Filed under: OS, Cult of Mac, UNIX / BSD
OS X 10.6 wish list
Today's question: what do you want to see in Ocelot and Margay? (I've decided that should be the name of 10.6: two closely related subspecies of leopard. I'm open to suggestion as to which is which). Leopard has already been announced, and most of the effort there will probably go into cross platform compatibility. But given the current release-a-year progression, 10.6 will come out in 2007 and be the first release to cater to a full range of x86 and PPC machines, from entry-level to server. What modifications do you want to see Apple incorporate between now and then?
My personal wish list:
- pf or some other easily configurable packet filter with altq.
- A file system that handles metadata in a more portable way.
- A file system with more efficient journaling.
- Secure levels and the ability to set files with immutable and append-only flags.
- POSIX ACL implementation.
- Wine-like execution of Windows binaries on x86 machines.
- A Rosetta replacement that can intelligently emulate Altivec calls.
- Open BIOS/firmware/AMT or whatever is going to give us current open firmware capabilities.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Oli said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
Why on earth does everyone seem to want Altivec emulation? What exactly would be the advantage? Altivec is so different from Intel's implementation that it would most certainly be much (and I mean MUCH!) slower than just using the G3 routines...
Plus there are very few programs that really need. These apps are pro apps (and most of them from Apple) and will be the first to be optimized for Intel anyway. So really, why?
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Ben said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I disagree with your timing estimate. Apple had been on a release-a-year schedule until 10.3. Then, it decided to slow down the releases and Tiger came 18 months after Panther. Steve said in his keynote that Leopard will ship late 2006 or early 2007, around the same time as Longhorn. So, 10.6 probably won't come until some time in 2008.
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janeiro said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
i don't want to wait 3 years for 10.6, so here's my hopes for 10.5:
- lightweight threading (aparently, threading is up to 10 times slower in OS X then Linux)
- updated Unix apps - apache 2, php 5, etc.
- a unified interface (pick brushed metal or the new platinum (or whatever its called) or the classic OS X look and stick with one of them)
- improved memory management (for all apps) and garbage collection (for objective-c apps) (when i close a safari tab, all that memory should go back on the heap)
- core image/video for everyone (especially all PPC users)
- definite integration and cleanup of Wine for x86 users (or at least really pushing a seperate download for it) and possibly a push for darwine for the PPC users
- file info that updates in real time (ie folder/disk sizes)
that would round out tiger pretty well, and possibly be worth another release (especially changes to how threads are handled). we'll see i suppose.
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Peter Bault said 10:56AM on 6-28-2005
oooo I like the sound of OS X Ocelot
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Robert said 6:09PM on 10-25-2005
No Wine for me!
While I understand the apparent appeal of Wine, adopting a wine-like ability in Mac OS X has numerous shortcomings:
1. Virtual PC is "blessed" by Microsoft, they sell it, AND sell a copy of Windows at the same time. A Wine implementation would have to be an Apple project, undermining MS sales. Do we want MS to kill Office as payback?
2. Related to above. Any attempt to keep up with the Windows APIs is a losers game. Things won't run perfectly and people won't be happy.
3. It forces Apple to expend too many resources making Mac OS X run Windows apps "seamlessly" (printing, clipboard, launching from Dock, etc.) destabilizing the OS and slowing development.
4. Seamless wine-like performance allows developers to cop-out and stop developing Mac versions of their apps. Ultimately Mac OS X just becomes an alternate platform for running Windows apps--then what is my motivation for buying Apple hardware?
Virtual PC is a great "bridge" app. It allows me to run a few critical Windows apps until I can find a replacement. Virtual PC on Intel machines will be faster, that's good. But the minute I start running Windows and Mac apps side by side and can't tell much of a difference is the day Mac OS X begins to die.
I used to run OS/2. It was great. Object oriented shell. More stable than Windows. Ran Windows apps seamlessly (key difference here was that IBM had the Windows 3.1 source code to work with!). And because it ran the Windows apps so well, developer after developer when asked about a native version just replied, "we've tested our Windows version and it works fine in OS/2". Let's not make the same mistake in OS X...
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Thomas said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I want more Apple applications integration. iCal and address book in the sidebar of Mail would be handy. Labels in Mail are want in my book. How about FTP upload availability in the finder?
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Gustavo said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
- PF
- lightweight threading
- more portable FS metadata
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narco said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I'm happy with Tiger. I just wish Safari wouldn't crash all the time and that Spotlight and Dashboard would actually work SOMEWHAT fast. There's no reason for it to be as slow as it is on a dual 2ghz G5 with 3gigs of RAM. It takes 15 seconds at least for a search result to pop up. Dashboard takes about 20 seconds to show up (for the first time) even though I only have 4 widgets.
Fishes,
narco.
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Chris said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
Heartily agree with Robert regarding a compatibility layer. Lets not turn OS X into Geos (first person that actually provides a CD of Geos gets a cookie).
As for changes/improvements/features that I want:
1. Improve the Spotlight UI. (Drag and drop, more extensive ctrl-click menu, etc)
2. Expansions of Automator abilities (I really don't have time/inclination to master Applescript)
3. Boolean Spotlight in the GUI (not just Raw Query)
4. Retention of current Apple unique features going forward to Intel machines. (OF features, target disk mode, etc..)
Also, I reiterate the requests of others. Specifically those system level requests regarding garbage collection. Safari shouldn't suck the life from my RAM chip. I don't have the coder background to be sensible on those subjects though.
