As the world wonders whether or not you’ll be able to buy the iPhone 3G in the morning or the early evening come July 11, the real question is whether the new software has all or most of the critical features missing from the original version.

Yes, there’s some great stuff in iPhone 2.0, based on what Apple has revealed so far. Forgetting the faster Internet and GPS features of the new hardware, you’ll have push email, contact list searching, improved security, full Microsoft Exchange support, the ability to read more formats and other stuff. Then there’s the incredible promise of the App Store and all the marvelous third-party stuff that’s expected.

But Apple hasn’t come close to filling the wish lists of a lot of iPhone users.

Consider: California motorists will soon be prohibited from talking on cell phones without a hands-free hookup. More and more states are considering such laws — a few have them already — in a bid to keep you from being distracted while driving and getting into an accident. Unfortunately, they haven’t considered the fact that spouses and friends will still argue with you, that you might be chomping down a burger and fries or finishing that morning coffee while negotiating a traffic jam. Some people are even known to shave or apply makeup, but all that fits into the general category of distracted driving, which may get you a traffic ticket regardless.

Unfortunately, the iPhone’s hands-free features are seriously lacking. Just buy a bluetooth headset — any model — and you’ll see what I mean. Now try to use voice dialing. Sorry, that feature isn’t supported in the iPhone even with the 2.0 software — unless Apple springs a surprise upon us by the time the thing is released next month.

Yet even the most elementary wireless handsets that you get free with the requisite two-year plan have built-in voice recognition. It may be frighteningly rudimentary, but it’s functional. So why didn’t Apple, who touts the superior voice-related features in Leopard, expand those capabilities to the iPhone?

Why indeed!

Sure, some bluetooth interfaces for motor vehicles, including some of those popular navigation systems, will provide that capability, so you don’t need it on the phone, but that’s still a serious lapse that ought to have been addressed with iPhone 1.0.

Another missing feature is cut, copy and paste. Sure, this may present some obstacles with a touch interface, but I’m sure the brilliant programmers at Apple can figure a way around this dilemma.

What about being able to edit your Office and iWork documents? No, I’m not talking about writing a long manuscript. But just being able to apply a few simple edits ought will suit for a lot of you. Imagine, for example, you’re on your way to an important meeting, and you suddenly recall a mistake in a proposal. With editing capability, you can simply pull off the road, or into a nearby Starbucks, make the changes and email the revised document to your clients.

Piece of cake right? But you can’t do that with your iPhone.

When it comes to the hardware, just when will Apple deliver support for bluetooth stereo? How about being able to sync your iPhone with your Mac or PC via your Wi-Fi router? No, I’m not expecting support yet for the 802.11n draft standard, since that would require a higher power radio that would reduce battery life. The existing connection is surely fast enough.

Now, I don’t know about the hardware, but I expect a lot of this can be implemented in software, and that would possibly include being able to make movies with your iPhone’s camera.

I would also hope that Apple would take a little time to deal with some of the iPhone’s stability problems in the rush to add great new features. While call quality is pretty decent, considering the limitations of any digital wireless phone network, my iPhone tends to crash far too often. The obvious symptom is that you’re returned to the Home screen, which is the equivalent of an application quitting. I can duplicate a few situations where this might happen, such as making too many configuration changes in my email accounts in a single sitting.

Also, I think Safari’s rendering speed could be better. Yes, I know we are limited by a slower processor, and limited RAM, but, even with a speedy Wi-Fi hookup, you shouldn’t have to wait 20 or 30 seconds for a simple Web page to display. Maybe Apple could do something to optimize the mobile version of OS X.

I’ve also encountered yet another problem, and I don’t know whether it’s related to the hardware, the software or my car. You see, at times I’ll make a call when the phone has interfaced with my car’s bluetooth setup, and the audio sputters. Hanging up and calling back doesn’t help. I have to actually restart the iPhone to set things right. AT&T says it may just represent the need for the iPhone to renegotiate its connection to the nearest cell tower. But they’re not sure either.

Regardless of its potential shortcomings, though, I’m psyched about iPhone 2.0 and especially iPhone 3G. This is one story The Night Owl will cover on an ongoing basis.

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We know now that most of the new features of Snow Leopard will be confined to the guts of the operating system, and that, other than native Microsoft Exchange support and a handful of other things, you won’t see much of a difference between 10.5 and 10.6. That, of course, excludes performance, which ought to be much greater, not to mention the system’s promised smaller footprint.

Although it may take two or three years to arrive, I thought it would be a good idea to take a stab at a proper wish list for a hoped-for feature upgrade instead (and don’t ask me what feline name Apple ought to use). Certainly with all the extra time to architect some compelling new features, you’d think that 10.7 ought to feature hundreds of them, including, perhaps, major changes in the personal computing paradigm.

Apple might, for example, leverage all that it’s learned from the grand experiment known as the iPhone in touch technology. One area that’s lacking in Multitouch, so far at least, is tactile feedback. When you work on a standard keyboard, you know your fingers are doing something because you feel the keys being pressed. With the iPhone, obviously, you’re just jamming your fingers onto a piece of glass!

That also returns you to the surface features that can still use some work and improvement. While the Leopard Finder works better than its predecessors, it can still stall temporarily when performing multiple copying operations even on an 8-core Mac Pro. Then again, maybe the multicore enhancements promised for Snow Leopard will remedy that, assuming the Finder is appropriately updated.

But let’s take this a whole lot further. You see, every single improvement you’ve seen with Mac OS X, or even the Classic Mac OS, has been incremental. The basic interface that debuted with System 1.0 back in 1984 is, in large part, fundamentally unaltered. Yes, this is testimony to the great programming efforts of the original Apple programming team, for building graphical interface conventions that have survived for nearly 25 years and have been imitated widely.

