Snow Leopard: Going to Need More Than Just Under the Hood Advancements If Apple Wants It To Sell That Is

I am actually an Apple systems engineer consultant and former Apple employee / engineer (2001-2003), having worked as a QA engineer on Final Cut Pro, iTunes, etc. I was there at Cupertino in late 2000 testing Mac OS 10.0, Puma. So I have had my hand on the pulse of this for a while now.

Of course, Apple will fix bugs, rewrite code, add much needed under the hood improvements, advancements, etc. One of these advancements that stands out is to me is: Open CL. This alone has me excited. Being able to finally access and harness the extremely fast nVidia / ATI cards (that can do trillions of calculations per second, versus the fastest Intel Xeons doing billions per second), for things like:

• H.264 encoding/transcoding
• Pro Audio plugins: more of them and more complex ones, convolution reverbs, etc (I am hoping that this will finally eliminate the need for any hardware cards (a la Universal Audio). The plugins could be recompiled in Snow Leopard Xcode/Cocoa, to take advantage of Open CL.
• Scientific applications. For instance, in the genetic world, where analyzing genetic patterns on say just 500 GB of data can take 3-5 days on the top of the line Xeon Mac Pros.
• Final Cut Pro, Motion, rendering, filters, effects, etc. 
• Instead of days, it would now be hours, instead of hours, minutes. Very exciting. We’ll see. Some additional things Apple will deliver in Snow Leopard, to name just a few:
• Apple will finally rewrite the Finder completely as a Cocoa app, hopefully making it more stable, faster, and streamlined.
• True Exchange 2007 functionality. This is great. I for one being a Mac engineer in a Windows Exchange/AD world, it’s a long time coming.
• The inclusion of ZSF file system (full read/write), essentially eliminating the Mac user from ever having to worry about their file system ever, performing fsck, etc.

However, if this is all that Apple does, with no obvious visual GUI changes / improvements, it will look exactly as is does now in Leopard, and this presents a major problem for Apple and its marketing department and its bottom line sales.

To most customers Snow Leopard will appear to be the same as Leopard and IMHO Apple will not sell many copies of “Snow” Leopard at $129.00, or maybe at any price. In that scenario, if it were me buying Snow Leopard, as the average non technical consumer , I think I would be less inclined to buy it. Why would I?, it does not look any different than Leopard, even though there are tremendous advancements / improvements underneath.

Perception is Reality. If it Looks Different, It is Different. If it Looks Better, It Is Better.

Apple can easily fix some of these glaring and obvious GUI issues, to make it seem better / different on the appearance side. Perception is reality, and if Snow Leopard does not “Look” different, for the average user, then It’s Not Different.

Along these lines, and to illustrate a point, I took the liberty and installed Windows 7 Beta (in VMware) and here is the exact same issue. Windows 7 Beta (albeit a beta) still looks and behaves exactly like Vista. My god. MS still does not get it. You would think a multi billion dollar company would eventually get it and want to run as far away from anything Vista and the  ”Vista look” as possible. Same ugly icons, desktop patterns, and pastel windows. I am sorry, Windows still looks like a Fisher-Price GUI to me, just awful.

So the last few days, there have been reports on certain Mac web sites of a “unified” and “new” theme / GUI in Snow Leopard, so called “Marble”. If true, this is awesome, it’s what Apple and Mac OS X needs, and what I believe us Mac users need, a nice refreshing GUI, to match the underlying technology advancements.

Regarding the Mac OS X GUI, I actually have felt quite strongly about this since 2001, and that Apple should elegantly and functionally address it. I also have agreed with others (like Daniel Eran) on this matter, and it is only now that I am choosing to write about it.

