So what are YOU looking for in OS X 10.7? Posted by Dr. Macenstein on Friday, October 15, 2010 · 28 Comments

So earlier this week Apple sent out invitations for its Back To the Mac event, set for next week. I’m not sure where our invite is (they always seem to get stuck in our spam filters I guess) but the point is it looks like Apple is ready to pretend it cares about its Mac business unit again, and will likely be previewing OS X 10.7. It’s always a bit of a fool’s errand to try to guess what Apple intends to show off based on their invites, but let’s take a looksee anyway.

OK, all I really get is that 10.7 will probably be called Lion, which is both a good and bad thing. The good is that the Lion is the top “dog” as it were, in the cat community, so to christen 10.7 Lion means Apple must be pretty high on it, unless they plan to go for some high tech mutant cross breed like “Liger” for 10.8. The bad news is, I don’t really like the sound of “Lion”. Panther, Jaguar, Tiger, Leopard… they all sounded cooler somehow. It will take some getting used to. But back to the invite.

So, aside from the Lion, it doesn’t look like there’s all that much more to get out of the invite… or is there? While at first it looked like the smooth flat gray might be meant to look like a closed MacBook, there is no white Apple logo to be seen. What it really looks like is a trackpad. And what it really looks like is maybe someone PUSHED on the trackpad to start the flipping of the Apple logo and reveal the rich, creamy Lion inside. Given Apple’s love of touch interfaces in its gadgets, its recent release of the “Magic” Trackpad, rumors of iBooks coming to the Mac, and the fact that there’s really not all that much more to do to OS X, we’re hardly going to call ourselves Nostradamus in predicting that we’re probably going to see some touch-gesture features fairly prominently in the new OS.

But is that enough to warrant an update? Especially one as presumably grandiose as to earn the moniker “Lion”?

Earlier I said that there wasn’t all that much more to do with the Mac OS, and while I realize that’s somewhat short-sighted, I am personally having a hard time thinking of any blatantly missing feature that would either A) make my life easier, or B) impress my Windows using friends enough to make them jealous (these are of course the two criteria I use to judge all Apple hardware/software releases). To be honest, Leopard didn’t give me too much new stuff that I didn’t already have, and Snow Leopard just gave me the speed Leopard should have had (while ruining QuickTime). Sure we can break out a couple individual features here and there, and they’re all nice and I wouldn’t give them back, but as far as saving me valuable seconds a day… well, let’s just say I have yet to see ANYONE using stacks in an efficient manner, and I refuse to touch Spaces until Apple lets me add different backgrounds to each Space.

But the very nature of technology is change and evolution. So, what is missing from OS X? What do we need Apple to give us? To be honest, if the demo next week is all about touch screens, I am going to zone out because as much as I like my iPad, I can’t work 1/5th as fast on that as my laptop. Sure, the movies have told us we all want to work while standing, in front of large transparent pieces of glass and flinging documents around, and I get that to get to that point we need to take baby steps and all, but there better be SOMETHING else awesome in Lion for me to get excited about, and I really WANT to believe there will be… but I just can’t think of it. So help me out. What is the feature you REALLY are hoping to see in Lion? What’s going to make it roar?

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