P
Peter Cohen
I've told you what I want out of OS X 10.10. Now it's your turn.
The feature list for OS X 10.10 Syrah has already been decided. I don't have any special insight to what it has, but I know what I'd like it to have — I made the case for a flatter interface, borrowing from iOS 7, and many of you agreed with me.
But you have lots of other great ideas, judging from the many responses I got from Twitter. Here's a sample
Plain voice interaction
Siri is at the top of the list of wants. It's something that a lot of us depend on we use our iPhones and iPads, why should our Mac experience be any different? Apple understands when it makes sense to blur the line between mobile and desktop operating systems, and I think this is one of those cases.
There's already excellent dictation and voice technology built into the Accessibility system preference, let's augment that with a tool we're already intimately familiar with.
AirDrop that works
AirDrop on the Mac and AirDrop on iOS are two different things, and right now never the twain shall meet. That has to change. It's a pain point for Apple's customers, and it complicates the relationship between iOS and OS X devices.
More apps that don't suck
Mavericks was a big bump in the road for iWork users for reasons I've articulated in the past. There's a consensus that the fit and finish of other core apps isn't as solid as it could be.
Take Mail for instance, which is about as core an OS X app as you can get. It remains unsteady for many users who have applied all of the latest system patches and have reconfigured e-mail server settings when necessary.
My Mail app's latest trick is to randomly hang when checking mail, even from iCloud. Something I ultimately have to restart to recover from. And I'm not alone — a bunch of you said you were having similar difficulty.
iTunes is another favorite target. iTunes is bloated, slow, cumbersome. It is the antithesis of Apple's design aesthetic. Yet it lumbers forth like a reanimated corpse dredged from the bottom of a lake.
Make iTunes about the tunes again, and separate other functionality away from it entirely. Apple's managed to do this with discrete apps in iOS. It'll work on OS X. Get video and apps out of there, too.
Safari is another perennial favorite to complain about. I'm beginning to think that no single web browser is the best solution for everyone. Which is why I keep Safari, Firefox and Chrome in my dock at this point.
That's just the start but it's a good stopping point for now. Tell me about what your secret hopes and desires are for OS X 10.10. Let's keep it going.
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