OS X Leopard is looking really cool, but...

Some things I really would love to see in this great operating system.

A better file explorer with plug-in ability! I find the Finder irritating to use, even the drag and drop from time to time, and horribly lacking in features. Right click tools are really nice, like zipping and extracting, preview for media, copy and move, burn to cd-r, and number one, copy path. Many of these features are found in Linux, and even Windows.

Making the Finder plug-in based would give users the abiltiy to add these features and would make the finder a little nicer to use and more powerful over time.

Why not make widgets available on your main desktop if you use them often? It would be nice to enter the dashboard, flip a widget over and set it to be on your desktop rather than the dashboard. The dashboard is a useless toy for most things and why make me install Yahoo Konfabulator to do what the operating system does already, and very well I might add.

How about some Beryl, Compiz, Looking Glass, Vista type 3-D effects for the OS X desktop that the user can theme and control the effects on?

Better window management! The OS X desktop is so cluttered when you have a lot of windows open, and only having the corner to resize doesn't help either. You find yourself constantly resizing windows to get to windows even with a 23" Apple Cinema display. Give the user more power over the windows like they do in KDE.

I would love to Apple build in better support for Linux applications that isn't a pain in the ass. It would be so cool if Apple had a Fink type of repository with a great package manager that handles dependencies and such. An interface similar to Adept Package manager with Apple supported repositories would be awesome. It would be so cool to select Krusader and in one click have Krusader installed and running on OS X! Even better would be a system similar to Klik, where Apple supports the porting of applications packaged into one self-contained executable file delivered to the desktop over the internet.

Ability to easily and natively share network resources and desktops with Linux with minimal setup from the user or separate software product.

I love Linux and support it, will most likey use it forever, but OS X is the best of both the Unix and Commercial software worlds. Let's face it, Linux can be a pain in the ass at times and Photoshop loses it's plug-ins via Wine or Crossover, which is part of the reason I use Photoshop. Most of what I need, like Poser and ZBrush, do not run at all. I find myself running Windows in VMWare for a few applications that are available on OS X natively and who wants to manage two operating systems? I've grown tired of it and the waste of hard drive space to support Windows, an operating system I don't find very useful.

Games shouldn't be the driving force of an operating system, especially with the great consoles out these days, applications however should be, so until Linux gets support from the Adobe and Intuits of the world OS X is the logical choice for productivity on both sides, at least at this point in time, but it needs these few items to really make it shine.



.