Mac OS X 10.5: How I’d like my Leopard

Summary: The next version of Mac OS X, Leopard, is scheduled for release in early 2007. Here are some things I would like to see: Leopard should consistently use tagging, rating, and coloring (including bookmarks and contacts) throughout the system. Give all the applications the ability to create dynamic “playlists” and the ability to share data via Bonjour. Improve Spotlight, by putting the details of some results, such as a dictionary definition, right into the summary results. Also add internet search results. Bring back compelling end-user programming. Integrate backups into the OS. Add some voice interaction tools and image recognition. Something like an iText should make it easy to manage text notes. Mail should have a smart feature for filing messages into mail folders. Add Wikipedia to the Dictionary, and make dictionary entries bookmark-able, and let people tag, rate, color, share, and sync definitions.

Apple will be announcing the features of their upcoming Leopard operating system at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) on Aug. 7-11, 2006.

I read one person mention that it seems ridiculous to share your wish list right before Apple announces what they’re actually doing, and I have to agree :-) They don’t have much time to do anything about it, but perhaps they can squeeze in work on the small ideas and consider the bigger ones for the next generation of the OS. So here are my ideas.

Universal tagging, rating, coloring, and sharing

Any file and any data you collect in any application (like fonts, contacts, etc.) should be able to be tagged, rated, colored, and shared. Everything possible should use a nice and relevant image for a thumbnail preview. Coloring should be like color labels in the Finder, a way to make items stand out and let users group them.

Tagging is putting keywords on items. iPhoto has this ability, but in a very painful interface. Look to excellent internet examples of tagging, such as del.icio.us, for efficient approaches. Smart tag suggestions (based on past patterns of tagging) can help a lot.

Everything ought to be shareable via Bonjour just by saying so: files, addresses, bookmarks (these lists would be really handy in small business). Further, they should be trivially shareable over the internet, via .Mac for example, and when public information (such as bookmarks) are shared by more than one user, it should be easy to view average ratings and collective tags. Every major app should also sync with iPods and .Mac.

Improved Spotlight

Spotlight could have many improvements. I’ll mention two.

I’d love it if the search results could show, for example, the definition of a word, pulled from the Dictionary, without even having to select and open the item. Which items get expanded in the search results can easily be a user option.

I’d also like internet search combined with desktop search. As soon as I type “a”, for example, there ought to be a “Web” category in the search results that lists the most popular search results starting with “a”, such as “apple.com”. These results could easily be cached and improved by combining them with matching items in bookmarks and browser history.

Bring back true end-user programming

Automator is cumbersome to use and not as useful as it seems it could be. For example, I tried something very simple with Automator: I wanted to pull all the pictures of people I have in my Address Book and print out a grid of pictures. In a more advanced version, I’d add their names and contact info. Can’t do it! There’s no way to reference the images in the Address Book, and no way I see to make a grid of pictures.

So Automator needs a lot of work. It will be limited regardless if you can’t do much in the way of conditional statements and loops. I’d love it if it added some ways to create basic layouts, graphs, and reports, which could be provided with a nice new iApp for drawing and charting.

Remember HyperCard? It let you create an incredible diversity of applications with simple drawing tools and some buttons and text fields. People wrote millions (seriously!) of applications in HyperCard. It was so cool that it dramatically influenced every application environment that came after it, including Visual Basic, Flash, and Interface Builder. Today, Apple offers Interface Builder and AppleScript Studio, but they really aren’t end-user environments. While it would be handy if Apple brought back HyperCard (so we could use our old programs and access the old data), I can see why they wouldn’t — resurrecting all the old HyperCard stacks would just make the Mac platform look retro.

Apple should bring a new end-user programming environment to us, with all the simplicity and the power of HyperCard. It should be part of the OS and integrated with iLife. It should be fast and clean. Automator may be part of the solution but certainly isn’t the whole answer.

Integrated backup

Apple has an app called Backup that you get with a .Mac subscription. It’s not fancy but it does the trick. As I argued in a previous post, backup capabilities should be built right into the OS and made as brain dead simple as possible. The .Mac sync utility, which is a great way to both do backups and sync machines, should be expanded to sync even more kinds of data.

