8 ms·

MacOS 10.14 Wishlist

51 points by mofle 8y ago

cjoy 8y ago
I’ll be happy if the only thing that ships with 10.14 is a bugfix for the Preview.app. It amazes me that they have not yet unfucked the PDF rendering with a minor release. It amazes me even more, that this issue is not present on the linked wishlist. Do people not view PDFs on their Macs?
- Exuma 8y ago
  I've never seen that
  - bshacklett 8y ago
    There are a lot of bugs that aren't reproducible with a short set of instructions. That doesn't mean that they should be ignored.
- vondur 8y ago
  What kind of issues do you have with Preview viewing PDF's? I'll admit I do need to use Acrobat to fill out most forms that Preview seems to choke on.
  - cjoy 8y ago
    At 100% zoom level, the type is not rendered with crisp edges. It looks as if someone had applied a mild gaussian blur. Only once you zoom in, the outlines are sharp as they should be. I have this issue on a 2012 and 2015 MBP as well as on a MP 5.1. With the built in screens, Eizos and a NEC SV. The only thing thats common across all builds is the OS. If you think you dont have this issue, compare the rendering of Preview.app at 100% with that of Acrobat.
    - glitch 8y ago
      Curious: (1) Do you have some screenshots demonstrating this issue and (2) perhaps an example PDF that others could download for the purpose of issue reproduction? (I have not seen this issue, nor am I able to reproduce this issue after repeatedly trying under Preview. I have compared it with on-screen rendering under Acrobat XI, as well.) // Preview 10.0 (944.5), macOS 10.13.4 (17E202), MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017)
      - citruspi 8y ago
        Not the original commenter, but I've experienced > At 100% zoom level, the type is not rendered with crisp edges. It looks as if someone had applied a mild gaussian blur. Only once you zoom in, the outlines are sharp as they should be. a number of times. Running on a 12" (Retina) Macbook w/ macOS 10.13.4 and Preview 10.0 (944.5). 1) Here's a screenshot (100% on left, zoomed in on the right) - https://s3.amazonaws.com/citruspi-tmp/Screen+Shot+2018-06-01+at+8.32.58+PM.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/citruspi-tmp/Screen+Shot+2018-06-01... 2) PDF being used - https://cdn.beastnet.works/bfc7d34daac8e7630541d49b591b1b62/4bd43ff50a8481c21836a1bdb9ff27705a7876f9/misc/resume.pdf https://cdn.beastnet.works/bfc7d34daac8e7630541d49b591b1b62/... It also happens within the PDF viewer in Safari - text and icons look a lot crisper when zoomed in.
        Tenobrus 8y ago
        Same setup, 10.13.3, preview 10.0 (944.4). Unless I'm blind, no issue. https://image.ibb.co/hXi53J/screenshot.png https://image.ibb.co/hXi53J/screenshot.png 15 inch MBP.
    - SiVal 8y ago
      I think I've seen what you're talking about, but only on rare occasions. I would open a PDF in Preview and it would be strangely blurry. I would be wondering about the document itself when, as I investigated, I would do something that caused a sudden snap to sharpness. Closing and reopening would not reproduce it, and it happened so rarely and hasn't happened for so long that I forgot about it. I can imagine, though, that if it somehow got stuck in that mode, it would be infuriating.
- dewey 8y ago
  I never had such a problem and I use a lot of PDFs so it seems the problem is not as widespread as you think.
- tom_ 8y ago
  The Preview PDF handling drives me mental too. Luckily it's not outright unusable for me, but it's still a pain. Buy Apple, they said... Apple always looks after the details :( Happens on both my Macbook Pros, too - a early 2015 13" (i7-5557U) with Sierra, and a mid 2014 15" (i7-4980HQ with discrete GPU) with High Sierra. The symptoms for me, with the proviso that I'm not in OS X right now to double check: 1. set Preview to open PDFs at 100% zoom, 1 page at a time. Open a PDF. Preview opens the window at the right size, then pops some scrollbars in. Now the client area is smaller, and that means the window is the wrong size! - which means the mouse wheel scrolls the view, rather than scrolling from page to page. Gets me every damn time. (This could be related, I imagine, to that setting that forces scrollbars always to be displayed. I suppose it's too much to expect Apple's QA to have a test matrix that encompasses this case) 2. scroll from page to page. Each new page appears blurry - or, if lucky, merely wonky - for a fraction of a second, then replaced with the clearer rendering one might expect. Actually quite distracting when scrolling page by page! - and when scrolling at keyboard repeat rate, the clearer version never has time to appear, making it impossible to scroll through a document visually at full speed 3. when resizing the Preview window, some sizes look mucky - looks like the sort of thing you get if you render to an offscreen buffer that's 1 or 2 pixel the wrong size, or add the 0.5 to only one edge of your quad, and so on. Really annoying
  - jonhendry18 8y ago
    "scroll from page to page. Each new page appears blurry - or, if lucky, merely wonky - for a fraction of a second, then replaced with the clearer rendering one might expect." THIS drives me nuts.
jsjohnst 8y ago
> True Color and hyperlink support in the Terminal app Why? Isn’t iTerm better in every imaginable way? > Markdown support in the Notes app. Including code blocks and syntax highlighting. 1) there’s plenty of good apps (better than Notes.app anyway) that support this already 2) I’d argue <1% of Mac owners know of Markdown, let alone use it. Sure, we both do, but I’d rather them focus on the important bits (stability/performance/etc) and leave the niche app features to the ecosystem.
- lewisinc 8y ago
