it Apple.
– Show a calendar when clicking on the time in the menu bar.
– Some way to sync pasteboard to iPhone/iPod Touch (providing it’s on the same network).
The problem is, is that if you want to do something in software that Apple doesn’t support natively, there’s an app for that. Apple really needs to get it’s hardware in gear – because no matter how good you make your operation system, people still by HARDWARE to put software on.
If someone goes to BestBuy and looks for a computer, and they look at a PC laptop that has an HD video camera, Bluray player, HDMI port, 4 USB ports, and a 12-in-1 media card reader…and then they go look at the MacBook PRO, and see: no HD iSight, no bluray player, no HDMI, 2 USB ports, and only SD card reader…..they are probably going to buy the one with more features.
Apple, you PWN in software, now go fix your hardware – maybe you could try implementing new tech first, instead of getting rid of something everybody still uses/needs first *cough* Firewire 400 *cough*
An OS that follows you from computer to device to computer. I don’t want different experiences on each ‘thing’ anymore. Make them all sync up to an identical OS (‘my’ OS), and let it follow me.
Not just the dock and the address book, and all the small pieces we have now. The whole thing. All of it. Make it fluid. A “King” OS. Never again would we need to buy a new computer or device and ‘set it up’. Who wants to wait an hour for your device to ‘sync’ ? The OS would just fluidly move in and ‘just work’. It should be quick, easy, and constantly evolving. I ‘kind of’ do this with Windows through parallels and vmware now. ‘Cloud-like’. Apple could make everything moveable & fluid — but could make it much cooler than everything else on the market. Full integration.
Give us a King OS. Give us the cloud.
🙂 I can dream, right?
new GUI, much better file manager than Finder is…
We videographers love MPEG-4, H.264 & AVCHD. Even the Big Steveo has gushed over these standards on a few of his keynotes.
The BIG PROBLEM using the these formats on Macs it’s that it is really, really slow to transcode. H.264 is so over-the-top CPU hungry that it badly needs extra hardware support. For instance just making a straight conversion of a two hour video of HD AVCHD source video to a SD DVD takes my Mac about 20 hours! Converting edited ProRes back to H.264 high profile for Blu-ray also takes forever!
So the Mac and OS X needs some really Kick-Ass accelerated H.264 support. We need a Blu-ray “Superdrive” and GPU support for transcoding High Profile H.264.
Our videos will never be available on iTunes and our clients will not be streaming it off the web. They only want play it on their computers and DVD / Blu-ray players.
Any Mac improvements limited to a new touch interface and ignoring the serious gap in H.264 video production is lame and unworthy of our money. Bah! Humbug! on multi touch Macs! Who needs that crap? We need to turn a twenty hour video render into a five minutes. We need inexpensive removable Blu-ray media so we can deliver our work to our clients.
One feature that windows 7 does well is the snap to feature.
Drag window to top goes full page to either edge it cuts the window exactly 1/2 the screen. I miss this when Im on a mac.
Steal it.
-New 3D, multitouch interface, for use with magic trackpad, touch screen imac, and iSight-recognized hand gestures.
-Dashboard replaced with iOS. Boom.
-New iLife app for drawing/image manipulation/animation like the other guy said. I like that idea. Kinda makes iLife like a low-cost user friendly CS5. And presumably, since Final Cut is to iMovie what Logic is to Garageband, there will be an equivalent ProApp to this new drawing/animating/image manipulating thing, quite possibly giving Adobe a run for its money.
-With that, NEW FINAL CUT PLZ!! FCP Studio 3 did not warrant a new version number, it should’ve just been a ProApps update. For F*ck’s sake, the interface still has brushed steel windows in some places. Multitouch gestures and something like the new iMovie interface would be awesome. Obviously with more functionality and a bit less kiddishness, but it would be nice to have just a tad more eye candy and to have to hit a few less keys and search through fewer menus to do certain things.
-Good god, I love the dock, but the new Windows 7 taskbar actually is pretty useful. Maybe Apple should show Microsoft how it feels to be ripped off for once. And by this I do not mean completely change the dock. I mean when you mouse over app icons that are running, a little thumnail of that app’s window(s) pops up over it. It’s like exposé but more organized.
Apple’s A4 is 1GHz. Methinks there is no way in hell they are not working on an A5 or something that is at least 2GHz for a super-low-power chip to go in their laptops, and maybe a 3GHz 6-core A6 to go in the Mac Pros. This would:
A). free them from Intel, both financially (allowing them to lower prices, probably substantially) and intellectually, allowing them to design every component to work together perfectly from the start rather than designing the machine around someone else’s processor.
