Dear Santa: What I Want By Next Christmas

Dear Santa:

2007 was a great year and I thank you, but I want to provide you with my Christmas list for 2008. I’ve worked with so many engineers that I know that a 363-day lead time should be sufficient.

MarsEdit is indispensable for my blogging and Truemors. (If any Macintosh bloggers are on your “nice” list, give them MarsEdit next Christmas.) I need two enhancements: first, the “Media Manager” dialog has to launch faster. Second, I’d like to crop and proportionately resize pictures from within MarsEdit.

What do you use for email? I use EntourMail. Never heard of it? That’s not surprising. It’s my homemade combination of Entourage and Mail. Entourage is a bummer because it requires a rebuild seemingly every thirty days. After a rebuild, all categories disappear and rules go on vacation. Searching is glacially slow—so slow I’ve tried using Spotlight to search Entourage. How pathetic is that?

By contrast, the searching in Mail is very fast. No complaints there, but I cannot get iCal and Address Book to synchronize with Exchange. Nor can I get the combo of Mail/Kerio/Exchange to synchronize with iCal and Address Book. And I’ve spent days trying to make this work. Santa, do you see the irony of a former Macintosh software evangelist using two clients to handle email? Please tell me that Office 2008 fixes these problems.

While we’re on the subject of Office, could you tell Bill Gates to make it so that if one creates a PowerPoint presentation on a Macintosh and then runs it on a Windows machine, the slide transitions don’t get messed up? I’ve had to do this every time I’ve the transfer for several years now. When you use as few slides as I do, transitions are everything.

Everytime I buy something online or get a password, I store the confirmation email in Yojimbo. It’s saved me hundreds of dollars and many hours of looking for such tidbits of information. I would like the ability to name a document so that it can say more than “Toyota Configurator.” Then Yojimbo would be just about perfect.

Speaking of Toyota, how about getting it to make two changes to the 2008 Highlander Hybrid? First, the steering is too vague—it’s bad enough that I don’t have a sportscar, can I at least get a tight feeling SUV? Second, the third row should be a split seat so that I could carry six people. Right now, it’s five or seven only—I don’t know what I’ll do if it comes down to a choice between a hockey bag and a child.

I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass, but this is perpetually on my list: a Macintosh laptop that runs for more than two hours on a battery—unless you want to give me a Gulfstream instead. I’ve heard truemors about a solution to this, but I’ve been hearing these rumors for a long time. What does Sony know that Apple doesn’t? As we both know, hope springs eternal every January Macworld Expo.

Do you think Steve uses a digital camera? If so, please give him one because it takes forty-two seconds for my copy of iPhoto to launch. I have 13,334 pictures, but that doesn’t seem like too many photos to me. Did Apple work with Adobe about speeding up boot times? You might also ask Steve to make Safari sort its bookmarks though Bookdog works fine.

Skitch is also a very important piece of software for me. It’s what I use to take screen shots. There’s only one shortcoming in it for me: it can’t “save as” in the JPEG format. I know I can drag and drop the file to the desktop in the JPEG format, but on my MacBook Pro, I usually can’t see the desktop. This problem will get worse if my next MacBook has an even smaller screen.

You’re probably not a big user of Facebook, but we mortals are. Maybe I’m too close to my next life to make it the center of my world. Hence, answering Facebook internal email is killing me. Right now I have 226 unread messages. Maybe you could tell Mark (Zuckerberg, not St. Mark) to enable POP or IMAP access to Facebook messages?

I know you have a sleigh (did you know that Rudolph is probably gay?), but it would sure be nice if United Airlines and Executive Travel Skyguide and other airlines and travel sites would figure out that lots of people have to copy and paste itineraries into emails and calendars, so how about a clean way to do this? I don’t really need the terms of service and miscellanous junk that gets copied most of the time.

One last item that is true of almost every consumer electronics and computer company: Print serial numbers so that people can read them. Whoever designed the nanotech serial numbers for Apple products is either a sadist or he/she owns stock in flashlight and magnifyng-glass companies. Are the numbers small so that people can’t figure out if their products are part of an exchange program? How many Apple serial numbers can fit on the head of a pin? Is this some kind of FSJ Zen thing?