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My in-depth OS X 10.9 wishlist

joshparnham.com

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: My in-depth OS X 10.9 wishlist

#12
post #4

I too would welcome if iTunes could return to be a music player. It must be a huge pain even for Apple to work on such beastly monolithic app that does almost everything except the laundry.

iTunes has become Apple's MS Office: it does too much and it's established it's roots so deep a rewrite would be close to impossible without breaking things.

Established its roots ? It is just a standalone app and would be trivial to rewrite or split into its separate parts.

The hard bit is in the overall experience. Splitting one app into 5 or 6 was manageable on iOS but could be unwieldy on OSX.

Re: My in-depth OS X 10.9 wishlist

#13

Just a couple of points. 1) .DS_Store is necessary for compatibility with UNIX/Windows who do not support the HFS+ resource fork/Finder metadata. There is no way around it and they are optional. Perhaps just add it to your .gitignore like everyone else does. 2) ZFS is unnecessary. Most of the use cases that haven't already been solved elsewhere e.g. Time Machine/Versions are only for super-advanced users. In which ca…

It's a list of feature requestes; none of this is necessary. But ZFS would be very nice to have.

Re: My in-depth OS X 10.9 wishlist

#14

Don't forget to include the request that OS X 10.9 supports your current computer.

Apple has generally been pretty good on this front.

For example, the last PowerPC mac was discontinued August 2006, and the first incompatible OS (10.6) was introduced August 2009. That's three years.

Similarly, the last 32 bit x86 Mac was discontinued August 2007 (Mac mini) and the first incompatible OS (10.7) was introduced October 2010.

And that's the most pessimistic view possible. Looking at typical purchaser lifespans, it seems you can look forward to around three major upgrades to Mac OS X over the life of a particular machine.

Re: My in-depth OS X 10.9 wishlist

#15
I've given some thought to the iTunes problem. I think the best solution is to break it up into smaller apps. The tricky part is no one wants to have a dozen different apps installed separately so iTunes would have to still be distributed as one big monolithic application. So instead of trying to cram everything into one window I would suggest something like a Springboard style UI to greet the user when iTunes is launched. From there the individual apps would be more like their iPad counterparts. Simple and to the point. Library management could be broken out into its own separate app to avoid a lot of UI clutter in the Music app itself. Going forward this would let Apple easily add or remove things from iTunes.

Re: My in-depth OS X 10.9 wishlist

#16
post #2

I would already be happy if they allowed me to cut-and-paste in Finder and allowed to turn off my MacBooks internal display when an external display is attached.

Either cut-and-paste or a dual pane Finder would work for me.

Cmd-Opt-V (vs. just Cmd-V).

Re: My in-depth OS X 10.9 wishlist

#17

Don't forget to include the request that OS X 10.9 supports your current computer.

Apple has generally been pretty good on this front. For example, the last PowerPC mac was discontinued August 2006, and the first incompatible OS (10.6) was introduced August 2009. That's three years. Similarly, the last 32 bit x86 Mac was discontinued August 2007 (Mac mini) and the first incompatible OS (10.7) was introduced October 2010. And that's the most pessimistic view possible. Looking at typical purchaser li…

Great Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Macintosh_models_groupe...

Re: My in-depth OS X 10.9 wishlist

#18
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iTunes has become Apple's MS Office: it does too much and it's established it's roots so deep a rewrite would be close to impossible without breaking things.

But Apple users have shown time and time again that they're perfectly willing to live with things breaking for the sake of what they consider progress.

Except iTunes contains two bits of functionality Apple can't afford to break:

- iPod/iOS sync

- iTunes Store

Break the primary route to a user's wallet/content, and the Apple experience starts to fall apart.

Re: My in-depth OS X 10.9 wishlist

#20
post #4

I too would welcome if iTunes could return to be a music player. It must be a huge pain even for Apple to work on such beastly monolithic app that does almost everything except the laundry.

That seems like such a terrible idea; I love the fact that everything is neatly organized in iTunes.

Think of how terrible it would be for your Apple TV to then break out and have to look at multiple applications for your content instead of one.

I highly doubt apple would make the mistake of creating more mini apps to manage each of the various items; just would be a stupid design move.

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