B). Increase their laptops’ battery life by quite a lot. Currently its about 8 hours. I think I heard somewhere that ARM chips use 10 times less power than Intel. For argument’s sake let’s say it only increases the current battery life by 5 times. That’s 40 hours. Going somewhere for the weekend? Why bring your charger? And why buy anything with an Intel chip?
C). Make for less power consumption for processor intensive tasks in Mac Pros like video editing, 3D, etc. This also means less heat, which in turn means less power used in cooling systems. Overall the “green” factor goes up by a factor of much. Apple can start advertising not only that it will help the planet, but that being a video editor will cost you less on your power bill. If you are a school or production company with multiple editing stations, this starts to become quite a lot of money.
D). Because of all of the above, this would give Macs a HUGE edge over everything else…another huge edge that is. But this edge is bigger than the rest, I think. Telling your Windows using friend that OS X doesn’t get viruses doesn’t impress him because he uses anti-virus software and has never had a virus (or so he says). Telling him it looks better doesn’t work because he just disagrees. Telling him Macs work better doesn’t work because he insists he can build a machine out of cheapo parts that’s better and cheaper than any Mac.
However, telling him that his Macbook Pro that was designed from the ground up using parts designed specifically and exclusively for that exact machine and no other, will run flawlessly and beautifully for 40 hours straight without having to recharge, will probably make him pause for a few seconds to consider whether he really does have the haggling and engineering skillz to build something comparable for a better price.
I just found out about hyperdock. So scratch everything I said about the Dock, apple should just buy hyperdock and make that standard.
An iLife app for database building. Windows has MS Access. Why can’t Mac have something even better than Access? Something that is very mac-like, very easy to use.
Change bootcamp so that you don’t have to restart, I don’t know how they can do it though. I know about parallels but boot camp’s faster at running games.
What I would love to see, but haven’t much hope for:
1.) Exposé:
– The return of the more spatial organization of windows seen in Tiger and Leopard. Whatever cosmetic bits they want to add in terms of highlighting, labeling, or graying-out the windows, fine, but at the very least, keep windows proportional.
– The segment at the bottom of the screen showing minimized windows is far too big, and isn’t grouped by application, which makes it less useful than it possibly could be. I really do like the idea of minimized windows being able to be Exposéd, but we need a better implementation of the idea. I have a modest suggestion. Windows minimize behind their application, creating a Stack and visibly altering the application icon so that the presence of windows is apparent. Clicking, or right clicking or what have you, the application icon creates a fan or list or grid view of the windows minimized there. I like this idea, since it would make both sides of the Dock work quite similarly. (I’ve had a more creative take on this problem for about 6 years now, but this seems to be a more realistic hope that ties into features already seen in OS X, even though I’m sure it will never happen.)
– An additional option for hot corners to allow the “Exposé-ing” of all minimized windows.
In total then, we would have traditional, spatial/proportional Exposé for all un-minimized windows, for all un-minimized windows used by the current application, and all minimized windows period. Windows minimized to an application would be handled similarly to a Stack.
2.) Finder:
– Allow folders to be expanded in the sidebar. Click the triangle, see the subfolders. Just like iTunes lets me click the triangles and see the playlists. It’s a feature that would feel pretty natural after using iTunes, so I doubt it would go unused or unnoticed or be apt to confuse people. I bet the smart folks over there could even make it look all snazzy like they do. Or they could make it gray and ugly like the sidebar in iTunes 10.
– I want the Search box at the top of the finder window to filter the contents of whatever folder I’m in, just as the search bar in iTunes does. Even when just searching a folder, the shift in view is a little dramatic, and backspacing in the search bar until there’s nothing left doesn’t return me to the view I had before I started typing there. Now to be clear, I’m not asking for the removal of the “Search this Mac” or a dedicated view for displaying search results. What I am asking for, however, is this: In the “Search Current Folder” mode, when I start typing, start filtering the contents of the folder in the same view as I have now. If I press Return, then you can take me to a dedicated “Search Results” kind of view with the extra info. If I am in the Search field, let me use the down arrow key to get into the filtered folder or Search Results. If I backspace until I delete everything in the Search field, restore the view to what it was before I ever started typing.
– Put a little relevant info under files. Not too big or anything – I mean,I don’t want it getting in the way, but put just enough that I can better see what I’m looking for. This applies to all views.
– Put a little more info about the file in QuickLook, too. Maybe even add a Print button. I wouldn’t even mind if you put a Print button on the preview pane in Column View. I wouldn’t consider this to be a really necessary addition, but it would come in handy sometimes.
