As WWDC fast approaches, and rumors of the next OS X update focusing on polish persist, I thought I’d go over my wish list for what I’d like to see Apple address.
Vulkan/Enhanced Graphics Support
The graphics situation on OS X is bad. 3D graphics on OS X have been rocky from the beginning (the first ever public OpenGL demo on OS X, which sadly I cannot find video of), but Apple in the past was willing to participate in a benchmark war with DirectX. At WWDC 2006, I remember Apple was still rolling out new features to try and compete with DirectX’s performance. And with 10.6 Apple introduced OpenCL which went on to become an industry standard for GPU based computation.
But recently, while Linux and Windows have had continuous cycles of improvement for 3D graphics, OS X has been seeing improvements in fits and starts. Mavericks, which moved to OpenGL 4, looked like it might be a recommitment to improving 3D graphics on OS X. But Yosemite didn’t seem to bring any real improvement to OpenGL at a time when OpenGL on the platform is already seriously lagging.
There is some speculation that Apple will bring Metal to Mac OS X, which from what I’ve heard seems like a strong possibility. Metal on Mac OS X might provide a direct route to high performance 3D and 2D graphics, but Apple might have a long road ahead in convincing developers to adopt Metal, and GPU manufacturers to write drivers for it. The driver quality on OS X for OpenGL is already so hit and miss it’s hard to believe that Apple would be able to get AMD and Nvidia to write a good driver for Apple’s proprietary Metal platform, when the OpenGL driver quality is already not that great. I have no doubt that Apple would be able to get a few software vendors on stage to demo Metal support on the Mac (Epic seems like a good possibility), but there are several third party vendors (like Adobe or Valve) that I see not being eager to have to support another standard. I could see Adobe dragging their feet for a long time on supporting Metal, or possibly not supporting it ever.
Recently the next version of OpenGL called Vulkan was announced and I think this would be a great chance for Apple to really improve cross platform graphics on OS X. Vulkan already has strong support from Valve (which is huge for a developer that used to be strongly in the DirectX camp), and is more likely to draw support from Adobe. The word is Apple is still on the fence about supporting Vulkan on the Mac. Vulkan supports the same capabilities as Metal, which puts it in an awkward position on OS X. But there will be a lot of smaller developers that won’t be able to put forth the effort to port to Metal, especially in the professional software community, so it would be foolish not to support Vulkan. Vulkan also promises a simplified driver architecture, which could be a boon for the traditionally complex development of OpenGL drivers on Mac OS X. I’d even suggest that maybe Apple should be spinning down development of Metal and really focusing on Vulkan instead, but I think the politics of Apple wouldn’t really allow for that.
At the very least, seeing support for OpenGL 4.5 in Mac OS 10.11 would be ideal, but it would be great to see Vulkan support. Metal would be an improvement as well, but I worry it would further alienate some developers of both professional software and games if only Metal were present as a modern API.
A Modern Window Server
(I don’t have visibility into the OS X window server, so this section is based on speculation on how Apple has implemented some parts of Yosemite. Please let me know if there are any corrections to be made.)
OS X’s window server is another component that had a very impressive start, looked to have a very impressive future, and then suddenly seemed to have public facing development stop while competing platforms passed it by.
The very first version of the Mac OS X window server did every bit of it’s drawing on the CPU. That made sense at the time. Great dedicated GPUs were still not common on the hardware OS X supported, and the OpenGL support required may not have been present either. But as a result, basic things like dragging windows across the screen was choppy on the first versions of Mac OS X.
In 10.2, Apple added something called Quartz Extreme. While everything inside of a window was still drawn on the CPU under Quartz Extreme, the contents of the windows themselves were stored on the GPU, meaning operations like moving a window around on the screen became very quick. There was a further project called Quartz 2D Extreme (later QuartzGL) which would have drawn the contents of the windows themselves with the GPU. This project was comparable to Windows Vista’s Windows Presentation Foundation which promised similar features to unlock fancy effects such as windows with a glass like transparency. While WPF was the source of a lot of Vista’s early performance issues, high requirements, and consumer confusion (Microsoft had two tiers of Vista certification for hardware, and one was not compatible with WPF), Microsoft’s investment in a fully GPU accelerated window server eventually paid off with a fast and responsive user interface that is capable of rendering advanced effects with ease.
