A short OS X new feature wish list 

OS X has been great to work with. But like any piece of software, it can be improved. Here are seven features that would let me work more efficiently.

  • Autocorrect typos in any text field, in any application. I use TextExpander to partially solve this problem. But it’s autocorrect algorithms don’t work as well as Microsoft Office, its dictionary is tiny (a few thousand words — sounds like a lot, but not nearly enough), and it has some frustrating bugs.
  • Resize windows from any edge or corner, not just the lower right. Especially frustrating since Microsoft Windows has had this ability since at least 1991. Would let me resize windows faster, probably by a factor of five.
  • Automatically consolidate duplicate dates. If there are two dates referring to the same event, combine their respective information. There’s an AppleScript to delete iCal duplicates, but since this isn’t the same as merging near-matches, it doesn’t fully solve the problem.
  • Automatically consolidate duplicate contacts. Address Book has functionality that partially solves this problem, but still misses out on many contacts.
  • Automatically augment contacts with directions to and from my home and office, and along with short URLs to corresponding Google Maps. I use Google Maps dozens of times a week, spending maybe half an hour a week at the site.
  • Automatically fix red eyes in photos. (But save the original picture, just in case the red-eye fix didn’t quite work out.) iPhoto can manually fix red eyes, but when you have thousands of pictures, this is very time-consuming.
  • Search for text within pictures. I use Evernote to do this for handwritten meeting notes that I’ve scanned in as jpegs. Their OCR works amazingly well, and Evernote is an incredibly useful way to keep track of what’s happened in meetings. But it’s awkward to fire up Evernote just to view a meeting note jpeg. I’d like to be able to do everything in the Finder and Preview.

One can  hope that Apple implements these sometime in the near future. And if they don’t, this provides an opening for Microsoft, Ubuntu, or some other OS.