– Do something about the drain in performance when I have lots of files on my Desktop. I seldom have much on there, but boy, when I do the whole machine gets slow, and Finder beachballs like crazy.
– Cut and Fucking Paste. Call it whatever the hell you want – Pick up and Put Down, Grab and Drop – I don’t really give a damn, but put it in there.
– Overall performance needs to be improved. Finder sure has come a long way, but there are still too many beachballs. I should be able to drag and drop a whole mess of files without having Finder beachball, or sometimes even stall and require a force quit. Snow Leopard’s Finder is MUCH better in this regard, but it still isn’t as good as it could or should be. If I move a bunch of stuff to or from an external drive, I find that universally (literally 100% of the time) Finder will not let the disk be ejected, no matter how long I wait for whatever mysterious and unnamed application that is supposedly using the disk to finish, and I must Force Quit Finder, which immediately solves problem.
3.) Appearance: Not much to say here, except I wouldn’t mind some move away from the old Aqua jellybean look to something a little more in line with the look of the computers themselves. Aqua really fit well with the older Macs with their bright colors and shiny plastic, but I personally don’t think it fits as well with the current aesthetic of aluminum and glass. I don’t consider this point to be essential in any way, but I would more or less like to see some changes to the appearance of the UI. Something maybe a little sleeker, you know?
4.) Better keyboard navigation: Mainly, I just want every single damn button in a dialog box selectable from the keyboard. Most are, but there are a few stubborn holdouts that just piss me off.
5.) Safari:
– I’m sure a new version will roll out coincident to 10.7, and I would like it to not suck, please. I like the return of the progress meter in the address bar in Safari 5, but overall the performance is quite bad. It’s really fast when you first start up, but I find that I must reset it 1-2 times per day or the entire computer suffers. Seriously. Dashboard becomes unusable, and the entire machine drags and beachballs. Simply quitting Safari 5 doesn’t fix the problem. It has to be reset. I’ve even gone so far as to reinstall the entire OS on a blank disk with none of my files, but Safari 5 will just not work properly after a few hours.
– Better security. It almost feels like Safari is becoming the IE6 of OS X.
– Better implementation of pop-up blocking. I need to allow pop-ups for some sites I visit, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I would like to enable popups for just these sites and block them everywhere else, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
etc…
ZFS.
Better remote desktop support so something like RDP to improve on VNC.
Blu-Ray support.
Allow OS X Client to be virtualised on Mac hardware and not just OS X Server. Allows devs to test on older releases without lots of redundant hardware.
@Aldo Johnson
Because Databases are boring and part of work, not life. That’s like suggesting Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Calendar, Mail, or Address Book should be apart of iLife.
For Home Sharing to be OS- or User Account-based, not Application based.
That is, when you activate Home Sharing via the System Preferences, you determine what you are going to share: iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, Documents, etc. It would then in effect turn your machine into a local network server and your info would be available on iPad, laptops, AppleTVs and iPhones.
Wireless syncing on a LAN to iPhone and iPad.
Different “skins.” Aqua is a great user experience, but it is getting long in the tooth.
Dashboard (which I never use) becoming more App-like.
be nice if it were focused on productivity, security, and big brother proof.
oh well v
Here’s a really simple one: Widgets that work like Konfabulator, not Dashboard. Seriously, why do I have to “suspend” my desktop to use a widget? Sometimes I need a quick calculator when I’m typing a document. But with Apple widgets I have to switch my view to dashboard, and can no longer see the numbers in my document. What the heck?
And while we’re on the subject, why not make widgets like iPhone apps? I’d love to buy some of that crap everybody runs on their iPhone, but I don’t want to spend $2,000 to use a $1.99 app. I’ve already spent 2 grand on my notebook, shouldn’t i get the chance to use those toys too?
I’m surprised no one has mentioned this, but I finally want the option to restore things I have moved into the trash.
10.7 lion –> needed
– OSX on x86 hardware, huge legacy growth, home, corporate, server
– ZFS
… also NTFS and EXT3, etc mount / read / write
– Virtualization, no limits please !!!
– Client limit , remove limit! also fix X11 xdm,…
… most people just want to get to their email, via rdp or client,
while their son is playing wow,….
– opencl /cuda support,…. even aperture is dog slow
– blu-ray support , look shiny,… plays blue,… some want to use for backup,…
– IOS on osx
– h.264 , support mpeg at least, and h.264 via GPU, even a quad is dog slow.
– diskutil -> block size,… not just 4k,… 16k,32k,64k,128k,…. 2TB
– soft-raid , 0,1,5,10,Z ,….
-…. and more fundamental stuff