Voice interaction

Voice technology is a great opportunity for Apple with their strength in the audio market. Apple already has text-to-speech technology, and smarter pronunciation combined with more pleasant and realistic voices would be a nice improvement. Mostly there needs to be a way to convert text to audio for iPods. Then I could listen to my emails on the way to work or listen to my favorite blogs.

Voice doesn’t work in every environment. People don’t want to hear me talking to my computer in the library and presumably not the coffee shop either, and noisy conditions can make voice recognition unworkable.

Some speaker identification could help: I once had the problem that the voice from my TV started triggering my computer to do things, and that wouldn’t happen if the computer knew to only respond to my voice.

I’d love to at least have the ability for voice input to trigger menu items and tool palette selections. Then I don’t have to go digging to figure out where Adobe has hidden the Paint Bucket within all the submenus in the tool palette. When something you say is recognized, a little transparent window can come up and fade out showing what command is being recognized. Anything triggered by voice should not modify anything (like bringing up the Dashboard) or be easily undo-able (with multiple levels of undo) so that misinterpretations aren’t fatal.

My favorite rumor: image recognition

The Mac OS Rumors site suggested that Apple could include image recognition tools taking advantage of the built-in iSight cameras. With this you could presumably wave your hands in specific gestures to activate Exposé or start up an application. Maybe stick out your tongue to let Mail know that a message is spam.

Expanding on this, face recognition could be used for low-security user identification, or as a way to get a report at the end of the day of who has used your computer -- even a snapshot of each user in a grid could help with security. Maybe face recognition wouldn’t allow secure access but could at least activate a set of user preferences.

Combining image recognition with bump recognition and voice recognition could provide some interesting user experiences. Point with your finger and say “Copy that file”.

Safari

I’d like to see a number of enhancements to Safari. As mentioned above, bookmarks should be able to have ratings, tags, and colorings, and page thumbnails should be saved. Thumbnails would show up optionally in search results, in a quick History window that let you jump to items based on their visual appearance, and in a thumbnail view option for bookmarks. These thumbnails might also appear as “album art” when listening to the reading of a web page on an iPod. Groups of bookmarks ought to be shareable via Bonjour so that, for example, one person in a workgroup can be made responsible for keeping track of some web pages, and everyone else in the workgroup immediately benefits.

Address Book

Like Safari, similar enhancements should be made to Address Book: ratings, tags, coloring, sharing via Bonjour. As with other apps, there should be a choice of list view versus thumbnail view for those people who have their Address Books populated with photos. The photos should be available in Automator. More complete metadata should be available for cards, including Last-Viewed-Date and View-Count, so that recently or frequently-accessed items can easily be defined as a group.

iCal

iCal needs an overhaul for all sorts of reasons. Improve compatibility with Microsoft Outlook — too often I get an event invite from a PC user that doesn’t show up properly on my calendar or that I can’t confirm, or an event change changes the wrong data. Ugh! It just makes the boss ask why I don’t have a PC, and that’s a problem.

I especially dream of an improved To-Do list capability. Automated to-do lists don’t work well for me because they quickly become too cluttered with everything I dream of doing that I can’t possibly finish. Whoever can come up with a clever to-do list will be my friend forever.

iText

Somehow or another it needs to be easy to collect scraps of text. I use Stickies a lot, but they are hard to manage as you make too many notes, and it is tedious to save notes before closing them. Pages could be generalized for text collections, though it’s not currently designed around simple text fragments.

Text handling is needed for convenient syncing of text to the iPod. Furthermore, PDAs like Palm have text, and that’s the only significant piece of data that I still require the Palm Desktop software to manage rather than built-in tools. Outlook has something for text notes, like Palm Desktop, that might be used as a basic model for this, though something much better is achievable, especially if merged with Stickies.

Mail

Mail messages should have ratings and tags. Tags could even be set by the sender.

