This was my all-time-favorite from my BeOS days. Extend the functionality of the file manager with plugins. The possibilities are endless. It works on currently selected files and folders and then, by selecting these plugins, you can act on these selections (with a gui or not). Ideas for little-easy-to-create plugins: bulk renaming, Terminal-Here, ToUpper, ToLower, Unix2Dos, Mac2Unix (end of line formatting for text files), CreateThumbnail (for images), CompressIt, UncompressIt, Create DiskImage, BurnNow, Label-it, RunAsUserName, SecureDelete, SendtoFloppy, EmailThis, ViewAsHex, Diff, ConvertImage, FTPit and many-many-many more. Plugins are a very clever idea to ultimately enhance the functionality of any desktop, and it pretty much comes "for free," as third party developers would be able to provide these with the use of a simple API.
Sherlock Plugins
This might destroy Karelia (which is a company I have much respect), but if we can get Watson's full functionality for free, well, I will have to be the selfish consumer and say that I would love to see it all in Sherlock, free of charge. While Sherlock is a good utility, Watson is still far more complete and offers great enhancements, like multiple dictionaries, phonebook search worldwide, recipies, TV search and much more. For now, it is still Watson for me.
Scheduled Tasks
Currently, Mac OS X has two ways of scheduling tasks: 1) with the Unix 'cron' command and 2) Via AppleScript. None of the two are elegant solutions for Mac users though. The first one requires Unix knowledge and the second one requires some "programming," which can be daunting for the 35-year old secretary in a small business office without an IT department, typing letters all day with her 2-inch wine-red fingernails. An easy-to-use GUI, I believe, is required and could help a lot of people automate some of their work without too much effort. WindowsXP does it, so...
Better Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition
And speaking of natural language, what I would like to see in a future Mac OS X is some "intelligent" built-in speech recognition, so you can control your Mac via voice without the mess and restrictions of the current speech recognition system. Also, the current speech synthesis is below par, although better than Jaguar's. I saw a demo from a company which specializes in speech synthesis and I could not distinguish if it was a person speaking or the computer (running on a Transmeta 600 Mhz CPU no less). There is still lots of optimizations and enhancements in this specific area in OSX.
WMV/ASF Safari plugin
This is a must-have for me. I need full plugin support for both QT, Real and MS Media Player formats. Very often I find myself at launch.yahoo.com and wanting to view music video clips, in WMV format. This is one thing I can not do with a Mac, and I am sure it is one less reason for any Windows user to switch. Oh, and MPlayer OSX doesn't do the job in this particular situation; I require a browser plugin, not just a standalone player.
Undo on Safari
How many times you find yourself typing something in a text area and suddenly the text disappears because of a combination of keys you might have hit accidentally? Unfortunately, Safari doesn't support CMD+Z to Undo the mistake. Poof, all your text is gone!
Tabs in Terminal.app
I am an SDI person generally speaking, but sometimes I do like the handiness of tabs in applications. Terminals and browsers are the only apps where I endorse them so far.
More IM Protocol support and USB cameras
I personally use Fire and/or Proteus because I need support for all four popular IM protocols: MSN, Y!, AIM and ICQ. While Fire does the job adequately, iChat does it more elegantly. I would love to see support on iChat for all four protocols, including camera and audio support for MSN and Y!. And speaking of cameras, enabling USB cameras to work wouldn't be a bad idea for users, even if it would cripple iSight's sales. Apple should give us the choice to be able to purchase a $30 Creative USB camera and work out of the box, we users should not be forced into the monopoly of the $150 iSight (and yes, I do own an iSight). There are some hacks to enable USB cameras to work with iChat, but these are just hacks that break from one OSX version to another.
Better X11 Integration, KDE/Gnome consistency
Not every OSX user requires X11. In fact, most will never need it. However, for us geeks, X11 is important. I use it all the time with either Fink or by displaying my Slackware's Gnome 2.4 from my AthlonXP on my OSX's desktop. It would have being great if X11 was tied and integrated to Quartz instead of just running "on top." If integrated, we would be able to put our X apps in the Dock and use them as regular OSX apps. Additionally, I would like to see Apple to work on clipboard support with popular X toolkits and also create Qt and GTK+ themes that resemble the default Mac OS X widget set and coloring theme. I like consistency on all my desktops; it makes things simpler and cleaner. Additionally, I wouldn't mind Apple shipping a CD or providing via DarwinPorts an "official" port of KDE and Gnome libraries and some related apps (e.g. KOffice, Kontact, Evolution, Mr. Project, AbiWord, Gnumeric etc). Amusingly, DarwinPorts was part of the betas in 10.3, but was removed in the final. To recap, I am not interested at all in running the Gnome or KDE desktop on top of my Finder's, but I am interested in running some of their bundled or third party apps, to all blend perfectly in the rest of the guest OS, OSX.
Hotmail and Yahoo! email integration to Mail.app
Mail.app already supports .Mac IMAP mail accounts and while .Mac is good business for Apple, most computer users are using Hotmail and Yahoo! when it comes to web mail. I would like to see support for these protocols on Mail.app via some sort of licensing. Currently, there is a third party Hotmail plugin for Mail.app, but it ain't stable and crashes Mail.app randomly when used.
- "User Interface"
- "Application Enhancements"
- "System Enhancements, Part 1"
- "System Enhancements, Part 2"
