As I’ve been juggling a lot of things on OS X lately, I keep finding I wish I could do certain things that I’m not able to do. Here’s my latest wishlist:
Mini Window States
For all applications that need to show some kind of status, like Mail, NetNewsWire, iChat, or any other app whose state might change while it’s in the background, there should be some kind of in between minimized and maximized state, much like iTunes 5 has the “mini” view with the current track.
Because I’m using Quicksilver exclusively now (removing all items from your dock does the trick), I could use that area to line up my applications in mini-state and easily see who IM’d me, or emailed me, or what RSS feed just updated.
Growl comes to mind, but it never works on my machine, and when it does, it only seems to work for a few applications at best. I’d rather that it just become part of the OS X norm so it’s done right.
Smart Window Management
Give me a single button that cascades similar application windows, or just does something smart to tidy up the windows. I’ll often have a few dozen windows open (two monitors encourages this bad behavior) and I want to just get them under control. The Expose Drag and Size Mode I mentioned a while back would do the trick. I still want it.
Tabbed iChat
Seriously, let me put my conversations into a single window. Make sure that I can have 10-20 conversations without the interface going nuts. I’d switch to Adium X, but I like iChat better. It’s more solid, handles iChat stuff better (like voice, video, dragging and dropping images, etc).
Consistent Close Window Behavior
Sometimes when you click the red pill with the x, the application closes, sometimes just the window. Do it one way or the other and I’ll be happy, just make the behavior for the button the same across the board.