Here’s a very cool idea. While you currently file items into a mail folder by dragging them over to the folder, Mail ought to make a guess as to which folder you want something in and show the guess at the top of the message (perhaps as a drop-down menu of suggestions with the best guess as default). Then a person just has to click a button next to it or use a keyboard command to quickly sort items into their folders:

File into: “Friends” <File>

The technology to guess which folder something goes in is a simple generalization of the junk mail filter. Mail would learn what keywords and phrases in a message are most often (and least often) associated with each mail folder.

iChat

iChat does great audio and video. Now it needs to get back to building better text support! The big bubbles that surround text mean that you can’t see much of what you’ve been discussing without scrolling, and frequent users certainly understand that the poor use of screen real estate is a pain.

Support multi-party text chats, and allow opening up a permanent “chat room” that can be linked-to from a web page and joined by any iChat user. Enable easier chatting with multiple people in separate chat sessions. A tabbed chat window is one possibility, but a better answer is to conveniently tile multiple chats so it’s easy to follow multiple threads simultaneously. The Tab key should move between chat panes.

Compatibility with Yahoo and MSN should be a high priority.

Support for internet phone calls would be great, but not essential. For now, what I really want is a wireless iPod with audio/video iChat able to call other iPods or Macs over the internet. Skip the phone companies entirely!

Dictionary

Add Wikipedia/Wiktionary to the Dictionary, including an edit mode. Make it so easy that Mac users become the major contributors to Wikipedia. Add other online reference works, as makes sense, such as language translations. I’d like a rhyme finder. Provide an easy pane that programmers can drop into their own applications to see words looked up based on the context of what the user is doing in the application. I’d be interested in a word processor that would show me, in a pane on the side, synonyms and rhymes of what I’m typing or what I click on.

Let people bookmark words. Let people rate, tag, color, and annotate entries (in this case, maybe they need two kinds of ratings: how much I like the word, and how challenging the word is). Then let people define word groups, based on dynamic rules. This would let me save vocabulary items to study, lists of my favorite funny words, lists of words I like to use in writing, and Wikipedia entries I find useful. Then sync these words to the iPod for a study list. The iPod could even have a Flash card mode for rehearsing words.

Font Book and the font palette

Make Font Book behave more like all the other iApps. Let me rate and tag fonts and create dynamic font groups. Fonts should come with metadata on various font characteristics, such as serif/sans-serif/semi-serif/block-serif (and degree of serif), thick-thin ration, x-height. Make fonts searchable by this metadata. Let me explore by browsing through “similar fonts”.

Improve the font palette. Let me choose bold and italic! Most important: convince 3rd party software developers to actually use the font palette and take advantage of Font Book. It doesn’t help to organize my favorite fonts if Microsoft Word and Photoshop won’t give me shortcuts to my favorites. Talk to the software developers and find out what needs to be done to make it compelling for them to use these tools. Make the defaults more effective and simple (such as shadow) so that I get back simplicity from all of the overwhelming power.

Fix the Font menus too. I miss the simplicity of the old days of a Font, Style, and Size menu. We don’t have to do exactly that, but font controls are too buried these days.

Miscellaneous ideas

•I’d like a nice "summary" widget in the dashboard with dense data (time, date, stock, weather) on one line each to reduce clutter for the most common information needs.
•Bring back translations of old file formats. We desperately need ways to easily recover archival files, especially in obvious formats like MacWrite and MacPaint that Apple defined and standardized. iPhoto should be able to at least translate every image format into a common format that it uses, and when another application wants an image from iPhoto, it should be able to translate the image into one of a few formats that every other app can understand.
•Keep adding more device compatibility, such as making more cellphones compatible with sync.
•At least one Unicode font should have ALL the characters in every script defined by Unicode. While it’s understandably a bigger problem to solve to create custom input techniques and keyboards for every language (especially if Apple has a small market with the corresponding group), it should at least be possible to enter and display all the characters for browsing the web, and for language freaks.
•The Airport Express lets you send audio wirelessly to a speaker using AirTunes. Why not to multiple speakers? Why not different audio output to each speaker? Build this feature into the OS: a program can specify where in space an audio signal ought to come from, and based on your speaker types and locations, the system works out which speakers the audio out to come from. I can imagine games using this for an ultra-realistic sense of your audio environment.

Some other Leopard wish lists and rumors:

‣Read my follow-up after the Leopard preview at WWDC

Mac OS X 10.5: How I’d like my Leopard

Wednesday, July 26, 2006