My in-depth OS X 10.9 wishlist
joshparnham.com
joshparnham.com
For example, the last PowerPC mac was discontinued August 2006, and the first incompatible OS (10.6) was introduced August 2009. That's three years.
Similarly, the last 32 bit x86 Mac was discontinued August 2007 (Mac mini) and the first incompatible OS (10.7) was introduced October 2010.
And that's the most pessimistic view possible. Looking at typical purchaser lifespans, it seems you can look forward to around three major upgrades to Mac OS X over the life of a particular machine.
Compared to both Windows and Linux, Apple is the absolute worst on this front. They break backwards compatibility and leave old devices in the dust all the time. It gives them the advantage of almost forcing upgrades upon people, and allows them to keep advancing at a fast pace because they don't have to maintain legacy systems. It comes at the cost of early 2008 macbooks with no problems becoming significantly less valuable since they will not longer receive software updates.
Just look at how quickly, relatively, the whole Flashback outbreak simply... died out.
Apple issued critical updates going back as far as Tiger, which is ANCIENT, and barely has 1% of the market.
A 2008 MacBook would easily run 10.6 and 10.7, both of which receive updates just fine.
Better than having millions of people using Windows XP in 2012, and keeping everybody back.
But it's not like Apple specifically goes for it. They made some major changes that necessitated that: the move to Intel, for one, and the move to 64-bit. I doubt transitions of that scale will happen again soon.
>It comes at the cost of early 2008 macbooks with no problems becoming significantly less valuable since they will not longer receive software updates.
Well, as for resale value, Apple's stuff is among the best of the industry anyway, if not _the_ best. So it's OK some 4 year old laptops getting a resale value hit once in a while.
Plus, they DO receive software updates for security and such, just no major versions.
What does absolutely suck in the Appleverse is photo syncing - the one thing Apple has not left to iTunes. You can either use iPhoto or a directory tree on the Mac, and you have the option to build a parallel photo library on your iOS devices with iOS iPhoto. Why can't I delete photos on my iPad and have it synced back to the desktop? Why is the Photo Stream still limited to one device? (iCloud often makes a lot of sense once you start sharing your account with other people).
Save As must come back.
iCloud syncing of Notes is broken. Notes which are supposed to be in iCloud often get branched to On My Mac without me noticing, where I continue editing them, only to create conflicts.
TextEdit list view should stay open if you want it.
Notes and TextEdit need to be merged. I like the note browser view, but prefer TextEdit's white background.
A package manager as good as apt-get would be great.
As for Notes syncing - I've been making fairly heavy use of it recently and never had a single issue, hopefully that will simply come down to teething problems and be addressed in a 10.8.x update.
Your suggestion about merging Notes and TextEdit is really thought-provoking, probably not entirely possible now - but I can really see Apple doing that down the road.
I agree about apt-get, Homebrew's great and all, but it it's not fantastic. I can't ever see Apple doing this though.
With more care, Apple could make OS X great not just for users but also for developers. Xcode must be installed by default, along with command line tools. A package manager as good as apt-get is something Apple should take as seriously as it does iTunes and the AppStore.
- iPod/iOS sync
- iTunes Store
Break the primary route to a user's wallet/content, and the Apple experience starts to fall apart.
The hard bit is in the overall experience. Splitting one app into 5 or 6 was manageable on iOS but could be unwieldy on OSX.
Think of how terrible it would be for your Apple TV to then break out and have to look at multiple applications for your content instead of one.
I highly doubt apple would make the mistake of creating more mini apps to manage each of the various items; just would be a stupid design move.
For all we know, iTunes could be (and probably is) a fully modularised code base, with minimal cross module dependencies. The fact that we see it as one application tells us nothing about the underlying code.
Even the UI parts for different functionalities can be neatly modularized in different IB files, the only thing they all have to share is the main menu.
If the app with 10GB can open in less then a seconds then i dont think many would have complained. The problem is all these apps are getting slower, even with the Hardware performance improvement, and they take up valuable SSD space.
iTunes is one hell of bloat. Because you simply dont use your Music Player to manage your iPhone! It simply does not make any sense. And telling casual users to install itunes is just making the problem even worst. The Sync Apps should be linked with your Media Player Library or Playlist. But it should not be the same app. As a matter of fact, get rid of Sync with iTunes and use iCloud instead.
There are lots of bits and pieces in OSX that is showing its age. It wasn't much of a problem when Microsoft fail to make decent OS, and Google wasn't doing Android. Now Windows 8 has a shit UI but brilliant Internals, and Android is basically a Linux with cooperate backing. Apple seems to lack enough Software Engineers for an OS internal development.
Look, it doesn't actually have to be so many apps. I'd split it into "Music", "Videos" and "Devices" for the synched data.
iTunes is just bad[1] software.
I personally love it on the mac, but it's gotten bloated with the years. I avoid this problem by mainly using it for music, nothing else, plus I hear on windows is painfully slow. It needs to be rewritten and it's architecture rethought.
[1]bad in the sense that it may be overkill, because it hasn't crashed for me in years. Despite all it flaws, it always works.
