“Unless something unexpected happens, Apple will tell us about OS X 10.10 at the traditional keynote next month on the first morning of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC),” Iljitsch van Beijnum writes for Ars Technica.
“The operating system is more than 13 years old, and it’s come a long way since those first versions, but it’s still not perfect,” van Beijnum writes. “What areas do we think Apple should focus on in 10.10?”
“The latest Macs may have solid state drives that can read and write over 700 megabytes per second over a direct PCI Express connection, but all that data is still organized by a file system from the previous millennium: HFS+,” van Beijnum writes. “There’s something to be said for using stable, battle-hardened code for the file system, which is probably the most critical part of the operating system. Unfortunately, Apple’s current HFS+ implementation isn’t as stable as it should be, much to the chagrin of Ars’ OS X reviewer extraordinaire John Siracusa. With the introduction of a logical volume manager — Core Storage — it looks like Apple has found a way to innovate in the area of storage without having to replace HFS+.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
There’s some good ideas in there, but I hope Apple doesn’t do a public beta. Also for the photo preview caching, that should be an optional setting. The article assumes we all want to trade speed for space.
ZFS anyone?
That’s been talked about for years.
Exactly which is why I was wondering why it wasn’t mentioned in the article.
They linked to Siracusa’s piece about it. Apple long ago closed down their open-source project to port ZFS to OS X.
Btrfs would be a great choice since it seems ZFS is out.
Anything sounds good or better at this point. Just want OS X to be the best it can be and shut down all the doofus detrimental dialog.
The DDD crowd outside this group that is.
Honestly, it would be really nice if they worked with Microsoft and came up with one together. Probably not possible given the Unix underpinnings of OS X though.
This is a long-winded legal issue. As I recall, and Wikipedia seems to agree with my recollections, ZFS was released as open source under a license that requires that anything it is included in be as free as it was. At least back when I was still with Apple this was true, and a stickler for the company because OS X was still a monetized product. Even today, with there being no charge for it, I think the license may include a provision that any code incorporating their code be released as open source… and Apple isn’t likely to do that anytime this century (Darwin, yes; Finder, et al, no).
Has anyone ever seen an article about mssing features we’d like to see in Windows 9?
No, but I’m thinking a 1024×768 pixel “Shutdown” button would be appropriate.
“Permanent Shutdown” monitor sized button in Windows 9 would be perfect.
Yes, starting back in 2012.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/looking_forward_future_features_windows_922
I just read that article. Wants to turn the computer into a robot. He kept referring to Apple. Kinda weird.
Keep in mind that Ars often falls on its arse with utter crap written up as science and technology. But Ars does have it’s actual experts and useful opinions.
Now that I’ve laid that flamebait…
There is a wide world of coding out there where Apple can go with OS X.
A. Apple has literally not touched the 3D GUI. That’s silly at this point. Kick yourself in the arse Apple and get going already!
B. There was a concerted effort to move to ZFS after HFS+, but Sun Microsystems fell on their own arse and never came through with the goods to help Apple. HOWEVER, ZFS for Mac has grown up despite of the death of Sun:
https://code.google.com/p/maczfs/
C. The OS X Finder has literally turned into spaghetti-ware, still full of inefficient fossil code, a slug, an antique that Steve Jobs himself swore to modernize. So Apple…
D. Then of course there’s the lazy ass coding from which we repeatedly suffer, the latest of which was the idiotic disappearance and permissions calamity of the /Users and /Users/Shared folders due to, of all things, an iTunes update. Tighten up Apple.
That list should keep them busy.
From the article:
This could very well mean that pre-release versions of OS X 10.10 can also be tested by the public, so Apple gets the benefit of early feedback from regular users.
The problem, from my experience with the AppleSeed program, is that Apple has to READ the feedback in a TIMELY manner. They don’t. Hearing back from Apple with questions that have become irrelevant during the MONTH it took them to bother reading your feedback is demoralizing to any beta tester, obviously.
Finder was rewritten in Cocoa for 10.6, killing off all the legacy code. I can’t find the Mavericks reference I was seeking, but I think Mavericks Finder was another rewrite.