  It is really good, but there should always be alternatives. Right now I use iTerm, but both Terminal.app and Alacritty are viable alternatives I want to see improve.
  - jsjohnst 8y ago
    My point wasn’t that they should not improve, but that Apple should have higher priorities right now. MacOS is declining badly due to obvious issues, I want them to fix those before nice to haves that already exist elsewhere.
- lashkari 8y ago
  I get your point, and somewhat agree, but I think it's important to remember that the two (feature updates to Terminal and Notes vs. stability/performance/etc.) aren't typically mutually exclusive; the developer that would implement Markdown support in Notes isn't likely the same developer that would be implementing performance/stability enhancements to the core of the OS.
  - jsjohnst 8y ago
    Each new “nice to have” feature requires QA testing time that steals away from potentially more important things. Nobody writes bug free code forever, so I’d rather they focus on the very important issues and make sure they are solid before adding nice to haves, especially ones easily solved by other existing apps.
archagon 8y ago
Still hoping for some kind of integration between iPad + Pencil and macOS. (I think it was vaguely rumored last year.) It would be so amazing for art. Not holding my breath, though.
mbell 8y ago
Realistically, all I want are performance and stability improvements. Unrealistically, there are number of relatively simple things Apple could do to improve the hackintosh experience.
fauigerzigerk 8y ago
I wish reminder alerts were triggered at the correct time or as soon as my Mac wakes from sleep, not hours later or even on the next day.
- erichurkman 8y ago
  Or reminders that reliably synced across Mac/phones. It works _most_ of the time, but there's at least 4 or 5 times a week I open one of my macs and it reminds me to call my mother even though that was checked off my list.. four days ago.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Maybe that’ll improve with Messages on iCloud finally being delivered?
kronie 8y ago
Can you just include a little checkbox in the mouse settings that lets me reverse mouse scroll independently from the touch pad's two-finger scroll without having to pay for an app? That'd be swell.
- glitch 8y ago
  (I have not tried either of these solutions, so I'm not sure if they actually work.) Although still separate applications, Karabiner and Scroll Reverser are both free. (I mention this since you stated having to "pay for an app".) (1) Karabiner: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ → Cf. Kellen Mace, "Separate Trackpad & Mouse Natural Scrolling in Mac OS X" (2014) https://kellenmace.com/automate-trackpad-mouse-natural-scrolling-in-mac-os-x/ https://kellenmace.com/automate-trackpad-mouse-natural-scrol... (2) Scroll Reverser: http://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/ http://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/
  - kronie 8y ago
    Wow, thank you for this. Scroll reverser did the job.
8bittaco 8y ago
The option to enable Windows-like click-through behaviour would be great.
- Kwpolska 8y ago
  I’d love an option to disable that in Windows.
jtbayly 8y ago
Lots of people still have macs that have DVD players. Why delete the DVD player app?
- rbanffy 8y ago
  Putting it on the App Store could be a good idea though.
maxxxxx 8y ago
They could fix the free disk space indicator. Mine goes up and down between 50GB and 200GB. I know this is because of local snapshots and supposedly it will clean up space as needed but I have no idea how much space is exactly available to me. Some versions ago the free space indicator was accurate. When you emptied the trash free space went up exactly by the amount of deleted files. Now it doesn't change at all.
derefr 8y ago
> No More iTunes! (Desktop) iTunes is the way it is in order to present a unified, familiar experience between the macOS and Windows iTunes desktop apps. In Windows, iTunes is essentially "just enough macOS to manage an iOS device"—with every disparate responsibility that management entails all smushed together. (It's been this way since it was iPods that were being managed.) And macOS iTunes is the same codebase(!) as Windows iTunes, so it's not like that codebase is somehow going to compile as eight apps with their own UIs on macOS, vs. one on Windows. It's going to look, and work, on macOS as it does on Windows.
kickingvegas 8y ago
My developer wish would be a redo of the Keychain Services API. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/keychain_services?language=objc https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/keychain_...
rbanffy 8y ago
My vote is for forcing Microsoft to respect Control-A for beginning of line and Control-E for end within all Office applications.
m-p-3 8y ago
If they could allow non-iCloud authenticated users to update and install free apps, that's be great.
Lramseyer 8y ago
How about the option to remove the dock entirely? Spotlight and Launchpad are preferable alternatives for opening apps, Mission Control works way better for switching between apps, and the list of running apps can be stuffed into the top menu with a pulldown list that can display diagnostic info and give a nice way to switch-to or force quit. I hide the dock and keep it off to the side, as I find it more annoying than useful.
- polezero 8y ago
  Do most people actually use Launchpad? Your comment is the first time I’ve encountered anyone who uses it.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  Whereas I cannot stand Spotlight, Launchpad, or Mission Control. Any time I use a different machine, those are the first things that I completely and totally disable. For me, the dock and the menu bar are much better solutions than any of the above, and they are in the category of "if it ain't broke, don't bloody flippin' fix it!!!"
