Things I want in the next OS

My favorite missing feature of all that you've listed. That would be an excellent idea IMO.

Er... every action a user takes must go through an application, even the Finder. This makes no sense.


These *ARE* OS services.


All Finder features, not OS features. But, Meh, Yes, and Yes.


Spotlight feature request. Available from third parties now.


Uh, *what*? Copy the app to the other hard drive. Done. Heck, I run apps off of the hard drive attached to the WAP in the other room.


Can't argue with this one - a clipboard stack/vector would be great. Luckily, there are widgets out there that you can get to do this now.


There are menulets to do this now. They even integrate with iCal.


God no. Talk about your UI nightmares.


A guide to help users understand what is the OS, what are applications, and how they interact with one another.

1. Nice features but a better workflow would be just to do batch conversions.
2. Any way to integrate the Dictionary deeper into OS X is welcome by me. I love it.
3. Fluff feature that would likely annoy many but hey if it's easy why not.
4. No doubt
5. They're probably working on this one. Each successive generation of OS X gets smarter and smarter metadata.
6. This is a bad idea to me. Spotlight should be focused on local content. Safari should be managing Internet content search. I like the abstraction.
7. Yupp I hate mispelings.
8. I think it could have benefits but I'd rather have all applications running on a single drive.
9. Hmmm do any third party apps do this?
10 Third party Menu Calendar something . I've got to install it
11. Sounds like a a GUI nightmare.
12 How about a freaking uninstaller and support for 3rd party updates using Software Update.

Another great idea. IMO.

What's irritating is that they're 95% of the way to this *now*... open up a Receipt from /Library/Receipts. Some, but not all, used to activate an Uninstall option in Installer.app, but it was buried in a menu.

The Receipt keeps track of what all was installed - it's a ready-to-use list of what should be deleted. The only possible remaining cruft would be from custom installer scripts that the developer creates.

Hear hear for 3rd party hooks as well - although I really like Sparkle's approach of letting me do it in-app, on the fly, and not having to grab a .dmg to keep around my disk.

I want to be able to toggle between buttons in a dialog window using the arrow keys and then press enter to press the selected button. (Only thing I liked in Windows and would like to see in OSX)

A better/smarter Finder.

It's the worst part of OSX IMO, I don't like it as a file manager at all.
The ability to cut and paste.
When moving a folder into a directory that already has a folder with the same name, the change to merge files, rather than copy and replace would also be appreciated.

Improved Samba support.

An improved Junk mail filter in Mail; it seems very aggressive IMO.

That's really all I can think of right now.

Easily done with Automator assigned to a Finder Contextual Menu Item.

It already is.

Make a disk image instead of a folder - you can password protect that.

It is confusing.

It is. Every Cocoa app provides spell and grammar check automatically. I can write a Cocoa text editor from scratch in 5 minutes, and it automatically has spell check.

Agreed. I wish I could think of the best way to do this.

I'd be happy if the date appeared in the menu bar. You can hack this, but it screws up the date format elsewhere.

God no. One of the defining features of Mac OS is the single menu bar. Did you come from Windows?

1. A Contextual Menu Item that would temporarily make a window float so that you could read from it while typing in the bigger window that is behind it. Example - you get a tiny window containing some info, and you want to type that into a form in Safari. Right-click on the tiny window and choose "float" and then you can type into the big web window behind without the small window disappearing.

2. Lots of changes to Xcode and Interface Builder.

3. Automator workflows able to be added as Contextual Menu Items to apps other than Safari and Finder.

4. A "Go" button in Safari.
5. Selecting text that reads "www.xyz.com" should enable the "Go To Address" option in Safari. At present, only text starting with "http" does that, and most web addresses in web articles don't include the http.

6. Make iDisk fast enough to be useful. Fix the "closing file..." kludge.

7. Dragging to select contiguous files in Finder or messages in Mail tries to move the first item rather than select it. You have to dick with it to get it to select. This worked in Classic Mac OS just fine.

I've got a few small things:

-Bookmarks for the finder.
-Tabs for the finder.
-Labels that let you just fold the effing icon like it did in classic. I hate when you label items and then view them in list view, it looks cluttered. Let me have an option to have it show this way and give me the ability to shade just the icon if I want.
-The ability to shade the labels to the color I want.
-An easier to read analog menubar clock.
-A menubardock that works very similar to Taskmenubar.

You can do that, but you press Space to choose the button.

Amorya

4. Isn't that what user folders are for? Your entire account IS password protected.
5. Spotlight is integrated into the finder...press Command-F.
6. So you want Sherlock back? I don't want my Spotlight searches to be slowed/cluttered with net results. Bad idea. How hard is it to open up a Google page or do a google search in a widget?

Like others, I would like to see Finder improved, especially in the area of speed.

SMARTReporter integrated into the OS. It's shareware now and could probably be purchased for a very reasonable price. Anyone who has had a HD go bad would love it.

Actually, there are probably a lot of very good shareware apps out there that could be purchased by Apple to enhance OS X and related features. There is no need for a "not invented here" attitude with regards to enhancements and it might fire up the developers who come up with some bright ideas, but don't enjoy the financial rewards for their efforts.

Apple doesn't really have that attitude. It's pretty well known for taking the "best of breed" apps and technologies and implementing it into the OS. DTrace and ZFS are good examples. There's also iTunes itself. It's origins lead back to the SoundJam MP.

A program called Xback lets you use your screen savers as desktops

http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/xback.html

Dictionaries being part of the Operating system or being part of the User-space Level?

Rewrite your universal converter to a Services Universal Image Converter. There is a major problem with this unless you think they should waste their time and include a Services Universal Image Converter Inspector Panel with Options for each Format.

Spotlight searching the Internet is called GOOGLE. If you want them to extend Metataging Google then you are just killing the OS.

SpellCheck: Aspell as a system wide service is available: http://cocoaspell.leuski.net/

8. I should be able to install applications on an external hard drive without installing the OS on every external drive too. (some applications already do this).

That's up to the application developer.

Finder will change when they put in the Cocoa version.