And the sync problem is solving itself as iOS devices continue to migrate away from iTunes as the repository manager.
- Add a wheelbarrow icon to the menu bar.
What for? To drag and drop stuff so I can move them around.
* More explicit: to easily move/copy files from one folder to another. From one app to another. Drag files to the wheelbarrow icon, a red circle shows how many files you're holding. Open an app or a finder instance, then drag from the wheelbarrow to the folder. No need to hold the command key while waiting for a finder instance to open and navigate to the folder I want. There is an app somebody showed some time ago that did exactly that. Something like that but part of the OS.
Under the hood, there's some low-hanging fruit that I'm surprised Apple hasn't gone for yet:
* Turn off the writing of ALL memory to disk every time a laptop is put to sleep. Got an SSD MacBook Pro with 16GB? Every time you close the lid, sixteen gigabytes get written. Every time.
* Disable file access times so every file that gets opened doesn't need to have the timestamp updated.
iPhoto 9.3.2 is 1.46GB.
That!
git checkout -b dev-10.9 release-10.4E.g "Return Apple to its roots with minimalism - does a photo manager have to be 707 MB?"
Yes it has. People think the binary is "bloated", while in actuality it's mostly templates for photo books and such, that doesn't get loaded or impact performance at all if you don't use them.
>Unix package manager - basically an official version of Homebrew/Macports/Fink.
And what good would that do? Do you really want to wait for Apple to release new versions of third party programs?
>Replace AppKit with UIKit.
Does not even make sense.
>[re: iTunes] Apple, this needs to stop. Even if the segregation of all of these components into separate, modern apps was the only new feature in 10.9, I would gladly pay my money and walk away a satisfied customer.
Really? People keep saying that, to sound smart (in how they condemn "bloat"), but I think it's wrong. You know what is worse than using one app to handle 15 tasks related to your media/app collection? Using 15 apps to do the same. How would that work? At best they can break it down to 2-3 apps --which you would still have to use every time you want to sync your phone.
>We all know the Mac needs a new, modern file system to ditch the ancient HFS/HFS+.
I for one do not know that. What's the problem with HFS+ again? I mean the actual problem that matters for the common user and that ZFS is supposed to solve in a desktop/laptop machine.
Does this guy even know how ZFS works? In a space constrained SSD disk it would be a disaster. And managing logical volumes and consistency with 1-2 drives is not exactly it's core strength. It's design is all about the enterprise and the server space.
A huge hunk of it is in databases for the location features, too.
Funny, it works out just fine from the iOS side. And that's even when I consider additionally managing podcasts in downcast, comics in comixology and reference PDFs in goodreader.
On the contrary, when you want to sync/manage/backup your collections from your desktop to your iDevices, it would feel like madness to have to use 15 or even 8 different apps. You want to be able to backup/sync everything with 1-2 clicks, drag new songs (and maybe some movies), etc.
In fact, iTunes already works like that with regards to contact sync'ing (from Mail) and the optional iPhoto/Aperture photo sync'ing.
And the only time someone need open those individual apps is when they want to consume or manage that content.
There's a reason I included the idea of a package manager in 'Crazy Pipe Dreams' - I'm not at all thinking this would happen, and you raise a valid point about Apple being the one to co-ordinate releasing the programs.
Have you had any experience with Mac development? UIKit is far more pleasurable and easier to work with than AppKit IMO - I was simply meaning trying to introduce more framework consistency between platforms, hopefully resulting in apps being far easier to be ported to and from each platform.
I didn't say ZFS should replace HFS+, simply noting that Apple promised inclusion of it in Snow Leopard. Although things like snapshots would be a welcome addition to some power users, but I am well aware that ZFS & OS X won't ever really happen.
1) .DS_Store is necessary for compatibility with UNIX/Windows who do not support the HFS+ resource fork/Finder metadata. There is no way around it and they are optional. Perhaps just add it to your .gitignore like everyone else does.
2) ZFS is unnecessary. Most of the use cases that haven't already been solved elsewhere e.g. Time Machine/Versions are only for super-advanced users. In which case they can download ZFS from a third party. Not to mention that the trend is overwhelmingly towards cloud storage.
3) Splitting iTunes into its parts is not necessarily the best answer. How do you handle syncing ? System wide syncing e.g. iSync was a colossal mess and confused the daylights out of people. Also how do you handle the store ? Separate stores in each app doesn't sound fun.
ZFS won't kill the need for external backups, even in the least.
Which you don't get at all out of your 1-disk laptop/iMac with ZFS.
For this use case, both filesystems as just as (un)reliable: a simple disk failure and you're out. So, all reliability comes, as before, from backups, not from anything fs inherent.
You only get to see the ZFS advantage in a much larger, multi-disk setup.
If .DS_Store is a dependency of HFS+, that's enough reason for me to wish for a filesystem replacement. I don't care if it's ZFS or not.
Obviously, there's a lot of hate for .DS_Store and there has been for years. That Apple has never addressed this is a sore point for a lot of people.
Bring back the Lion touch scroll acceleration curve
> requiring it to be enabled in WebViews and then only working in Apple’s core apps.
Not true, works in any cocoa app