  - natecavanaugh 8y ago
    I have to agree with you, with the exception of Spotlight. Spotlight for me is just simpler of an app launcher for my rarely used apps than Alfred (though I use Alfred for other features), though I do miss Quicksilver. But Launchpad is worthless for me, and I've never had a time when Mission Control hasn't just choked for a noticeable amount of time (I've even had 4 seconds of UI lockup just waiting for it to show up). Granted, I tend to keep a lot of apps open, but still, it's irritating whenever I accidentally trigger it or accidentally move a window to a different Space (this is on a still very capable mid-2014 Retina MBP with the highest specs available), and I much prefer using Keyboard Maestro to open/focus my most used apps (if the app is open, focus the foremost window, hit the combination again to bring all app windows forward; if it's closed, open it), and for window switching, Witch does the job faster and more logically than Mission Control. And I agree about the Dock and menu bar. Sadly the Dock is easy to hide for those who don't want it visible, but Mission Control and Spaces can't be disabled (AFIK, I'd love to be wrong).
gnachman 8y ago
Please fix the dumpster fire that is AppKit! Doing a grep for angry words in my source code and commits reminded me of some traumas over the years… * Core Data's generated classes are broken for one-to-many relationships * NSTableView is a total mess. Lots of things don't work quite right. For example, calculating the correct height for a row of wrapped text is nearly impossible without hackily adding a few points here and there. * In Metal, constant buffers over 64k get silently truncated on some GPUs. * MTKView is half-baked. Resizing it stretches the window's contents, for example. If you don't use layers it overlaps the window's rounded corners. If you do enable layers, the framerate drops by half. * The one field editor per window hack breaks expectations every time I use it. It should be done away with. * NSTitlebarAccessoryViewController is officially supported but was never documented and forces the entire window to use auto layout Please don't add any features. Just fix the garbage fire you already have rather than throwing more garbage on it.
- himom 8y ago
  Yup. Feature freeze / bug hunt challenge with some morale incentive honorariums. The only features that vital necessities. * Peripheral Shield - “firewall” I/O security and disablement on 2008+ machines. Many a disk cloner and malware loaders use USB, Thunderbolt or FireWire to install their stack. * Deep Sleep that works. /var/vm/sleepimage is 1 GiB but it has 16 of RAM. * Official internal OS tweak platform that’s sandboxed. * Open source much more of macOS and iOS.
crsv 8y ago
How about an iTunes experience that doesn't make me want to jump off a bridge. I can't name a single more consistently infuriating piece of software to interact with. It's been horrible as long as it has existed, without fail. On second thought, perhaps its stalwart consistency as one of the most unusable applications in the history of consumer software is one of the few constants in this fast changing world. Perhaps its flawed nature is meant to remind us all of our own deep imperfections. God I hate iTunes.
- justinator 8y ago
  Version 1 was really good. That's where my frustration over the app comes from. It used to be pretty much perfect.
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    It's an app to play music. How bad can it be?
    - justinator 8y ago
      It was an app to play music. I fear that is has been transformed into some amalgamation of an app/media store, a mobile device wrangler, one interface to your Apple ID account - and a lot of good features that now kinda are half broken. Lots of stillborn features too - wasn't there a music social media integration that went nowhere? It's not very light on memory usage, either. It was so nice to rip a CD, have it part of your library, and well that's it. Search worked great, everything just worked. The UX is just so bad now, I don't even want to listen to the music I have saved. It's literally changed my music listening behavior.
      - rbanffy 8y ago
        I get it became a way to sync all your mobile devices with a music and apps library, along a music player and music/mobile app store (which, I agree, should all be moved to the App Store and become a "Store"), but that's the extent of my usage of it and it's mostly fine (apart from the fact it's becoming harder to manage my music library - I ripped all my CDs back when my Mac had a DVD drive). So far, the stillborn features don't bother me that much. It's heavy and should be lighter, with the features not being used quietly swapped out and remaining there - it seems like it's trying to reanimate the parts that are not in use all the time and that may be the root cause of the humongous memory footprint. Moving the store and sync out would somewhat make things better, but Windows users would need to run 3 apps instead of one.
dawnerd 8y ago
> Remove old junk like the Dashboard and DVD Player apps. Should just include those the app store as well. Not mentioned are the many years old bugs with multi displays and networking. I just want Apple to take a year and really fix all the core problems they've introduced. No more new features until the existing stuff works!
- rbanffy 8y ago
  The App Store is Apple's package manager. It's not going anywhere.
  - dewey 8y ago
    They are not saying that the app store should go away, they are saying that the apps should be added to the app store like the other utilities that the blog post mentions.