This is what I think still needs to be addressed in Mac OS X,  in two areas: Appearance and Function

Appearance

• The folder icons in Leopard are absolutely horrendous. They are blue, muted, flat and look like folders from the System 7 days, a joke really. I have no idea how Steve Jobs actually likes or approved of these icons. Look at the “Float” folders in Candy Bar and you get an idea of where Snow Leopard icons should look like, for a start.
• Anything “Aqua”  MUST absolutely be removed. Is this Mac OS 10.0 Puma?, it reminds me of when I was at Apple in 2001.
• These absolutely hideous ” candy cane stripes” must be removed in Progress Bars, or in any other part of the GUI.
• The “Pink” iDisk icon is again a head scratcher. Who approved of this horrendous icon?, it must go.
• New Desktop Pictures / Screen Savers.
• When a new Mac OS 10x comes out, I always look for new Desktop Pictures and Screen Savers, (doesn’t everyone). For some reason this makes it “Feel” like a totally new OS X, even if nothing else was touched. And for some inexplicable reason, Apple just fails to understand this basic concept. Yeah, we got a few new Screen Savers and Desktops in Leopard, but not that many. Many more new ones in Snow Leopard and take away some of  very tired old ones.
• The Mac icon in the Finder, come on. It reminds me again of System 7. Design something else or remove it once and for all.
• The blue shading in the left column of the Finder or Mail app is another head scratcher. New in Leopard, but at least give us an option to turn it off.
• Not sure about you, but it seems to me the font size is just too big when doing a right click, on objects (icons, etc.) some how can it be resized to be smaller?

Function

The Finder absolutely must be rewritten in Cocoa, and it finally is. Why it has taken so long is ridiculous. The Finder is the heart of  Mac OS X, and it essentially serves as the “Front Man” of Mac OS X. If the Finder is slow, crashes, etc., for all intents and purposes, especially people new to the Mac could conclude OS X is slow, crashes and sucks.

The Finder must be fast, fluid and as independent as possible of core system services, folder/file activity (copy, delete), network connections, etc.

• Fix how the Finder windows open / appear on the desktop. Apparently Finder windows drop onto the desktop totally at random. Why?
• Give us an option to Snap the Windows to Grid, Vertically or Horizontally. Windows has done this for years and is quite helpful when copying / comparing files.
• I agree with Daniel Eran with all the things he has listed in his articles regarding the OS X GUI, two I’ll re-iterate here:  
• 1) A more e detailed/better Get Info, that more closely resembles iTunes’ functionality
• 2) A way in the Finder to Sync, Merge, Compare two volumes/folders. Yes, there are tools out there, and I use those tools everyday, but this is a functionality that should be included in the OS, and to me long overdue.
• Apple’s built in Active Directory binding plugin still sucks and is still mostly unreliable, we will see if this is finally fixed in Snow Leopard.
• Apple Mail App is great. I love it. But it leaves much to be desired on Exchange Server, not the best experience, slow, etc. So corporate enterprise Mac Mail App users on Exchange, could conclude, ah Mail App just sucks, not true. Mail App is just not a true Exchange client. But in Snow Leopard it finally will  be, taking advantage of MS’s Exchange Web Services (SOAP, XML). IT departments will have to have (upgrade) to Exchange 2007 for this to happen.
• Fix the @$^%! issue with the Finder, networking and file manipulation, particularly with WebDAV / iDisk. Leopard has done a better job, but we still see issues even with fast connections, where WebDAV / iDisk, slows or crashes the Finder. Unacceptable. De-couple this from the Finder. If the service is going to time out, let it time out,  give us a time out message, but the user should just be moving Finder windows around going about his/her other business on the desktop.
• Finder copies. The Finder uses ditto when copying files. But something is amiss. When I use ditto from the terminal, 100 % of the time, ALL of my files copy. When I do a Finder copy of larger folders, etc, one could get a error message from the Finder complaining about a file, and guess what? Does it continue to copy your files, skip that file and keep going?. No, the copy stops! So your 300 GB volume/folder/file, for example, did not copy overnight. This has to be fixed.

Just some of the things that I have noticed over the years that I feel need to be addressed. So here’s to Snow Leopard, may it be all that we are hoping for.

macguitarman@mac.com

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