“The cat is almost out of the bag. Or rather, the big cat has almost toppled the Apple cart? Analogies aside, the next iteration of Apple’s desktop operating system, OS X, is due around July, and the developer’s preview of the software should be released in the next few weeks,” Meghan McDonough reports for Digital Trends. “That time estimate is based on Apple’s release schedule for Mountain Lion, which was released to the public in July of last year. The developer preview of Mountain Lion debuted in February 2012.”
“Once the developer preview appears, we’ll know for sure what some of OS X 10.9’s features will be — including which cat name it will be given,” McDonough reports. “While there’s been some speculation that OS X 10.9 could be called Lynx, we like the idea of it being called Domestic Cat. Sadly, we’re pretty sure Apple won’t take the suggestion.”
McDonough reports, “Based on rumors, rumblings and some ideas of our own, here’s what we think will be included in OS X 10.9.”
Read more in the full article here.
Here is a new one. How ’bout calling OS X 10.9: “El Gato”
Or the plural: Los Gatos (former home of former Apple employee and former all around nice guy Steve (Gus) Wozniak.
Gus?
General Utility Servant
How about picking a new family of animals and finally moving on to OS X 11. It is time. 12+ years of basically the operability and GUI philosophy is enough.
“OS 10 11” ?
“12 years of basically the operability and GUI philosophy” ?
Comprehension is elusive here… and so is your grasp of the english language
I think the next OS will be simply be called Mac OS. They may include ten (X) in the name. Or hell even 11, but I think the cats will gracefully be retired. They have had their nine lives!
Serval
There are two things really missing in OSX: a much better finder, and iBookstore. I can watch movies on my Mac but can’t read books bought from Apple? That does not make sense.
By the way Apple should offer iBookstore also for Windows like they did with iTunes. Millions of potential customers for eBooks created with iBooks Author would be waiting. Not just the plain ePub crap everyone sells but the very distinctive iBooks.
What improvements are you expecting from Finder? I find that it works very well for me.
Tabbed browsing for sure
For that you have to buy a Finder add on called Total Finder for $18 that will give you tabbed browsing. I have it and find it very useful as you can drag and drop files between two open tabs.
Might also look at Path Finder.
Cost more than Total Finder, but best I recall it did more.
Depends on what you need.
http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/
Pathfinder can definitely do more than Total Finder but I find most of what it does I don’t need and Total Finder meets my needs perfectly. Total Finder and HyperDock are my only paid additions to OS X. Tinker Tool (free) is quite helpful too in a small way, e.g. forcing QuickTime videos to play immediately on opening.
What improvements are you expecting from Finder? I find that it works very well for me.
Off your meds again I see. Naughty BLN! You’re hallucinating. The OS X Finder has been BEGGING for a total rewrite, again, since the release of the screwed up version in 10.7 Lion. We’re up to 10.7.5 at this point and it’s STILL screwed up. And Apple knows it’s screwed up. I’ve delineated the problems to them enough times. Sheesh. 10.8.3’s Finder is only a partial solution.
Mmm. Dunno. The Finder seems fine to me.
I think my perception of the Finder has to do with my being a research maniac all day long. I want the thing to be fast and immediate. I want it to give me what I want from a massive collection of stuff I have on my machines.
I do NOT want to reboot my Mac, tell the Finder to open my Applications folder and be FORCED to SIT THERE WAITING for the Finder for literally 20 seconds or longer while it tears through the database of files in that folder. WTF am I waiting for?
This became a problem SPECIFICALLY with 10.7. I’ve been beta testing new versions of 10.8.x for Apple for about a year now on my nifty Mac Mini 2011, and I still see the problem although more rarely.
Another situation specific to just me is the pile of background processes I have going. Because I write about Mac Security, I have a pile of related software running. They’re grabbing CPU cycles here and there and the Finder apparently gets bumped behind them in the queue far more often than I’d like. I’m inspired to use either the CLI (via Terminal) to give the Finder 1º priority or be lazy and use AppTamer to do it.
IOW: My complaint might entirely be due to me working in a way and running crud in the background that overcomes the Finder’s capabilities. I don’t like it, so I grumble. Could be!
OS X 10.9 Grumpy Cat
+1 Grumpy Cat
Oh, you mean Garfield? 🙂
TomCat
I would like to see iDisk come back. I know there is a lot of other cloud drives available, which I have quite a bit of them, Google, SkyDrive, Amazon Cloud, Cubby, Glide, but I still don’t think any of them measure up to what iDisk ever was.
Apple should either develop a Dropbox equivalent (much cheaper) or buy Dropbox outright. Dropbox is one of the easiest to use file manager on the cloud.
I wish they would come up with a way to video-chat with people and at the same time add others to the conversation or share files or the screen all in one app.
Probably not, though. That technology is years behind us…..
You can share files via Messages on OS X by dragging and dropping the file to the person’s name or open chat window.