  - dawnerd 8y ago
    Updated to make it a bit more clear - bad choice of word there.
- nomel 8y ago
  We're getting exactly this for iOS [1]. Hopefully that includes MacOS, as well. [1] https://www.axios.com/scoop-apple-delays-ios-features-to-focus-on-reliability-performance-1517278421-d7722a3b-402e-4804-8f24-719154bf2a8e.html https://www.axios.com/scoop-apple-delays-ios-features-to-foc...
- Kwpolska 8y ago
  The DVD Player app takes up only 24 MB. Not updated since 2014. Some people still need it, and you can delete it if you don’t care. Dashboard also has some users, and it’s deeply integrated into the Dock.
SippinLean 8y ago
>Better Window Management YES! Please add native Snap in MacOS (and native Exposé in Windows).
- Karliss 8y ago
  Isn't the second one already available in windows 10?
SiVal 8y ago
Topping my wishlist would be for Apple to not have to put every product in the same "fashion bauble" category and consider pro, workhorse computers to be a different type of thing with different criteria. Both the Mac Pro and the MacBOOK Pro should be treated as workhorses, not show horses, and optimized for practical usefulness. Less emphasis on looking thinner and more fashionable and more on keyboards that feel great and go on working just fine when splashed with bacon & eggs, thrown in a backpack, dragged around on a desert adventure, lots of convenient connectors, maxed out on battery power, useful buttons instead of gimmicky touchbar, and so on. My wish would be that actual computer users could look forward with excitement, the way we used to, at what new improvements were about to become available rather than dreading what they'll "courageously" take away next.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  The Touch Bar actually gets somewhat useful if you install BetterTouchTool, at which point you can override it with custom everything (including scripted buttons, changing contents of things with Applescript, etc). The sad part is that there's still no good way to use it as a Dock replacement, which seems to me like the really obvious thing that would actually make it a productivity boost rather than merely "nifty".
- derefr 8y ago
  • Thinner means lighter—i.e. more luggable, which you'd think would be an important consideration for a workhorse. • Apple's ecosystem (at least for business leasing) is sort of like the luxury car ecosystem: there are rather few models, and they're not very customized, but there's a dealership close enough to you that if there's any problem—any problem at all—with your [under-warranty] device, the idiomatic "solution" is to give you a loaner (the exact same model, with your data copied over) while they attempt to repair yours; and then either you get it back fixed, or you keep the loaner. Like luxury cars, this enables them to use nice-but-brittle components, under the expectation that nobody will actually have to put up with the component being broken, instead just being fed a steady supply of working devices. (Anecdata: my MacBook's keyboard has failed five times. Do you know what that means? It means that I've received a same-day replacement MacBook five times!) • I think you're confusing "professional" with "ruggedized." Apple has never made, or claimed to make, ruggedized hardware. (The iPhone is waterproof, I guess?) Apple has no product category aimed at e.g. the ThinkPad's "techs performing maintenance on cell towers in deserts/jungles/swamps" use-case. Apple makes its desktop products like most companies make servers, or scientific equipment: intended for climate-controlled, central-air-purified conditions, to be operated by techno-priests who take the proper ritual-purity precautions before touching them. The Macs really are workstations, in the sense that they are intended to do their work from a designated station. ;)
EdwardCoffin 8y ago
How about APFS on Fusion drives?
- glhaynes 8y ago
  Sounds like it's coming soon (or being cancelled soon, of course): https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/22/craig-federighi-apfs-support-fusion-drives/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/22/craig-federighi-apfs-su...
- rbanffy 8y ago
  How about block checksums on APFS? Block deduplication, even if offline, wouldn't hurt either.
djcollier 8y ago
It's abundantly clear to me that Apple is not interested in improving the desktop experience. They simply want to show some shiny new features, and to continue to reduce the dimensions and weight of their laptops (even at the cost of usability). At this point I am hoping for a new unix-based alternative to windows with the same level of stability and usability as macOS. Long gone are the days where I would expect Apple to do what so many of us want with the operating system.
carloscheddar 8y ago
I would love the ability to customize the location of notifications so that I can set them on the bottom right corner instead of having them fixed to the upper right. Really hate how calendar notifications can hide my chrome extensions and many other things.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  Funny. I just heard exactly the same comment from a co-worker yesterday. You two are the first people I've ever heard of complain about this issue.
erichurkman 8y ago
I want customizable "later/snooze" options for reminders/calendar notifications. Specifically, I want a "Snooze until tonight" or "Snooze until I get home". … Mostly when I tell Siri to remind me to do something and she records the wrong time and the reminder comes up at 2pm at work instead of 8pm like I tried to record it.
FraKtus 8y ago
Give a little love to OpenGL. Sure Metal is great... but...

