Suggestions for Apple in Q2 2006

After 6 years of continued refinement, Mac OS X is no longer new to most of us. In 2000, I remember my excitement over the Public Beta release, even when there were hardly any applications written for the new OS. I knew that this was going to be the OS for me, and that OS 9’s days were numbered. While I didn’t fully complete the transition to OS X until 2003, I was eager to all along.

But here I am in 2006, I’ve had Tiger installed on my Macs for a while, and I’m actually starting to get simultaneously nostalgic and forward-looking. As a result, I’ve thought of some things I’d like to see out of OS X and its included apps:

1. Themes. Sure, we have ShapeShifter, but I want native theme support that’s even more powerful than Kaleidoscope was in OS 9. Allow developers and geeks to post new OS X themes on Apple’s website, just like Widgets!
2. I miss Audion. Or more to the point, I miss what I could do with it. iTunes is great, and I’ve owned 3 iPods, but after several major releases of iTunes, I’m still missing features I enjoyed in Audion and even the inferior SoundJam (iTunes’ predecessor.) Give us some themes, detach the controls window from the Library/Store window. Give us audio plugins, not just visualizers - why can’t we use our Audio Units plugins with iTunes? After all, Apple owns Logic/Garageband, why not let us take full control of our audio experience?
3. Make .Mac a better value. I’m a disgruntled .Mac user. iDisk is incredibly slow and error-prone, and it doesn’t support resume. Why the hell does Transmit, a third-party FTP client, work better/faster with my iDisk than Finder? I don’t care about Podcasting, or my Homepage, and I haven’t even upgraded to iLife ‘06 yet. Just make
   iDisk work how it should and I will be happy!
4. Make Finder more stable. I swear, the most crash-prone app on my Mac is essentially the OS itself - the Finder. For some reason, Finder freaks out if there is any kind of connectivity problem with mounted network shares or iDisks. Why? Finder is supposed to be multi-threaded and rock solid! While Finder has never forced me to restart since Jaguar, I do find myself often force-quitting it when I get beachballed due to network timeouts - which in turn crashes any file requesters I may have open in other apps! I don’t care about Spotlight - it’s great, just make the Finder work how it should!
5. Give Mail a makeover and/or themes. I hate the look of Apple Mail in Tiger. It even violates Apple’s own humane interface guidelines!