5. Something nifty I wasn't expecting.
Lastly, I second Ocelot. That's just the best cat name.
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l.m.orchard said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I want them to join up the extended metadata in HFS for files with Spotlight, which currently just indexes data produced by plugins.
This way, I can set my own arbitrary indexed metadata, making the filesystem much more like BeFS or like a database.
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Chris said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
narco, there must be something horribly wrong with your system. I'm on a g4 1.42 mac mini as well as a G3 800 iBook and spotlight and dashboard are nowhere near that slow and Safari crashes are infrequent at worst.
Even Safari running the CVS WebKit doesn't crash that badly and I've been trying to make it crash.
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Navypoo said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
If you think Leopard will only focus on Intel compatibility, I think you are mistaken. "Hey, it's Leopard! No reason to upgrade if you are using a PowerPC Mac!"
The only people who need the Intel compatibily will be people buying new Intel Macs, which Leopard will be installed standard.
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Mark H said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
My wish list is pretty short:
- Something as efficient and intuitive as Window's method of keyboard-based menu access (e.g. Alt-I O to insert an object in Word is way faster than selecting the menu item with the mouse, and keyletter highlighting makes it really easy to use).
- Shift-arrow multiple item selection that works as you would intuitively expect it to (i.e. reversing direction should unselect the last item) consistently across all applications.
- More standardization in UI elements (and fewer custom permutations on standard elements), and the addition of de facto standard elements to Interface Builder if they are not already there (e.g. iTunes-style alternating color lists). More adherence to Apple's own UI guidelines, and less changing of the guidelines without demonstrably good reasons. This would be great for both users and developers.
- Much more comprehensive OS and application-level help.
- More attention to consistency and spatial-type features in the Finder. For example, when I open my applications folder from the link I have in the dock, it opens in icon mode (as I told it to in the folder preferences), but when I open it from a sidebar link in an existing Finder window, it instead opens in column mode.
- A tab for advanced preferences in all Apple applications. For example, I'd love to be able to change the font size in Preview annotation boxes, but there's no way to do this right now. There are lots of things like this that Apple doesn't think most people would care about (witness the many 'defaults write...' hints on macosxhints.com), and they're probably right, but it would still be nice for those of us who do care to have access to additional controls.
That's all that comes to mind at the moment.
Mark
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John said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
FYI, internally 10.4 and 10.5 were merged and you're not going to see much reference to a numbered OS with leopard. technically it is a mix of some of 10.5 (that didn't merge) and 10.6
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Mark H said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
One more:
In all spotlight result windows, show the path to the currently selected item! This is so simple, and would make Spotlight so much more useful (right now how can't tell the difference between files with the same name), that I can't believe it's not already in there. Actually, I want this with 10.4.2, not with 10.5.
Mark
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Extensor said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
Fishes.narco
I am running Tiger on a Yikes! 350 G4 and I don't have the problems you have. My Spotlight takes about half a second to begin spitting out stuff. My Dashboard has 20 widgets and takes less then 2 seconds to pop up.
System info:
I've got about 28 gigs of data on my drive. I gig of RAM.
I think you should take your computer in and get it checked out. That shiz ain't normal.
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Matt said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I'd like to see Spotlight display summaries of document hits rather than just the file names. For example, I have a large collection of technical documentation that comes with software for the PC that displays hundreds of topics and upon clicking the topics an Adobe Acrobat reader is spawned to display the selected document. Problem is all the documents are named the same and are even split by chapter. If I could do a search and see not only the file names but also the occurance of text in the document that caused the hit that would be fantastic.
Spotlight needs additional UI tuning as well. It works well for files that have different names as someone else has mentioned but seeing a full path would definitely be nice. It's also got that irritating and Windows-y feel to searching...it's kinda lame that when you type five characters of a search it starts displaying your results and as soon as you hit a sixth character these are all cleared and show up again. Instead it would be a nice piece of eye candy as you add more characters for Spotlight to query the index for the already displayed documents before it executes the main query and if something is no longer a valid result, remove it and smoothly slide the other results up. That would give you more of a feeling that you are narrowing your search rather than the jerky and unrefined feeling it has now.
Oh and for God's sake let's have an icon and a place on the taskbar for spotlight rather than making it a second-rate Finder extension thing. It's kinda lame that you can't just find it on the taskbar...I've got it mapped to one of my keys on the keyboard so it's easy to find a second time but it would be a lot nicer to see if it's opened or not on the task bar.
I read somewhere there is a way to do boolean expressions as well but I don't remember where...maybe on macosxhints or something. Supposedly you use pipes or something but can't be bothered to Google for it right now.
Dashboard kicking up faster would be nice...I'm using a 1.42 mini and it takes a little longer to load the widgets than I'd like (how typical). I guess because it's kicking up Safari to do the rendering itself as they're HTML thingies anyways.
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Matt said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
Oops I meant dock, not taskbar...can you tell I'm a recent switcher?
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Mark said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
AMEN to more Windows-like keyboard shortcuts! You want switchers? Apple may have invented the GUI, but it doesn't have to be an exclusive Mac/Mouse DOS/Win/Keyboard relationship.
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Frank Denis said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I would also love to see the old ipfw firewall replaced by OpenBSD's PF.
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