You can screen share through Messages on OS X or enable screen sharing through the Sharing option in System Preferences.
I know the ability is there. Putting it in practice only works sometimes. Same sign on, same people, unpredictable results.
Messages lets me do less over more accounts.
iChat was closed….and worked (usually vs seldom).
I know what you’re saying and don’t necessarily disagree with you.
The trouble with a unified file sharing capability in FaceTime chat is the absence of the ability to share files through FaceTime in iOS whereas you can share files through iMessage in iOS. My guess is Apple wanted to keep the approach consistent between platforms. You can share files between OS X and iOS users via Messages/iMessage and it works back and forth going both ways.
As for screen sharing, again Messages was seen as a natural successor to iChat and they must have kept the screen sharing function there rather than FaceTime. I think they wanted FaceTime to be as stripped down and simple as possible so iOS users could use FaceTime without worrying about ancillary sharing services which have been relegated to Messages in OS X.
Yes, I know, but it still sucks that I spent a fair amount of money equipping all my kids and girlfriend with Macs and had a very reliable method of communicating and trouble shooting/teaching OS X methods that now just sucks.
As of this morning, my text from my computer do not show up on my iPhone, and the ones sent directly from Safari don’t show up on either.
Signed out and added all accounts back and guess what?
Still sucks….
I’m finding Messages/iMessage is quite good. The only gripe with it is the out of order messages that should be sorted according to their time stamp but is not. This seems to only occur in Messages in OS X. But they’ve been quite reliable as far as sending and receiving are concerned.
Mine would be stable if I left it running, or it would finally get the right order after it was running a while. That was two updates ago.
Now…..it just sucks.
Couple of issues to troubleshoot:
– ensure that at least one of the checked accounts you are sending the message from is an iCloud account and that the iCloud account is tied to your Apple ID and is enabled and working for the associated device.
– ensure that the account from which you are sending the message is consistent across all enabled devices. In other words if you use your mobile number to identify your outgoing message, ensure that is applied uniformly across all your participating devices.
– as a last resort disable and re-enable Messages/iMessage and iCloud synchronisation.
I have the same problem with messages; I have to close it and reopen it a couple of times before it sorts out the message order.
Go back to your iPhone. Delete any “send from” accounts (except phone number). Turn off iMessage. Wait five minutes for the iCloud server to reset. Turn iMessage back on. Starting with your new (Apple-supplied) icloud.com and old me.com or mac.com addresses, add all your AppleID email accounts back to “send from”.
Then repeat these same steps for each device (iPad, iPod, iPhone and v 10.8x Macs).
Ally our iMessages then will be synced.
This sorted out my issues when I had them early on.
Never have an issue now.
Yes, I’ve had to do these before…and why?
So yes, I do them again. No success for awhile, then I go back and do it again, and before I am through, the desktop starts working. Add the phone back, now the phone threads are on the desktop, but not the replies. Type on the desktop, get the replies on the desktop, but not on the phone.
Don’t get me wrong. It is working better.
It is just stupid that it doesn’t work right…
Stray Cat
Pussy Cat
Felix the Cat
Nice article by Meghan.
So far there’s nothing rock solid about the July timeframe. Apple will release the new OS when it is ready.
I would love to see an Mac map application. I currently use the Mac’s iCal (synced to my iPhone) where I can click on the location for my next appointment. I would love to include Apple’s Mac app in that workflow.
Why did Meghan chose to lead with cat names and then spend soooo much time on that? Yea I know marketing, but that has to be the least important feature for us users to worry about. It made me think she didn’t know anything important to contribute to the article.
OS X Liger
Tigger
They should call it “Neutered Cat.” That’s what it’s been since they dropped Rosetta. Long live the virile Snow Leopard.
I hate that I have to agree with that sentiment.
Not necessarily for Rosetta, but because Lion and Snow Lion are just not as stable, at least not across my 2011 I5 iMac/ 2012 I5 13″ MacBook Pro and a 2010 Mini Core 2 Duo.
I go update my son’s G5 iMac (Leopard), girlfriend’s CoreDuo iMac (Snow Leopard) or other son and daughter’s 2006 Core 2 Duo iMacs (Snow Leopard) and they are ALL more stable than my setup.
Boy don’t I feel smart…..
Rosetta was a stopgap solution for the transition from PPC to Intel. Any developers worth their name have come out with Intel-based versions of their software. Rosetta is not needed anymore.
Says you.
Not all developers “worth their name” are still around.
Any computer company “worth their name” wouldn’t arbitrarily drop support for an important function.
My PC runs software from the 1980’s.
Why can’t a Mac run software from the early 2000’s?
Apple has over $100 billion cash and they can’t keep an OS feature working.
IBM bought Transitive, the company whose technology was used in Rosetta in order to prevent their own customers from using it as a way to take legacy software off IBM’s POWER mainframe architecture onto commodity servers without modification.
