Seeing that Brad has published a Windows 7 wish list, I figured I should add my Mac OS X wish list.

I am not a big Carbon application user and hence don't really care much about 64 bit Carbon. It would be great for Qt and REALbasic and all those toolkits based not based on Cocoa, but I would probably prefer everything to be pure Cocoa anyway.

1. .NET support built into the system, with an Apple-supported method to use Cocoa APIs from .NET and vice versa.

I don't care if Apple licence Microsoft .NET or ship a version of Mono, but I want Xcode support for C# and Visual Basic and I want .NET applications to look at least as nice (for lack of a better word) as Java applications.

2. 64 bit kernel.

I have no idea how that would help, given that the current 32 bit kernel already runs in Long Mode, but it would be cool.

3. Support for virtual machines.

I would love an Apple-supported way to install Mac OS X in a virtual machine. I'd also like Apple to work closer with VMware, Citrix, or Parallels to integrate their products better into Mac OS X.

4. Better intellisense in Xcode!

I like Xcode but Visual Studio is _so_ _much_ _easier_ to use. Apple need to do something.

5. Cocoa for Windows.

That's not technically a Mac OS X feature, but I think it is needed. And I don't care if it's difficult. Start small. Start with giving Mac developers an easier way to port to Windows from Cocoa.

6. Remote Desktop.

And by that I mean something that is not just a very slow implementation of VNC. Either write something useful or licence from Sun, Citrix, or Microsoft. It's ridiculous. My other two Macs are less than 10 feet away and it feels sluggish to use them. At work I regularly use Windows machines accross the planet using Microsoft Remote Desktop and it works flawlessly.

7. Better support for UNIX users.

The BSD base of Mac OS X is excellent, but I would love a some sort of official or at least suggested way to boot Mac OS X into a purer BSD mode (full screen command line with virtual consoles or X11), preferably side-by-side with the Aqua session.

8. Revert to the old style where windows didn't steal focus.

Microsoft Windows constantly annoys me because apparently any program can decide to steal focus whenever it wants. I start Firefox, it takes a few seconds, I switch to something else, suddenly Firefox decided it has finished starting up and steals the focus without warning. This happens all the time on Windows and is rare on Mac OS X. But with the last two releases of Mac OS X this "feature" has found its way into the Mac world. And it's Apple applications that are doing it, including iTunes. It's annoying and I want to go back to the old way.

9. Bring back the Apple-sponsored BSD package manager!

A few years ago Apple actually paid some lip service to the open source community by supporting package managers for Darwin. I want that back.