What Do You Want out of Leopard?

Apple recently announced the dates of its World Wide Developers Conference. This year it is coming a bit later than usual, running August 7-11 instead of the more traditional May or June. Speculation is that the conference is being held up a bit so Apple can get its hands on Intel’s 64-bit desktop chip called Cornroe and have a shiny new tower to show off at the conference. New hardware is always interesting but much more interesting is something else that is rumored to happen at WWDC ‘06: A preview of Apple’s next iteration of OS X, Leopard.

The changes brought about by Leopard will be far more interesting over the long run than any computers introduced at the show. Before specific improvements and enhancements are suggested, it is important to note that Tiger, at least personally, has been a pretty terrific release. Sure, Widgets have not quite made a huge difference in day to day life for most users (except for the Apple Matters This Day in Apple History Widget, outstanding!) but the less glitzy side of Tiger, also known as everything else but Spotlight, is generally very solid. Personal satisfaction with the current OS revision noted, it is time to address what improvements Leopard should bring.

A better Finder

This is an old complaint about OS X, the finder is busy trying to do two things at once. John Gruber of Daring Fireball sums the problem up nicely:

“To boil it down, the fundamental problem with the OS X Finder is that it’s trying to support two opposing paradigms at once – the browser metaphor (metal windows and column view) and the spatial metaphor from the original Mac Finder (Aqua windows in list and icon view), and it ends up doing neither one very well.”

So, the Finder needs some work. Digging through folders to find specific files made a lot of sense when people were using System 6 and had 40 MB hard drives, heck you could remember just about every file on your computer. With the expansive hard drives of today, feature bloat and the sheer number of files most people have, just digging around through folders isn’t the most efficient way to find files. The Finder should be a priority.

Improved Safari

Safari is generally a good browser, you won’t find any fatal flaws. Yet, it isn’t without annoyances. To begin with, as Chris Howard noted, Safari isn’t the most compatible browser around. Secondly, also noted by Chris Howard, Safari has an annoying tendency after long periods of use to drag like crazy. Yes, there are fixes and tricks. You can delete Favicons or clean your Mac with any one of a seeming jillion maintenance programs (I prefer OnyX) but that is too much to ask of the average Mac user. We just want stuff to work.

Those are just minor quibbles; a new release of OS X shouldn’t be mainly about fixing minor complaints with the current release, it should be about making the OS substantially better. If the previous revisions to OS X are any guide Leopard will offer speed increases, a few pieces of eye candy for his Jobsness to gush about and plenty of under the hood improvements that you won’t see but will (even if you never realize it) appreciate. So, what hot newness would be nice to see?

Prefechting

Intel is promising laptops that use flash memory extensively. The idea is that by using a scheme called Prefetching and storing vital chunks of frequently used programs in flash memory you both speed up the computer and save power. If the difference is as big as Intel says it is (perhaps doubtful) one would expect Apple to offer a similar function in Leopard. Sure, it is a Windows innovation but share and share alike.

A Finder much more reliant on Spotlight.

As mentioned above, the Finder is in an uncomfortable between area still not quite sure what it wants to be. By leveraging the power of Spotlight cleverly the Finder could go from OS X annoyance to OS X all star.

Anti-Phishing, anti-stupid user stuff.

The recent news has been all doom and gloom when it comes to Macs and security. Yet, for all the hyperbole, the Mac is very secure when compared to other systems. The honest truth is that no computer will ever be completely safe as long as files are being moved onto it so you can expect an ove-hyped story about holes in OS X every six months or so. FUD disguised as news aside, the biggest security threat to Mac users isn’t a virus or some ham-fisted piece of Malware disguised as a JPEG, the biggest hole in OS X security resides behind the keyboard of every Mac.

With that in mind, it would be nice to see Apple add some flags to Mail. You know a flag that says something like:

Attention: your eBay account hasn’t been suspended

When users receive an obviously fraudulent email. Or

Warning: This mail did not originate from MBNA server

When you get one of those pieces of spam asking you to log into your credit card account. Even, perhaps most helpfully:

Danger, Danger: That’s not really an attractive Russian with a sincere desire for your company. It’s a guy with copious amounts of back hair who wants to take a crack at your wallet.

There is, of course, a limit to how much you can protect the painfully gullible from themselves. That, however, doesn’t mean Apple shouldn’t try to help the less computer savvy among us.

That’s a short list of improvements your humble author would like to see. Undoubtedly, the wise and intelligent readers of AppleMatters will have their own suggestions for things that should be changed in Leopard which should prove much more interesting than the previous listing.