IBM have since stopped distribution of any of the QuickTransit technology and unsurprisingly weren’t willing to make an exception for a company that had just used the technology to jump ship from another IBM CPU family to x86.
So, unfortunately Apple probably didn’t have a choice when it came to offering backward compatibility. There just isn’t anything that can be interchanged for QuickTransit and offer acceptable performance.
I would like 10.9 to be intrinsically attached to a new Mac Pro.
Not a lot there that pumps my nads. More iOS fluff.
Apple has been granted 3D Desktop patents, so is that technology going to be in the future 10.9 OS X?
10.9 Tomcat / Hellcat
Mountain Lion already includes the dictation application that was the precursor to Siri on iOS, so it’s not that big of jump.
What IS a big jump is the need for a noise canceling microphone. I’ve had rant warz over this fact, but it continues to be wise that you REQUIRE one in order to get the best results from Siri. Apple isn’t going to simply toss Siri out to the public without optimized hardware to go with it. That might well mean Apple selling a battery amplified, noise canceling microphone for Macs that have a mic jack. I certainly hope so or there will be ticked-off user rant fests about poor Siri results, I guarantee. And that would not be a good thing.
IamOrganized keeps both local and cloud based files in one convenient, easily searchable location that may be accessed and searched across a variety of devices. Plus, it looks pretty.
3D GUI plus an evolution of the Finder. I’d love it if the entire Spotlight system got ripped out and replaced with something that is actually RELIABLE and FAST. I’m personally sick-to-death of stupid Spotlight, one reason I have every OTHER search utility for Mac on my machines.
Wow – my experience the exact opposite. I own other search tools and finder replacements and none come close to the built in spotlight / finder search. I get fast (near instant)from an old Xeon Mac Pro with 4 old spinning hdds and over 3tb of data to wade through.
Things like pathfinder (which I use for tabbed file management) and data lore are useless on my machine
I’m assuming you’ve repaired permissions and rebuilt the spotlight indexing?
Looks like I poked a hornets nest. So I’ll be cautious in my reply:
I teach people who to optimize their Macs. So yeah, I’ve performed the duties. As a power user I want to search the entire computer for what I want about 99% of the time. Having to use special searches I’ve created, in order to work around the ‘user-friendly’ limited searching, that is the default in Spotlight, is a pain, but that’s not the big problem.
The big problem is that Spotlight is slow and provides no user feedback as to when it is finished or is going to finish. This is particularly the case in 10.7.5, which I am pounding on most of my day (until I get to buy a new shiny, no-more-crappy LG, Retina display MacBook Pro to replace my aged workhorse MacBook 11/2006. (I have a nice new Mac Mini but I need to be portable most of the day).
Apple has heard from me about this. I expect it was an oversight at some point. But Apple never fixed it again.
So what I get are quick, happy results, but meanwhile spotlight is churning in the background and OH LOOK! A bunch more stuff showed up. I hope it’s done! I wish there was a way to tell. But there isn’t. And oh look some more stuff showed up.
Then there’s the situation of: Why can’t I just search in Spotlight EXACTLY the way I search on Google? But no, the search parameter underpinnings are different and you have to compensate.
Did I mention that Spotlight is SLOW?
I have masses of data to search through on my machines. But at least let me know through some sort of feedback when the search is actually ongoing and when it is finished. There ain’t no such thing in the current renditions of Spotlight. There IS such a thing in ALL the alternatives.
Sorry to rant. It’s just that I have to use the thing every day all day long and I really really resent Spotlight’s problems.
OS X 10.9? No way July. This is Tim Cook guys… the wheels spin much slower.
One thing that annoys me. When I want to view a folder contents in either list or icon view, I mean just for that folder. Not ALL the folders. There was a time you could tailor individual folders. Not any more that I know off. Oh and Upgrade iTunes 11 to 10.
“Magic Cat”… (or maybe “Felix”?)
Apple blew their chance to call 10.8 “Octopussy”.
I recommend for the next round Apple picks canine species and turns it to 11 — with a modern file structure (ZFS or equivalent).
Also, move the fluff to application level. The Mac OS does NOT need to keep following iOS.
Could not agree more on Octopussy.
As for the FS, I think it is totally on the table. They have started getting involved in physical memory technology as well as versioning, so the FS just makes sense.
I think the next version of the Mac OS is going to be very interesting. I think Apple is going to really forge ahead with things like rethinking the FS, rethinking how data is shared, iCloud, backup and Applications. They have dabbled in all of these waters and I think we are going to start to see the future of computing environments start to unfurl.
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Reports say that Tim Cook uses his iPad mostly. He’s not on the Mac daily, so he doesn’t know the frustrations of working daily on the Mac. The biggest hassle is moving files from one folder at a time. You need to open two windows, and drag and drop. That’s why a tabbed window would be ideal.