It's only been about seven months since Apple released OS X 10.9, the latest and greatest version of its Mac operating system. But the yearly upgrade cycle means that unless something unexpected happens, Apple will tell us about OS X 10.10 at the traditional keynote next month on the first morning of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The operating system is more than 13 years old, and it's come a long way since those first versions, but it's still not perfect. What areas do we think Apple should focus on in 10.10?
Think of the SSDs
The latest Macs may have solid state drives that can read and write over 700 megabytes per second over a direct PCI Express connection, but all that data is still organized by a file system from the previous millennium: HFS+. There's something to be said for using stable, battle-hardened code for the file system, which is probably the most critical part of the operating system. Unfortunately, Apple's current HFS+ implementation isn't as stable as it should be, much to the chagrin of Ars' OS X reviewer extraordinaire John Siracusa.
With the introduction of a logical volume manager—Core Storage—it looks like Apple has found a way to innovate in the area of storage without having to replace HFS+. One of the big missing features in HFS+ is snapshots. Time Machine, for example, works per-file. Changing a few bytes in the middle of a large file means that the entire file is copied during the next backup. With snapshots, that's not necessary: multiple snapshots share the unmodified disk blocks. As such, snapshots could be implemented in Core Storage rather than in the file system. This would allow Time Machine backups to be much faster and more efficient.
It would also be great if Apple could make the next OS X use disk space more economically. SSDs may be fast, but the big ones are still expensive. Those of us who got a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro in recent years probably have less disk space at our disposal than we used to back in the days of spinning, rust-covered disks, even as photo and video sizes have continued to balloon.
The first place to look is Apple's included applications. iTunes is 325MB. The iWork trio is 1.44GB. GarageBand is almost 900MB, iPhoto a whopping 1.7GB, and iMovie is no less than 2.9GB. In my iPhoto library with 67GB worth of photos, iPhoto kept a Previews folder with 23GB worth of previews. Turns out you can simply delete those without issue. Now that CPU cycles and RAM are relatively abundant and disk space is more constrained, it probably makes sense to recreate previews on the fly rather than cache them on disk. Or, at least allow for these caches to be flushed when the disk space is needed for something else.
Notifications
The iOS-inspired notification system was a great addition to OS X in 10.8. I like them a lot for e-mail: as interruptions go, Mail notifications are as unobtrusive as it gets. Unfortunately, that's not true for all types of notifications. Many will stay on the screen until you dismiss them. Software updates are especially annoying; they keep coming back every day until you finally break down and install the update just to get rid of the notifications (or disable automatic checking of software updates). Apple needs to let the user customize system notifications the same way other notifications can be turned on/off and customized. And let us know that there are missed notifications, for instance, by having the Notification Center icon in the menu bar turn blue.
Resolution independence
I'll spare you the details of Apple's winding road toward supporting high resolution displays. But it's a hard problem, and although Apple's pixel doubling solution is more robust than what's in Windows, there's still room for improvement.
I upgraded from a 13" MacBook Air to a 13" Retina MacBook Pro in October. On the Air's 1440x900 display, the user interface was about the right size, but on the Pro's 1280x800 display, too many of those 1280x800 pixels (or, rather, points) are taken up by the user interface, leaving less room for content.
There's always the inelegant solution of running in a non-native resolution, but it would be incredibly helpful if Apple could bring the iOS 7 global font size setting to the Mac and then, for applications that opt in, expand or shrink the graphical user interface elements such as the menu and title bars along with the selected text size. Applications that have a very rigid layout that can't adapt to different sizes can simply not opt in, so there are no backwards compatibility issues.
There are too many apps for that
The Messages application on OS X lets you send messages to users of various instant messaging platforms as well as to iOS users through Apple's iMessage service. However, Messages on iOS is limited to iMessage. If you're more into video, you can also use Messages on the Mac to talk to other users of Messages on the Mac through the various IM protocols that it supports—but video compatibility with non-Apple users is limited or non-existent. There's also the separate FaceTime app that allows for video (and audio) chats with other Mac and iOS users.
The fact that Apple has these two apps with such overlapping features is bad enough, but the real problem is that Apple now seems to be only interested in messaging within its own user base. Back before iChat became Messages, it looked like we were finally making some progress toward a world with a single, interconnected instant messaging system. But with the ascent of mobile, new mobile-centered ones have been cropping up like weeds. Now I need IRC, Jabber, iMessage, FaceTime, Skype, and Whatsapp to talk to different people at different times, and I'm not even including Twitter and Facebook here.
Apple needs to extend the appeal of Messages/iMessage by opening the lines of communication beyond buyers of Apple hardware before users have moved on if only to let me get rid of a few IM applications in my Dock.
AirDrop
Or maybe iMessage users should count themselves lucky. After all, at least they get to exchange messages between Macs and iOS devices. AirDrop users can only dream of such far-reaching interoperability; although the feature does the same thing under the same name under both OS X and iOS, it's not possible to AirDrop anything from an iOS device to a Mac or the other way around. Yes, obviously there will be some limitations on the type of files iPhones and iPads can accept from Macs, but this one is a no-brainer.
External screens and keyboards
Multi-screen support is pretty good in 10.9, but I still dread connecting an external display to my Mac. I'm quite particular about where I like many of my application windows to be, and often, connecting and disconnecting an external screen brings chaos to that order. Some applications simply go back to their original positions, but others tend to migrate toward different edges of the screen. Please make it stop. Having a modifier key snap windows to the middle and edges of the screen would also help tremendously.
Of course with an external screen comes an external keyboard. Unfortunately, 20-year-old keyboards don't come with media keys. OS X does have a rather extensive system for adding keyboard shortcuts, but the fatal flaw is that only system functions that Apple specifically exposes—which is only a subset—can be bound to keys system-wide. So while it's possible to create a keyboard shortcut for iTunes to skip to the next track, that shortcut only works when iTunes is the active application. I would love to be able to program keys for system-wide media functions and to control applications in the background.
Per-network settings
iOS has a very clever little feature that OS X would do well to borrow: each Wi-Fi network can have its own settings. So if you need to use a special proxy at work, that proxy is only used on the work Wi-Fi network, not at home. With OS X, network settings are tied to "locations" that you have to change manually.
With automatic awareness of network locations, OS X could be smarter about security. For instance, when connected to an untrusted network such as a Wi-Fi hotspot, the system could use more aggressive security checks and possibly even refuse to make certain network connections that would be given the benefit of the doubt when on a trusted home or office network.
Public beta?
When a new version of OS X comes around, there are often bugs and features that don't quite hit the mark that make me wonder whether Apple eats its own dogfood. For instance, automatic termination seems like a good idea, but it's kind of hard to open files with Preview or QuickTime Player if the application keeps automatically terminating on you. A 10-second delay would easily solve that.
Somehow, either the registered developers who get access to beta versions of upcoming OS X versions fail to find these issues, or Apple doesn't take advantage of their feedback. If it's the former, there's hope: Apple recently opened the OS X beta program to the public. This could very well mean that pre-release versions of OS X 10.10 can also be tested by the public, so Apple gets the benefit of early feedback from regular users.
The beta program could also be an indication that Apple expects a lot of pushback from users with the rumored iOS 7 style makeover of OS X in version 10.10. An extensive overhaul of the look of OS X could lead to a lack of attention elsewhere and more bug reports from users before the official release could help offset that.
Listing image by Apple
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