Apple’s QuartzGL project eventually fizzled out due to performance issues (some interesting benchmarks are still posted here). With 10.11, it might be time for Apple to take a second look at extending QuartzGL further. Microsoft has pushed through their performance issues, and many of the visual effects Apple is trying to do with Yosemite could be speed up by GPU acceleration.The “glass” vibrancy effect OS X is using doesn’t seem to be GPU accelerated, which might be leading to some performance issues (I sometimes see vibrancy backed views “lag” behind their window being drawn which leads me to believe the vibrancy effect isn’t drawn as part of window compositing on the GPU.) GPUs are really good at these sorts of effects, and it would be great to have a window server that could do things like flag a portion of a window to the GPU as transparent, and then attach a shader to that portion of the window. As with Windows, not every element on the display would have to be drawn on the GPU. Certain views could opt in to GPU backed drawing (such as the vibrancy view), which would help the performance of views that could benefit, without hurting the performance of other views.
My understanding is that QuartzGL is still present in some form in Yosemite, and that applications can opt in to it, but it would be great to see QuartzGL taken a few steps further to allow the advanced OS X vibrancy effects to be GPU backed.
Networking and WebKit Enhancements
Yosemites’ networking woes have been well documented at this point, but I’ve also noticed a decline in Safari’s quality. HTML5 web views in particular don’t perform right, the controls always seem to be in the wrong place, the video is scaled incorrectly, and sometimes they don’t play at all. I’m having to open Chrome more and more often these days and I really wish I wouldn’t have to.
Pro Hardware
As a follow up to my post about the Mac Pro, I had one more thing that I wouldn’t mind seeing at WWDC, but it’s really a long shot. If Apple doesn’t really care to continue maintaining their pro hardware, they should really think about licensing OS X. It doesn’t have to be a license free for all. Maybe they could only license to certain HP product lines. And Apple hasn’t been against licensing in the past. Apple’s failures in markets like the server market weren’t necessarily because OS X made a poor choice for servers, but because the company didn’t seem to be willing to provide the support services required for that market. Apple’s Pro hardware may be in a similar place.
If Apple really comes out supporting Pros over the next year in a big way, I’ll gladly eat my words. But I’m becoming more and more convinced that licensing OS X would allow Apple to keep users who are happily buying Apple software (and would be paying Apple licensing fees) as an alternative to having them leave the platform entirely would be the best course of action. If Apple isn’t willing to dirty themselves with towers that can be opened and customized, or 1U rack mount servers, they could let someone else serve those markets for them.
End of Sandboxing For the Mac App Store
The Mac App Store is slowly dying, and sandboxing is a big reason. Apple either needs to fix sandboxing, or remove it as a requirement. This is again a place where Windows 10 is pulling ahead of Apple.
Real Exchange Support on OS X
Microsoft Outlook, especially the new beta version, provides a good Exchange client on Mac OS X. But I’d love to see the built in support enhanced. Mail.app still doesn’t support push email. The Exchange client in iCal still sucks (better meeting availability assistant, please.)
Conclusion
A lot of the suggestions I’m making are not user facing, but are instead foundational. OS X hasn’t had many foundational enhancements in almost 10 years (not counting security orientated things like Gatekeeper.) Microsoft has put a lot of working into their foundations that cost a lot of time and money that Apple has so far been unwilling to commit. My worry is that if Apple doesn’t concentrate on the less glamorous aspects of OS X, like graphics performance, the user experience will continue to decline. Apple is simply stacking too many new features on an aging foundation. Beyond stabilizing the features they already have, Apple really needs to look at building a foundation for the next 10 years of the Mac.