51 points by mofle 8y ago

cjoy 8y ago

I’ll be happy if the only thing that ships with 10.14 is a bugfix for the Preview.app. It amazes me that they have not yet unfucked the PDF rendering with a minor release. It amazes me even more, that this issue is not present on the linked wishlist. Do people not view PDFs on their Macs?

Exuma 8y ago
I've never seen that
- bshacklett 8y ago
  There are a lot of bugs that aren't reproducible with a short set of instructions. That doesn't mean that they should be ignored.
vondur 8y ago
What kind of issues do you have with Preview viewing PDF's? I'll admit I do need to use Acrobat to fill out most forms that Preview seems to choke on.
- cjoy 8y ago
  At 100% zoom level, the type is not rendered with crisp edges. It looks as if someone had applied a mild gaussian blur. Only once you zoom in, the outlines are sharp as they should be. I have this issue on a 2012 and 2015 MBP as well as on a MP 5.1. With the built in screens, Eizos and a NEC SV. The only thing thats common across all builds is the OS. If you think you dont have this issue, compare the rendering of Preview.app at 100% with that of Acrobat.
  - glitch 8y ago
    Curious: (1) Do you have some screenshots demonstrating this issue and (2) perhaps an example PDF that others could download for the purpose of issue reproduction? (I have not seen this issue, nor am I able to reproduce this issue after repeatedly trying under Preview. I have compared it with on-screen rendering under Acrobat XI, as well.) // Preview 10.0 (944.5), macOS 10.13.4 (17E202), MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017)
    - citruspi 8y ago
      Not the original commenter, but I've experienced > At 100% zoom level, the type is not rendered with crisp edges. It looks as if someone had applied a mild gaussian blur. Only once you zoom in, the outlines are sharp as they should be. a number of times. Running on a 12" (Retina) Macbook w/ macOS 10.13.4 and Preview 10.0 (944.5). 1) Here's a screenshot (100% on left, zoomed in on the right) - https://s3.amazonaws.com/citruspi-tmp/Screen+Shot+2018-06-01+at+8.32.58+PM.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/citruspi-tmp/Screen+Shot+2018-06-01... 2) PDF being used - https://cdn.beastnet.works/bfc7d34daac8e7630541d49b591b1b62/4bd43ff50a8481c21836a1bdb9ff27705a7876f9/misc/resume.pdf https://cdn.beastnet.works/bfc7d34daac8e7630541d49b591b1b62/... It also happens within the PDF viewer in Safari - text and icons look a lot crisper when zoomed in.
      - Tenobrus 8y ago
        Same setup, 10.13.3, preview 10.0 (944.4). Unless I'm blind, no issue. https://image.ibb.co/hXi53J/screenshot.png https://image.ibb.co/hXi53J/screenshot.png 15 inch MBP.
  - SiVal 8y ago
    I think I've seen what you're talking about, but only on rare occasions. I would open a PDF in Preview and it would be strangely blurry. I would be wondering about the document itself when, as I investigated, I would do something that caused a sudden snap to sharpness. Closing and reopening would not reproduce it, and it happened so rarely and hasn't happened for so long that I forgot about it. I can imagine, though, that if it somehow got stuck in that mode, it would be infuriating.
dewey 8y ago
I never had such a problem and I use a lot of PDFs so it seems the problem is not as widespread as you think.
tom_ 8y ago
The Preview PDF handling drives me mental too. Luckily it's not outright unusable for me, but it's still a pain. Buy Apple, they said... Apple always looks after the details :( Happens on both my Macbook Pros, too - a early 2015 13" (i7-5557U) with Sierra, and a mid 2014 15" (i7-4980HQ with discrete GPU) with High Sierra. The symptoms for me, with the proviso that I'm not in OS X right now to double check: 1. set Preview to open PDFs at 100% zoom, 1 page at a time. Open a PDF. Preview opens the window at the right size, then pops some scrollbars in. Now the client area is smaller, and that means the window is the wrong size! - which means the mouse wheel scrolls the view, rather than scrolling from page to page. Gets me every damn time. (This could be related, I imagine, to that setting that forces scrollbars always to be displayed. I suppose it's too much to expect Apple's QA to have a test matrix that encompasses this case) 2. scroll from page to page. Each new page appears blurry - or, if lucky, merely wonky - for a fraction of a second, then replaced with the clearer rendering one might expect. Actually quite distracting when scrolling page by page! - and when scrolling at keyboard repeat rate, the clearer version never has time to appear, making it impossible to scroll through a document visually at full speed 3. when resizing the Preview window, some sizes look mucky - looks like the sort of thing you get if you render to an offscreen buffer that's 1 or 2 pixel the wrong size, or add the 0.5 to only one edge of your quad, and so on. Really annoying
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  "scroll from page to page. Each new page appears blurry - or, if lucky, merely wonky - for a fraction of a second, then replaced with the clearer rendering one might expect." THIS drives me nuts.

