What I would like to see in Snow Leopard

The word is out that Snow Leopard will be about trimming down Leopard – likely Apple’s effort to switch to lower-capacity solid-storage such as found in the MacBook Air and perhaps future iPhones and maybe a tablet.

Mac OS X binaries have always been on the large size containing as they do multiple human languages and processor code (PPC, X86, X64) and it will be good that you don’t need to keep running TrimTheFat or XSlimmer to get them down.

Given this is such a system-oriented release, here’s what I want to see:

• More detailed system information such as RAM SPD details, processor revision etc. (Manufacturers are offering faster RAM but you have to run a tool in Windows to find out what you have)
• Option for ZFS system-partition with intelligent fast compression.
• Support for flash memory as a cache/page-file – 32GB ExpressCards are cheap but useless on OS X.
• Uninstaller to clean up installed/created files squirreled away in /Library etc. (Present in NextStep but had disappeared by OS X now space is a priority it’s time to bring it back.)
• System notification API with standard responder that can be replaced by Growl for more customization.
• Show package contents to work on ZIP files and other supported archives. Ability to drag files in/out.
• Core compression API to complement core video and core data API’s with plug-in ability for extra compression algorithms and archive formats.
• Optimization of the OpenGL drivers and API to get frame-rates for Mac games on par with their Windows equivalents.
• Smart play-lists in Font Book – come on I want a list of English fonts… or monospaced ones. Why should I have to manage them?

I’d be very surprised if Blu Ray support doesn’t show up too and it might be time for DVD Player to just become Movie Player and gain some features from QuickTime which would then become just an API and the missing authoring features exposed to CoreVideo or iMovie.

[)amien