A Last Minute Leopard Wish List

The countdown to Leopard’s launch ticks closer and closer and yet, Apple continues to not only fix bugs, but tweak and enhance it.

Given each addition requires its own bug-testing, it is a bit of a surprise - even if it has been working on them for some time.

However, a bigger surprise is Apple has included a feature I’ve longed for since I first opened Finder way back in 2003. ThinkSecret have shown us that finally Apple has recognized the need to show the whole file path in a Finder window header. Yay! There is a god!

The “Apple Relentless” will argue that you could always command-click the little drop drown proxy icon in the Finder window header to see the full path. True enough, but let’s make it easy, eh? And Apple’s inclusion of this demonstrates it also concedes it’s a good idea.

So, anyway, I’ve been accumulating an OS X 10.6 wish list that I intended to write after Leopard came out, once I confirmed what’s missing. However, now I’m presenting it, Dear Apple, as a last minute features request. Well, some of them. Others can come in 10.6.1 or later. (On an aside, did anyone notice Tiger’s incremental upgrades were very light on for new features? Unlike preceding iterations of OS X in which new features were regular in the incremental updates.)

So here’s a few things I hope to see in Leopard or one of its updates:

• Rollback. I’ve wrote about this earlier this year and got quite a bit of support for it.
• A proper uninstaller. Again, I wrote about this as well; however opinion was divided.
• Default printer settings. Although you can save presets and it remembers the last one used, I really want to see a button that says “Set as Default” and the current printer’s settings will become its default settings. That way I can set my inkjet to default to B&W for each who user at home so they have to actively choose colour, instead of so often forgetting to change to B&W when colour really isn’t necessary.
• Migration assistant: Option to reinstall only specified apps. At the moment it’s all or nothing, and a lot of times we reinstall the OS to get rid of all the dead weight apps we’ve accumulated.
• Printer drivers! Argh! I want to be able to access and assign any printer driver installed on my Mac - not just the ones it thinks are compatible with my printer.
• Device management. Again, like the printer drivers, I want greater access and control over devices on my Mac.
• Navigate up a folder tree while dragging files. Because I loath the hideous space consuming column view, and the list view is a neutered tree view and only useful when I want to view files in a specific sort order, I use the icon view most often. And springloaded folders make this an easy way to work - almost. Unfortunately, Finder has no way of opening the parent folder via springload or keystroke. You have to either navigate backup the hierarchy, or open the destination folder before hand.
• Font management: Automatic categorization would be really useful, even for things as simple as serif and sans-serif. It’s my understanding is well designed fonts include this information in their metadata, so there’s no reason Font Book couldn’t automatically categorize fonts based on that metadata.
• Relocatable user folders, eg screen captures, downloads etc

So that’s my wish list. Some would require a bit more work, but others would require no more effort than the full file path in Finder windows did.

What’s on your last minute wish list?