We forgot about OS X 10.6!

Macrumors last week had an item that references to Mac OS X 10.6 appear in the iPhone SDK beta 6.

You've got to chuckle, don't you. It seems in all the hype of iPhone 2.0, and a possible new handlheld computing device, we'd all forgotten why World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC) is normally so hotly anticipated. Most WWDCs of the last few years have had Steve getting us salivating about the next iteration of OS X.

But this year, in all the hype, we'd forgotten to speculate about what to expect in OS X 10.6 and what Steve might show at WWDC.

Leopard, admittedly, has been a damn fine OS and hasn't left me pining for more. Certainly some enhancements would be appreciated, but I'm not yearning for the next OS X.

Leopard hit the ground in October 2007, so, given the longer development cycle now OS X has matured, it could easily be October 2009 before we see 10.7. We got our first glimpse of Leopard at WWDC 2006, so (even allowing for Leopard being delayed by Apple co-developing OS X for the iPhone) it's still quite possible Apple could show us a little of 10.6's new features at WWDC 2008.

And what might there be? Well, I don't know about the rest of Mac-land, but here's a few I'd like.

Parental controls
Parental controls took one step back and two steps forward in Leopard. Some of the kinks have been ironed out in the dot upgrades, but parental controls still have room for improvement. In my house, I still use the brilliant MacMinder for finer control, such as time limits on individual applications. Unfortunately, the developer of MacMinder has given up in the face of competition from Leopard - albeit inferior. Hello, Apple? Can I recommend you go buy the MacMinder code?

Time Machine
Time Machine is great but it's greatly limited too. SuperDuper! is still an essential part of my backup routine. And it - or an equivalent - should be a part of yours too until Time Machine gets up to speed.

Time Machine is great for covering your butt and good for rebuilding your system. But it's not a replacement for a proper backup regime using a product such as SuperDuper!. I run TimeMachine as my first line of defence, but use SuperDuper! for my archived and offsite backups, multiple backups and (really useful and never likely in Time Machine) cloning.

In it's current form, Time Machine can't do multiple backups. You get one set of backup parameters and that's it. What I'd like is for Time MAchine to support multiple backups, so for instance, you might have your normal backups hourly, but once a day backup just your data to a different destination. (You can never have too many backups!)

I do this now using SuperDuper!. I backup my iPod data, my photos and my Mac's user data to separate backups. And, being disk images, any of these can be easily archived or transferred to and accessed pn other computers. I also use SuperDuper! to make a daily clone of my entire system drive. So if I ever have (another) hard drive crash, I can boot up from my clone and be operative straight away. Time Machine can't do that for you.

I also want Time Machine to be able to backup iPods. On the one hand I can understand why Apple hasn't included this functionality, i,.e. because the iPod isn't always there and a lot of the data is already on your hard drive. But if you're using your iPod for file storage, it'd be nice if Time Machine could back it up.

Multi-touch
Multi-touch is an interesting one. As Apple has already developed the multi-touch functionality into OS X via the iPhone and iPod touch, it is a relatively simple matter of enabling it on the desktop version OS X. The only thing really holding it back is the hardware to take advantage of it. Consequently, OS X currently only supports limited multi-touch and that's with it's MacBook touchpads. But 10.6 could see that broaden.

Multi-touch is the future, a future that at this time seems distant. Microsoft has shown it will include multi-touch in Windows 7 - whatever decade that comes out; however, Apple, being ready to go, can get a huge jump on Microsoft.

As Robert Scoble recently said, though, after seeing Window 7. who wants multi-touch on a computer? Sure it's useful for a phone, but a computer? Apple, however, has a habit of making things popular. Released alongside a tablet Mac, multi-touch on OS X 10.6 could finally usher us into the age of tablet computing.

Eye-candy
Apple loves productivity eye-candy. In Panther it was Exposé, in Tiger it was Dashboard, and in Leopard it was Spaces and Quick Look What will it be in 10.6?. Personally I've always wanted screen partitioning. Thus you could use one large screen and partition it so it functioned like dual screens. Probably just lacks in the eye-candy department.

Lion?
Will 10.6 it be called lion? I hope not. I hope Apple is more creative than that.

So, it's over to you now, readers. What do you want to see in the next version of OS X? And hopefully we just might get a very early sneak peak at in the WWDC keynote.