10.7- A Wish List

For those of you who are not slightly addicted to the likes of Engadget, Gizmodo or TechCrunch, this news might of slipt you by; on Wednesday Apple are holding a press conference to announce the first set of public details about the latest incarnation of their computer operating system; OS 10.7. Recently all we have really heard from Apple is iPhone this, iPad that, Multitouch, etc, however this event has been labeled ‘Back to the Mac’.  Alex Bilbie, a friend working for the University of Lincoln, posted on his blog a simple list of things that he really wanted from 10.7 to fix:

• Finder
• System and Software Notifications (aka Growl)
• Software Installation
• Software Removal
• Hardware Accelerated Apps

I’m not going retype his blog post here (just summarise quickly), you can go and read that on his blog, it is well worth a read I agree with all of it; Finder needs to be improved, Growl is a fantastic app that all software should use, Sparkle is in many apps and should become a standard and finally uninstalling software properly is a pain without third party apps such as AppZapper.  In addition to these there are a couple of other things that I really want to see improved with in 10.7.

Multitouch:

In case you haven’t noticed Apple have put a big push towards multitouch, first with the iPhone and iPad, but also with the Magic Mouse and Trackpad.  I’ve invested in a Magic Trackpad, it just feels like a toy that has been shoe horned into the operating system, sure it is nice to go into expose with a four fingered swipe, etc, however I can’t help but feel there is a lot more to come from multitouch.  We’re also going to be seeing a new release of iWorks and iLife so building multitouch properly into those programs would be something I would really value. The one thing that I really want to be able to get out of multitouch is customisation of it; for example pinch to zoom in and zoom out is irrelevant for me most of the time, I really really want to reconfigure this to go in and out of spaces.

Standardised User Interface

The new release of iTunes 10 really annoying; they have moved where the maximise, minimise and close buttons are, I fear that Apple are going to send this across some applications and not all. Apple need to decide where these buttons are going to go, perhaps iTunes 10 was a test to see how people reacted to the change, I’m not sure, but it has to be either or - not a mix of both.

Facetime

Apple have been getting pretty excited about Face Time within the iPhone and iPod Touch. iChat is really in need of an update, and Face Time seems like the perfect route to improve it; call any other Mac user (maybe even iChat for Windows?) from your iPhone and vice versa. It just makes sense.

What will be interesting to see is Apple’s take on Flash is within 10.7, they have been pretty clear on their stance towards it in iOS, I’m wondering if it will be taken across to the desktop OS.  That’s enough from me.  What about you? Anything you really want to see being put into 10.7? Or anything that you really don’t want to see there?  I saw a particularly vicious rumour about an AppStore… Please no!