What comes after Leopard? Musings on OS X 10.6
Filed under Apple, Software on March 7th, 2008
[A repost of a rather nice post that went under the radar. I will post a new one with more current ideas and observations soon]
Leopard is finally out and on its’ way to our desktops. Is our inner geek happy? Well, yes. But it he is also restless. You see, Leopard is old news. We’ve been there, installed that and got the t-shirt. It’s time we move on and start fixating on the next big cat.
OS X 10.6 (Ocelot? Lion? Meerkat?) is still a couple of years away. The official feature set has not even been defined yet, much less implemented in any way. And even if it has been defined, there’s no way it will leak from the underground dungeons of 1 Infinite Loop before the next Macworld or WWDC. Nevertheless, we do have some very good pointers on what to expect. For example, some things that are introduced but underdeveloped in Leopard will surely get improved. Other things have beens rumors for so long, that they just have to be implemented. There are some also features whose time has come. I have compiled a list with the most important (or, obvious) of those for your reading pleasure.
ZFS
Filesystems are pretty boring stuff. ZFS, not so. It’s the hot little filesystem-du-jour from our friends at SUN Microsystems and it has a huge following. Back when Leopard was still in development, hints of ZFS support got us really excited. Some people even thought that it will replace HFS+ as the default filesystem [SUN’s Jonathan Schwartz included]. Well, it didn’t. What we got instead was read-only support for ZFS volumes. Then Apple went on and seeded “Developer Preview version 1.1 of Zettabyte File System” that includes full read/write support and management of ZFS pools. We expect OS X 10.6 to incorporate the changes in the Developer Preview and provide full support for ZFS. Whether 10.6 will support using ZFS on the boot volume is anyone’s guess. That said, we don’t believe it will become the default filesystem until at least 10.7.
NTFS
Although our Macs are perfectly capable of using external USB/FireWire disks, sharing data with a Windows computer on said disks is another matter. In order to do so, we have to use the ancient, limiting (and non-journaling) FAT-32 filesystem which is the only one both Macs and PCs understand. (Actually we could also use Mac Drive on the PC to access HFS+ formatted disks. But this isn’t an option when we are on the road, nor does it helps us access disks already formatted as NTFS).
It’s a little known fact, but Tiger already supports read-only mounting of NTFS volumes. One can also install MacFUSE, a program that allows running any filesystem as a normal application. MacFUSE, combined with the NTFS-3G module supports reading and writing of NTFS volumes. This combination, however, is neither fully tested nor particularly speedy or stable.
We expect Apple to update Leopard’s read-only ntfs drivers by incorporating the stable NTFS-3G driver in 10.6, providing full read/write NTFS support.
Resolution Independence
Higher resolutions and densely pixel-packed monitors render our text and icons smaller and smaller. A 32×32 pixel icon is ridiculously small on a high-end 140dpi monitor. That is because programs specify graphic element dimensions in terms of pixels. As monitor resolution increases, pixels get smaller. Resolution Independence is the ability to define graphic elements in terms of actual size, so that we don’t have a 32 pixel wide character but, say, a half-an-inch wide character that it’s drawn the same size on every monitor (actually, it’s a tad more complicated that that, but this explanation will do for now). With this scheme, higher resolution translates to “more detail”, not “tiny type” and “small icons”.
Apple had incorporated resolution independence in Tiger, albeit in a proof-of-concept form, only accessible through the obscure Quartz Debugger software. On Leopard the feature is more refined but it’s still not the default option. Our guess is that it will be enabled by default come 10.6. Until then, third party developers (and Apple themselves) will have enough time to update their GUIs and icons to be ready for resolution independence.
Aqua 2
Aqua, OS X’s user interface is already 8 years old. Sure, it has been refined over the years, and Leopard also brought us the unified window look which, while nice, is really just an evolutionary step. Clearly, it’s time for something new. Some people hoped that one of the “super secret” features Jobs promised for Leopard would be a revamped Aqua (some, even named the new interface “Illuminous”). Except for some cosmetic changes here and there, it wasn’t. My guess is that the really big UI change is reserved for 10.6. After all, a lot of the pieces are starting to fall into place: the GUI is now unified, resolution independence will be mature enough by then, and Core Animation will provide special effects and eye candy galore.
.Mac
I believe we will see some action on this front from Apple. Jobs briefly mentioned upcoming changes in some of his interviews this summer, but nothing really interesting came out of it. Apple needs a solid .Mac plan. (I have elaborated a bit on the subject in my “.Mac 2.0” post).
What do you think will be the most important features of 10.6?
