October 20th 2010 – up and until this date you are going to be hearing about a lot of Apple rumors, on the 20th Apple will be holding a press event. The event has been titled on invitations as ‘Back to the Mac’ which certainly means that the focus of the event is not iOS oriented. In the past I have predicted what I expect to see at these events, often leading to me looking a bit foolish (as anybody who regularly predicts Apple stuff is). This time around I decided to put together a Mac wish list of sorts.
The following is a list of things that I would love to see Apple announce, that are not too far out of the realm of something that we could reasonable expect Apple to release.
FaceTime
This may just be the only thing on this list that I am sure of. FaceTime really needs to be integrated into Macs – what will be interesting is wether Apple decides to use iChat (which really is aging) to implement it, or if they will create and entirely new FaceTime app on the Mac. Either way, we need it built into Mac OS.
Better SSD Support
SSDs are the way of the future, that is why Apple offers them as an upgrade right now. My guess is the Mac OS gets all the latest and greatest SSD support baked into the new OS. Specifically TRIM support.
Other than that I would hope that this new version of the OS will be something along the lines of optimized for the SSD first and a platter drive second.
iOS & Mac OS Love
By that of course I mean a better way for Mac apps to talk to iOS apps for syncing data and so forth. Right now the best way is Dropbox, which requires more setup than the average user will undertake. I would love to see a system where iOS devices can recognize a Mac app via Bonjour and just go from there.
A New iCal
Soooo…I have talked about this before but iCal on the Mac really sucks and all the replacements for it from third party developers suck. I want this:
A New Mail.app
Better filtering options, widescreen support built in, keyboard commands, exchange support is better, spam filtering is amazing, filing is improved. Most of all I hope that Apple gets with the times and realizes that most of the world does NOT use MobileMe and therefore needs Apple’s Mail client to work with things like Gmail and Exchange, and to work with those services very well.
Subtle Tweaks to the UI
I like the way Mac OS 10.6 looks, it is definitely the best looking OS out there right now (without heavy customization at least), but it too could use some refinements. For instance we could use a new Finder icon and a new Trash icon – man do they look dated. Ok and while we are at it, why can’t the inspector windows look a little more like the HUD themes that you can find online?
Updated Finder
Any Mac power user will tell you, Finder is showing its age. Tabs are the biggest wish for most people. I would settle for better network drive support, for both WebDAV servers and network shares. But my biggest complaint? Why can’t I hide some of the computers that Finder shows under the ‘shared’ tab in the sidebar? I mean only a few of those are ones that I need to access, so let me hide the rest away for crying out loud.
New Preview
I love the Preview app on Mac OS X, what a jack of all trades it is and far better and faster than using Adobe Acrobat. That said we need better support for reducing file sizes, the ability to OCR a PDF, and some basic tools to be able to digitally sign a document.
Yojimbo / DEVONthink type App
File folders are so 1999, today we just like to search or see things organized for us. This would be in addition to Finder, giving us a place to store and search all of our files, view and edit them – think iTunes for the rest of your crap.
Saving No More
I just feel greedy at this point, but one of my favorite features of Notational Velocity is that I don’t have to worry about hitting save. All that is done for me and backed up – saving needs to be a thing of the past. I can just imagine the commercials comparing saving on a Mac versus saving on a PC.
New iChat
Last but not least, if we are going to be forced to use iChat in order to use FaceTime on our Macs, the least Apple could do is make it good again.
Just sayin…