Wishlist: Leopard and beyond

By Jay Savage

The results have been tallied from last week's discussion of features we'd like to see in future OS releases.  As several commenters pointed out, the numbering of OS X releases has become a little complex–much of what was originally intended for 10.5 was merged into Tiger and Leopard may not have a number attached when it's released, at least not one that's mentioned much–and Leopard takes us to the end of the roadmap for the scheduled "X" OS line. This is a very good point.  So good, in fact, that I've decided to drop any mention of "10.6" from this post (other than this sentence).  I'm not going to speculate, either, on whether we're moving to "XI," "11," "!!," "eleven," or something completely different.  Instead, I'm just going to keep calling our hypothetical OS "Ocelot and Margay." Everybody seemed to like that. So without further ado:

Your Ocelot and Margay wishlist:

Most requested features:

  • OpenBSD-style pf to replace ipfw
  • Better UI standardization
  • Better memory management/garbage collection
  • More/better keyboard shortcuts
  • More efficient threading

 Very close seconds:

  • Portable metadata
  • Finder ftp uploads
  • Wine-like Win32 binary execution/built-in VPC
  • Mono/.Net support
  • Rosetta support for all current apps, including altivec emulation
  • Core Image for everything
  • Real-time in-Finder file and fs info updates
  • Easier boolean Spotlight searches (let me add regex in there, too, hopefully pcre)

Not exactly OS, but very popular:

  • Current Open Firmware functionality–target disk mode, one-click boot volume selection, etc.–for both PPC and Intel-based machines
  • Open source BIOS/AMT on Intel-based machines

This strikes me as a pretty decent list.  And a pretty reasonable one, too.  People made a lot of suggestions, but for the most part they build on what's already there in one way or another. Personally, I'd like to see POSIX ACLs, more efficient journaling, an OpenBSDish combination of secure levels and filesystem flags–at lease immutable and append-only–as well.

So what does this list tell us? Most people want speed, stability, security, and compatibility.  Not much surprise there. And Mac users–at least TUAW readers–are pretty happy with the design. Nobody asked for earth-shattering changes, just for more of what we already have.

Recommended