jsjohnst 8y ago

> True Color and hyperlink support in the Terminal app Why? Isn’t iTerm better in every imaginable way? > Markdown support in the Notes app. Including code blocks and syntax highlighting. 1) there’s plenty of good apps (better than Notes.app anyway) that support this already 2) I’d argue <1% of Mac owners know of Markdown, let alone use it. Sure, we both do, but I’d rather them focus on the important bits (stability/performance/etc) and leave the niche app features to the ecosystem.

lewisinc 8y ago
It is really good, but there should always be alternatives. Right now I use iTerm, but both Terminal.app and Alacritty are viable alternatives I want to see improve.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  My point wasn’t that they should not improve, but that Apple should have higher priorities right now. MacOS is declining badly due to obvious issues, I want them to fix those before nice to haves that already exist elsewhere.
lashkari 8y ago
I get your point, and somewhat agree, but I think it's important to remember that the two (feature updates to Terminal and Notes vs. stability/performance/etc.) aren't typically mutually exclusive; the developer that would implement Markdown support in Notes isn't likely the same developer that would be implementing performance/stability enhancements to the core of the OS.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  Each new “nice to have” feature requires QA testing time that steals away from potentially more important things. Nobody writes bug free code forever, so I’d rather they focus on the very important issues and make sure they are solid before adding nice to haves, especially ones easily solved by other existing apps.

archagon 8y ago

Still hoping for some kind of integration between iPad + Pencil and macOS. (I think it was vaguely rumored last year.) It would be so amazing for art. Not holding my breath, though.

mbell 8y ago

Realistically, all I want are performance and stability improvements. Unrealistically, there are number of relatively simple things Apple could do to improve the hackintosh experience.

fauigerzigerk 8y ago

I wish reminder alerts were triggered at the correct time or as soon as my Mac wakes from sleep, not hours later or even on the next day.

erichurkman 8y ago
Or reminders that reliably synced across Mac/phones. It works _most_ of the time, but there's at least 4 or 5 times a week I open one of my macs and it reminds me to call my mother even though that was checked off my list.. four days ago.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Maybe that’ll improve with Messages on iCloud finally being delivered?

kronie 8y ago

Can you just include a little checkbox in the mouse settings that lets me reverse mouse scroll independently from the touch pad's two-finger scroll without having to pay for an app? That'd be swell.

glitch 8y ago
(I have not tried either of these solutions, so I'm not sure if they actually work.) Although still separate applications, Karabiner and Scroll Reverser are both free. (I mention this since you stated having to "pay for an app".) (1) Karabiner: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ → Cf. Kellen Mace, "Separate Trackpad & Mouse Natural Scrolling in Mac OS X" (2014) https://kellenmace.com/automate-trackpad-mouse-natural-scrolling-in-mac-os-x/ https://kellenmace.com/automate-trackpad-mouse-natural-scrol... (2) Scroll Reverser: http://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/ http://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/
- kronie 8y ago
  Wow, thank you for this. Scroll reverser did the job.

8bittaco 8y ago

The option to enable Windows-like click-through behaviour would be great.

Kwpolska 8y ago
I’d love an option to disable that in Windows.

jtbayly 8y ago

Lots of people still have macs that have DVD players. Why delete the DVD player app?

rbanffy 8y ago
Putting it on the App Store could be a good idea though.

maxxxxx 8y ago

They could fix the free disk space indicator. Mine goes up and down between 50GB and 200GB. I know this is because of local snapshots and supposedly it will clean up space as needed but I have no idea how much space is exactly available to me. Some versions ago the free space indicator was accurate. When you emptied the trash free space went up exactly by the amount of deleted files. Now it doesn't change at all.

derefr 8y ago

> No More iTunes! (Desktop) iTunes is the way it is in order to present a unified, familiar experience between the macOS and Windows iTunes desktop apps. In Windows, iTunes is essentially "just enough macOS to manage an iOS device"—with every disparate responsibility that management entails all smushed together. (It's been this way since it was iPods that were being managed.) And macOS iTunes is the same codebase(!) as Windows iTunes, so it's not like that codebase is somehow going to compile as eight apps with their own UIs on macOS, vs. one on Windows. It's going to look, and work, on macOS as it does on Windows.

kickingvegas 8y ago

My developer wish would be a redo of the Keychain Services API. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/keychain_services?language=objc https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/keychain_...

rbanffy 8y ago

My vote is for forcing Microsoft to respect Control-A for beginning of line and Control-E for end within all Office applications.

m-p-3 8y ago

If they could allow non-iCloud authenticated users to update and install free apps, that's be great.

