

My in-depth OS X 10.9 wishlist - _dev
http://joshparnham.com/2012/09/my-os-x-10-dot-9-wishlist/

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adrianN
I would already be happy if they allowed me to cut-and-paste in Finder and
allowed to turn off my MacBooks internal display when an external display is
attached.

~~~
cpr
Just keep your MacBook closed when plugging in the external display (or wake
it up with an external mouse or keyboard), and the internal display will stay
off when you open it later (if you need to use the internal keyboard).

~~~
adrianN
This doesn't work anymore under Lion. I now have to use a small magnet to
trick the lid-closed sensor.

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RexRollman
Don't forget to include the request that OS X 10.9 supports your current
computer.

~~~
sjwright
Apple has generally been pretty good on this front.

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.

~~~
mirashii
Three to four years is an absolutely terrible window. Applecare lasts 3 years
and they're introducing OS updates that make the devices obsolete just outside
of that window?

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.

~~~
assafs
What's wrong with it? It keeps system with less cruft, allows the vendor to
focus on current attack surface only, and makes everyone stay more-or-less up
to date.

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.

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gurkendoktor
I am actually completely and almost 100% happy with iTunes. I wish I could
stuff _more_ into it. I can basically drag whatever media I want on it and it
only takes up one dock icon.

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).

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jorangreef
As far as I understand, the versioning implementation in OS X is built on top
of SQLite, which has one-reader/writer-at-a-time-only transaction semantics. I
wonder how much this contributes to the beach balls.

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.

~~~
_dev
I'm not sure what causes the beachballs, I've been meaning to crack open lldb
one of these days and try and find out.

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.

~~~
jorangreef
Thinking more about apt-get,

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.

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zoul
I too would welcome if iTunes could return to be a music player. It must be a
huge pain even for Apple to work on such beastly monolithic app that does
almost everything except the laundry.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
iTunes has become Apple's MS Office: it does too much and it's established
it's roots so deep a rewrite would be close to impossible without breaking
things.

~~~
morsch
But Apple users have shown time and time again that they're perfectly willing
to live with things breaking for the sake of what they consider progress.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Except iTunes contains two bits of functionality Apple can't afford to break:

\- iPod/iOS sync

\- iTunes Store

Break the primary route to a user's wallet/content, and the Apple experience
starts to fall apart.

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ksec
Well we needed to define what bloated means. While we have always point to its
size. Most of the time it is including too many things we dont need and want
while the whole thing is slow and large in size.

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.

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rvid
I'd say relabel iTunes as iSync, remove the media player from it and build one
from scratch, something that's snappy as hell and more modern.

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dguido
Uhh, I was just going to say "Ruby 1.9 by default" but ok.

~~~
_dev
Adding to this, shipping with modern UNIX utilities. I understand they might
face issues with GPL3 but it's annoying that the OS is shipping with UNIX
software that's _years_ out of date.

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jsz0
I've given some thought to the iTunes problem. I think the best solution _is_
to break it up into smaller apps. The tricky part is no one wants to have a
dozen different apps installed separately so iTunes would have to still be
distributed as one big monolithic application. So instead of trying to cram
everything into one window I would suggest something like a Springboard style
UI to greet the user when iTunes is launched. From there the individual apps
would be more like their iPad counterparts. Simple and to the point. Library
management could be broken out into its own separate app to avoid a lot of UI
clutter in the Music app itself. Going forward this would let Apple easily add
or remove things from iTunes.

~~~
DeepDuh
A springboard on top of a springboard?

Look, it doesn't actually have to be so many apps. I'd split it into "Music",
"Videos" and "Devices" for the synched data.

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redial
The biggest problem for iTunes is actually Windows. Imagine telling a new,
novice user to download and install ten different applications in order to
sync their media to their phone, one for their music, another one for their
photos, another one for their podcasts and so on. That would be suicide.

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.

~~~
roc
They could break up iTunes under the covers and maintain a legacy 'unity'
interface for a cycle or two.

And the sync problem is solving itself as iOS devices continue to migrate away
from iTunes as the repository manager.

~~~
redial
That's what I think they would do. They are going to rewrite iTunes, but
nothing radical, and just wait for iCloud to replace it.

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Kilimanjaro
My only request:

\- 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.

~~~
Maci
Draw wheelbarrow icon on your command / apple key. Hold down said key, drag
menu bar icons to desired position.

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the_mat
Can you imagine the pain caused by transitioning away from HFS+? Is there
something so fundamentally wrong with it to justify all the compatibility
headaches of a new filesystem?

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.

~~~
LaGrange
Leave both alone. Sorting by last access time is really useful. Saving the
memory dump means there's space for recovery when batteries run out while
asleep – it just takes a bit longer.

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coob
> does a photo manager have to be 707 MB?

iPhoto 9.3.2 is 1.46GB.

~~~
_dev
Good god, really? My copy of 9.3.2 appears to only be 707 -
<http://cl.ly/JO6T>

~~~
coob
I've asked around the office and on all but mine it's 707, I need to figure
out why! Mine is a copy from the App Store, not preinstalled, which seems to
be the difference…

~~~
_dev
Interesting - Mine is preinstalled too, have you had a look around the App
bundle to determine where the majority of the space lies? For me,
./Contents/Frameworks/ & ./Contents/Resources/ are equally about ~330 MB
(about half of the total bundle size)

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risratorn
> _Return Apple to its roots with minimalism - does a photo manager have to be
> 707 MB? Does a music player have to be 270 MB? If something’s not needed,
> get rid of it_

That!

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dchest

       git checkout -b dev-10.9 release-10.4

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scrumper
He wants to get rid of Stickies! The only justified response to this is to
turn up on his doorstep with a torch-wielding mob.

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batista
Some things one agrees with and some that sound like typical non-programmer
(and sadly, some-programmer) lists.

E.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.

~~~
roc
> _"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."_

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.

~~~
batista
Because you don't manage them there, you mostly consume them, and one at a
time at that. In any case, you do it at your leisure, while delving into them.
Consuming them, and mostly one at a time is the main reason for having the
iPhone/iPad.

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.

~~~
roc
There's nothing that says an iTunes rewrite would necessitate opening X
programs to sync content. It's trivial to envision an architecture where a
sync service is aware of and can pull from those X repositories.

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.

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taligent
Just a couple of points.

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.

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eli
It's a list of feature requestes; none of this is _necessary_. But ZFS would
be very nice to have.

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batista
Why? Do you have half a SSD to spare for checksums and additional metadata? Or
does the common OS X user have several disks that he wants to see as a logical
volume, while also understanding the risks after one of the dies? Do they even
have the storage redundancy needed?

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eli
Do I want the option to trade disk space for greatly increased reliability?
You betcha. Also, snapshotting.

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batista
Single drive reliability means nothing. In a SSD, doubly so.

ZFS won't kill the need for external backups, even in the least.

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eli
Who said anything about replacing external backups?

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batista
You wrote about "greatly increased reliability".

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.

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89a
Bring back the Snow Leopard mouse acceleration curve

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

