After reading these suggestions for the improvement of Mac OS X, I can’t help but think of the manager in “Fight Club” who asks “Can I get this icon in cornflower?” Cosmetic changes, while entertaining, do not an OS major revision make, and can sometimes even break it. Now I’m no Cocoa guru, but if the APIs are exposed, maybe what would be more reasonable is for someone who is not necessarily Apple write a viable Dock or Finder replacement (and at least for Finder, I believe there are already a few around, although the best ones are not free, either as in beer, or as in speech.) Why does the OS itself have to contain millions of bits and pieces that are not essential to an OS?

Then again, maybe I’m just used to a more open-source kind of world, where the inevitable response to such a suggestion post would be to “write it yourself!” Linux, my OS before Mac OS X, is, in the final analysis, the cobbling together of various individual pieces of software, some essential, some less so, some mere entertainment, and some completely useless and non-working. In an open-source world, it’s not the vendor’s responsibility for allowing you easy access to ephemeral, superficial customization. (Although, contrary to what many Linuxheads may claim, I do think that it is the vendor’s responsibility to release a working user interface—even if it’s not a GUI—that allows you to administer your system out of the package, which was not always the case for some of the distros that I experimented with.) If the source is open (which is in fact the case for the Mach Kernel and BSD Subsystem that comprises Mac OS X, but which sadly does not apply to Aqua) or in the very least, if the APIs are open (which is, I believe, the case for Cocoa), you should just write it yourself and not ask that the other thousand users who like the OS should be burdened by your personal preferences.