Lramseyer 8y ago

How about the option to remove the dock entirely? Spotlight and Launchpad are preferable alternatives for opening apps, Mission Control works way better for switching between apps, and the list of running apps can be stuffed into the top menu with a pulldown list that can display diagnostic info and give a nice way to switch-to or force quit. I hide the dock and keep it off to the side, as I find it more annoying than useful.

polezero 8y ago
Do most people actually use Launchpad? Your comment is the first time I’ve encountered anyone who uses it.
bradknowles 8y ago
Whereas I cannot stand Spotlight, Launchpad, or Mission Control. Any time I use a different machine, those are the first things that I completely and totally disable. For me, the dock and the menu bar are much better solutions than any of the above, and they are in the category of "if it ain't broke, don't bloody flippin' fix it!!!"
- natecavanaugh 8y ago
  I have to agree with you, with the exception of Spotlight. Spotlight for me is just simpler of an app launcher for my rarely used apps than Alfred (though I use Alfred for other features), though I do miss Quicksilver. But Launchpad is worthless for me, and I've never had a time when Mission Control hasn't just choked for a noticeable amount of time (I've even had 4 seconds of UI lockup just waiting for it to show up). Granted, I tend to keep a lot of apps open, but still, it's irritating whenever I accidentally trigger it or accidentally move a window to a different Space (this is on a still very capable mid-2014 Retina MBP with the highest specs available), and I much prefer using Keyboard Maestro to open/focus my most used apps (if the app is open, focus the foremost window, hit the combination again to bring all app windows forward; if it's closed, open it), and for window switching, Witch does the job faster and more logically than Mission Control. And I agree about the Dock and menu bar. Sadly the Dock is easy to hide for those who don't want it visible, but Mission Control and Spaces can't be disabled (AFIK, I'd love to be wrong).

gnachman 8y ago

Please fix the dumpster fire that is AppKit! Doing a grep for angry words in my source code and commits reminded me of some traumas over the years… * Core Data's generated classes are broken for one-to-many relationships * NSTableView is a total mess. Lots of things don't work quite right. For example, calculating the correct height for a row of wrapped text is nearly impossible without hackily adding a few points here and there. * In Metal, constant buffers over 64k get silently truncated on some GPUs. * MTKView is half-baked. Resizing it stretches the window's contents, for example. If you don't use layers it overlaps the window's rounded corners. If you do enable layers, the framerate drops by half. * The one field editor per window hack breaks expectations every time I use it. It should be done away with. * NSTitlebarAccessoryViewController is officially supported but was never documented and forces the entire window to use auto layout Please don't add any features. Just fix the garbage fire you already have rather than throwing more garbage on it.

himom 8y ago
Yup. Feature freeze / bug hunt challenge with some morale incentive honorariums. The only features that vital necessities. * Peripheral Shield - “firewall” I/O security and disablement on 2008+ machines. Many a disk cloner and malware loaders use USB, Thunderbolt or FireWire to install their stack. * Deep Sleep that works. /var/vm/sleepimage is 1 GiB but it has 16 of RAM. * Official internal OS tweak platform that’s sandboxed. * Open source much more of macOS and iOS.

crsv 8y ago

How about an iTunes experience that doesn't make me want to jump off a bridge. I can't name a single more consistently infuriating piece of software to interact with. It's been horrible as long as it has existed, without fail. On second thought, perhaps its stalwart consistency as one of the most unusable applications in the history of consumer software is one of the few constants in this fast changing world. Perhaps its flawed nature is meant to remind us all of our own deep imperfections. God I hate iTunes.

justinator 8y ago
Version 1 was really good. That's where my frustration over the app comes from. It used to be pretty much perfect.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  It's an app to play music. How bad can it be?
  - justinator 8y ago
    It was an app to play music. I fear that is has been transformed into some amalgamation of an app/media store, a mobile device wrangler, one interface to your Apple ID account - and a lot of good features that now kinda are half broken. Lots of stillborn features too - wasn't there a music social media integration that went nowhere? It's not very light on memory usage, either. It was so nice to rip a CD, have it part of your library, and well that's it. Search worked great, everything just worked. The UX is just so bad now, I don't even want to listen to the music I have saved. It's literally changed my music listening behavior.
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      I get it became a way to sync all your mobile devices with a music and apps library, along a music player and music/mobile app store (which, I agree, should all be moved to the App Store and become a "Store"), but that's the extent of my usage of it and it's mostly fine (apart from the fact it's becoming harder to manage my music library - I ripped all my CDs back when my Mac had a DVD drive). So far, the stillborn features don't bother me that much. It's heavy and should be lighter, with the features not being used quietly swapped out and remaining there - it seems like it's trying to reanimate the parts that are not in use all the time and that may be the root cause of the humongous memory footprint. Moving the store and sync out would somewhat make things better, but Windows users would need to run 3 apps instead of one.

dawnerd 8y ago

> Remove old junk like the Dashboard and DVD Player apps. Should just include those the app store as well. Not mentioned are the many years old bugs with multi displays and networking. I just want Apple to take a year and really fix all the core problems they've introduced. No more new features until the existing stuff works!

