My Snow Leopard Wish List

One thing I like about being a Mac user is the surprises you get. With Windows, anything that will be forthcoming in a future release is known well in advance and generally available in beta. But with Mac, the future is always a black box. Oh sure, there's been some talk about what's to come in Snow Leopard - better performance & smaller footprint - but I think there's more in this black box than we've been told. To compete with Win 7, I'm predicting that Snow Leopard will address a few of the current OSX shortcomings. Here's what I'm hoping to find in the Snow Leopard release:

1. Better font rendering. I want my Mac fonts to be just as readible as my windows fonts, so I think there has to be some improvements to the fonts themselves, or maybe to the antialiasing engine.
   
2. Better Chrome. I'm getting really sick of the gray brushed aluminum that surrounds every application window. (If you can suggest a 3rd party app for this, please do.)
   
3. Improved Spotlight. Please, please, please add meta tags to the search. I've had this in windows for about two years.
   
4. Ditch dock. I really find Dock to be a stupid application. It's obnoxious looking and really doesn't seem very purposeful. Let's chase this circus outta town. Have a look at the Win 7 taskbar and build something similar.

Okay, I'm a Mac convert, but...

Alright, after several months of having both a win 7 and a mac machine side by side, I'm a Mac convert. My windows machine is the blazingly fast X61 tablet with 3 gig of ram, whereas my Mac machine is a lowly little mini mac with only 1 gig of ram. Yet, for some reason, the Mac machine seems to start faster, wake up faster, install apps faster, runs quieter and deals with plugging and unplugging of USB peripherals more elegantly than the PC does.

There are still many things I don't like about the Mac. For long bouts with spreadsheets or word documents, I find the PC better because it displays fonts more crisply than the mac does (on the same monitor and same resolution.) Of course, whenever a tablet would help, I reach for the x61. (Considering how few tablets there are in the world, Win 7 has ridiculously rich support for pens.) But most of the time, I'm heading to the machine for a short duration, or I am doing something that involves jacking in a USB something or another, and in those instances, the Mac is best.

Great article in ITWorld comparing the Mac and Win 7 UIs.