Mac OS X turns three

March 24, 2004 is the third birthday of Mac OS X, not counting betas. Ars.Technica is celebrating with a somewhat obsessive-compulsive recap of three years of OS X. Good read–relive the madness of DVD playing on 10.0! Hard to believe it’s only been three years; seems like the pinstripes have been around forever.With 10.3, Mac OS X really came in to its own–there are few obvious improvements to make at this point. But nevertheless, as the faithful eagerly await the release of 10.4, here are a couple of suggestions for said release:

• Make FTP in the Finder actually work and let me upload files to servers

• While you’re at it, make it do SFTP as well

• The metal Finder has to go. Seriously. What the hell were you thinking?

• Linux API compatibility. Let us download and compile Linux software without all the patching

• Provide a mechanism to let Mail remember self-signed certs, so we don’t have to click through all the warnings every time we start Mail

• More speed is always good

• Don’t forget the Mac is your core market. Don’t get sidetracked too much with iTunes Music Store and the iPod. They’re cool and groovy and all that, but what we need is a great Mac experience

• Make Python an officially supported scripting language. AppleScript kills kittens. Enough said

Wow, that’s a short list. But there really aren’t that many annoying glitches in 10.3, which hopefully means that the elves in Cupertino are free to work on creating exceptionally cool things…Music: Stream from Secret Agent