rbanffy 8y ago
The App Store is Apple's package manager. It's not going anywhere.
- dewey 8y ago
  They are not saying that the app store should go away, they are saying that the apps should be added to the app store like the other utilities that the blog post mentions.
- dawnerd 8y ago
  Updated to make it a bit more clear - bad choice of word there.
nomel 8y ago
We're getting exactly this for iOS [1]. Hopefully that includes MacOS, as well. [1] https://www.axios.com/scoop-apple-delays-ios-features-to-focus-on-reliability-performance-1517278421-d7722a3b-402e-4804-8f24-719154bf2a8e.html https://www.axios.com/scoop-apple-delays-ios-features-to-foc...
Kwpolska 8y ago
The DVD Player app takes up only 24 MB. Not updated since 2014. Some people still need it, and you can delete it if you don’t care. Dashboard also has some users, and it’s deeply integrated into the Dock.

SippinLean 8y ago

>Better Window Management YES! Please add native Snap in MacOS (and native Exposé in Windows).

Karliss 8y ago
Isn't the second one already available in windows 10?

SiVal 8y ago

Topping my wishlist would be for Apple to not have to put every product in the same "fashion bauble" category and consider pro, workhorse computers to be a different type of thing with different criteria. Both the Mac Pro and the MacBOOK Pro should be treated as workhorses, not show horses, and optimized for practical usefulness. Less emphasis on looking thinner and more fashionable and more on keyboards that feel great and go on working just fine when splashed with bacon & eggs, thrown in a backpack, dragged around on a desert adventure, lots of convenient connectors, maxed out on battery power, useful buttons instead of gimmicky touchbar, and so on. My wish would be that actual computer users could look forward with excitement, the way we used to, at what new improvements were about to become available rather than dreading what they'll "courageously" take away next.

crooked-v 8y ago
The Touch Bar actually gets somewhat useful if you install BetterTouchTool, at which point you can override it with custom everything (including scripted buttons, changing contents of things with Applescript, etc). The sad part is that there's still no good way to use it as a Dock replacement, which seems to me like the really obvious thing that would actually make it a productivity boost rather than merely "nifty".
derefr 8y ago
• Thinner means lighter—i.e. more luggable, which you'd think would be an important consideration for a workhorse. • Apple's ecosystem (at least for business leasing) is sort of like the luxury car ecosystem: there are rather few models, and they're not very customized, but there's a dealership close enough to you that if there's any problem—any problem at all—with your [under-warranty] device, the idiomatic "solution" is to give you a loaner (the exact same model, with your data copied over) while they attempt to repair yours; and then either you get it back fixed, or you keep the loaner. Like luxury cars, this enables them to use nice-but-brittle components, under the expectation that nobody will actually have to put up with the component being broken, instead just being fed a steady supply of working devices. (Anecdata: my MacBook's keyboard has failed five times. Do you know what that means? It means that I've received a same-day replacement MacBook five times!) • I think you're confusing "professional" with "ruggedized." Apple has never made, or claimed to make, ruggedized hardware. (The iPhone is waterproof, I guess?) Apple has no product category aimed at e.g. the ThinkPad's "techs performing maintenance on cell towers in deserts/jungles/swamps" use-case. Apple makes its desktop products like most companies make servers, or scientific equipment: intended for climate-controlled, central-air-purified conditions, to be operated by techno-priests who take the proper ritual-purity precautions before touching them. The Macs really are workstations, in the sense that they are intended to do their work from a designated station. ;)

EdwardCoffin 8y ago

How about APFS on Fusion drives?

glhaynes 8y ago
Sounds like it's coming soon (or being cancelled soon, of course): https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/22/craig-federighi-apfs-support-fusion-drives/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/22/craig-federighi-apfs-su...
rbanffy 8y ago
How about block checksums on APFS? Block deduplication, even if offline, wouldn't hurt either.

djcollier 8y ago

It's abundantly clear to me that Apple is not interested in improving the desktop experience. They simply want to show some shiny new features, and to continue to reduce the dimensions and weight of their laptops (even at the cost of usability). At this point I am hoping for a new unix-based alternative to windows with the same level of stability and usability as macOS. Long gone are the days where I would expect Apple to do what so many of us want with the operating system.

carloscheddar 8y ago

I would love the ability to customize the location of notifications so that I can set them on the bottom right corner instead of having them fixed to the upper right. Really hate how calendar notifications can hide my chrome extensions and many other things.

bradknowles 8y ago
Funny. I just heard exactly the same comment from a co-worker yesterday. You two are the first people I've ever heard of complain about this issue.

erichurkman 8y ago

I want customizable "later/snooze" options for reminders/calendar notifications. Specifically, I want a "Snooze until tonight" or "Snooze until I get home". … Mostly when I tell Siri to remind me to do something and she records the wrong time and the reminder comes up at 2pm at work instead of 8pm like I tried to record it.

FraKtus 8y ago

Give a little love to OpenGL. Sure Metal is great... but...