At Monday’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote, Apple will almost certainly preview the next version of Mac OS X — which will most likely be dubbed “macOS.” Hopefully, the company will concentrate on stability and performance issue, as well as bug fixes. Beyond those, here are some things I’d love to see:
- Siri support. C’mon, Apple, Mac support for the “personal digital assistant” is long overdue. And I’m pretty sure we’ll see it announced during today’s keynote at 10 a.m. (Pacific).
- Group video calling in FaceTime.
- The ability to rename, delete and trash folders from the Open and Save dialog boxes. Apple should pay big bucks for Default Folder and just roll this into the operating system.
- The return of Save As — without having to use a special keyboard command.
- An expanded Disk Utility that can optimize and defrag Mac volumes.
- The ability to start up from a Time Machine back-up and carry on working, just as we can when using SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. In other words: system cloning.
- Support for multiple Time Machine backup profiles that are location aware so it will automatically switch from one backup volume to another when I move between home and work.
- News support. Why isn’t there a Mac version of the News app that’s available for iOS devices?
- The return of Front Row — or a replacement. Front Row was Apple’s media center app for navigating and viewing video, photos, podcasts and music. It was abandoned in Mac OS X 10.7. But why? The Mac still plays host to the majority of our photos, music and home video.
- An app such as Prosoft’s SoundBunny that lets you adjust the volume of any open app and individual browser pages.
- Along the same line: the ability to mute or adjust the volume of one app instead of having to mute or adjust your entire Mac.
- Consistency in the user interface styles.
- The break-up of iTunes into separate apps as in iOS (but this ain’t gonna happen).
Come back at 10 am. Pacific Monday and we’ll see what Apple actually has in mind for the next major upgrade of the Mac operating system.
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