Being tried and proven doesn’t, however, mean that it’s necessarily perfect. Even experienced Mac and PC users are still occasionally flummoxed by system inconsistencies that cause migraines. When your Mac misbehaves, for example, you are often given little clear information about what to do to solve the problem, which is why we have troubleshooting sites and system maintenance utilities.

Now I do not wish to see such great programmers as John Lowry, creator of Leopard Cache Cleaner, put out of work. Such utilities serve a crying need, because they are filling in the wide gaping holes left in Mac OS X, and they also provide tools that power users crave to customize their computers.

Part of the problem, of course, is the sheer complexity of today’s personal computer operating systems, and Apple is as guilty as anyone. There are tens of millions of lines of code, and, while Apple is apparently doing it share to reduce the amount of storage space it will parcel out for itself in Snow Leopard, a leaner meaner system doesn’t mean it won’t be a bear to fix.

You should not, for example, have to pore through incomprehensible system logs to figure out what went wrong and why, nor should you ever have to enter the Terminal unless you’re a command line maven and want to do your Unix thing unfettered by a graphical shell.

Just for a change, what if Mac OS X provided clear and detailed troubleshooting guidance when things go awry? I’m not talking about offering to Relaunch an application after a sudden quit or restoring preferences to their default setting. I’m thinking more in terms of additional step-by-step guidance to help you get your Mac running again, or at least tell you where to go if the standard remedies fail.

This is also a large reason why I dislike the current Help system. Making the Help menu labels smaller than the others might allow for more information to be delivered in a single line, but it’s otherwise a questionable design choice in a system where interface inconsistencies were supposed to be eradicated.

The core question, though, is whether system-related assistance can be done in a way that works well for the novice, the experienced user, and the power user alike. That’s why I return to the suggestion I made early on (for 10.5 and 10.6, for that matter) that there should be some sort of intelligent Help system that refashions itself on the fly depending on the level of knowledge you display.

So when you first encounter the initial Setup Assistant,you are asked a few simple questions that are used to determine your level of expertise (it can always be changed later). On that basis of that information, the level of Help is configured to best guide you through the various functions of the operating system.

An active Help scheme, for example, could put up tiny messages to alert you to a better way to accomplish a task. Why, for example, double click on a document, when the application is running and the Open dialog box would handle that task a lot quicker? And don’t get me started about the lapses in the Open/Save dialogs. That’s why we have Default Folder X. To this day, in fact, Apple seems to have learned little from the work of Jon Gotow in making his dialog box enhancer a must-have.

This is, however, just the beginning. Now that we know that few of our hopes and dreams will likely be fulfilled in Snow Leopard, it’s time to consider the prospects for 10.7. This time, we’re entering this dialog early enough for Apple to actually consider some of these suggestions before too much work has been done.

And, believe it or not, it’s very likely Apple has already done preliminary work on 10.7 and even some of its successors.

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The news first come to listeners of The Tech Night Owl LIVE during the final portion of last Thursday’s episode. According to commentator Kirk McElhearn, a new potentially critical exploit had been discovered that could really impact Mac OS X users.

Dubbed by some “AppleScript-THT,” it uses AppleScript to apparently exploit a vulnerability in the Apple Remote Desktop Agent, allowing it to load itself with super user or root privileges. The end result is that the invader can take control of the unwary victim’s Mac and do some nasty stuff, such as delete your files, retrieve your stored passwords, and other unwelcome things.

One method in which the Trojan is supplied is in the form of a file bearing the unlikely name of ASthtv05. It doesn’t strike me as something you’d casually download — or am I missing something?

Regardless of what it’s called, however, you can’t succumb to this malware infection unless you actually download the file and launch it. There’s no other way to surrender control of your Mac.

You can bet that such virus protection applications as Intego’s VirusBarrier have already been updated to guard against this exploit. But, according to Kirk, there’s an even easier way to protect yourself. In 10.5, for example, just open System Preferences, choose Sharing, and check Remote Management to turn it on. Just make sure that all the choices listed under Options are left unselected.

This may sound counterintuitive, of course, but a test that Kirk and I ran during the radio show demonstrated that the Trojan couldn’t take over my Mac Pro with Remote Management activated, which is quite enough protection for me. I would also expect that, if there’s a chance at all that this Trojan is spreading, Apple will close the security hole in a future Mac OS X update for 10.4 and 10.5 user.

This particular episode, raises the larger question of whether Mac users are in for a deluge of malware now that the flood gates are open. However, let’s try to look at this a bit more realistically, because there have been a handful of other exploits in the wild over the past few years, and none of them have amounted to anything, except for limited infections.

No, I’m not taking the nature of this threat lightly. You wouldn’t want to suffer the consequences of having your Mac compromised simply because you accidently downloaded and executed the wrong file. It would seem likely that some people will be affected, regardless.

I also expect that Windows fanboys will now be flooding their blogs with inane chatter that Mac users are now finally getting what they deserve, a true epidemic of malware. Serves them right, they’ll say, to dare criticize the Windows platform as being too vulnerable.

But it’s not as easy as that. It has taken years for the number of Windows exploits to hit six figures. From day one, the number of Mac infections is still a few dozen. Sure, Apple has patched lots of potential vulnerabilities in Mac OS X in recent years, but a potential security leak doesn’t translate into rampant malware.

AppleScript exploits, for example, aren’t new to Mac OS X. We had some under the Classic Mac OS as well, and they didn’t amount to much then either. So, my friends, I don’t think the dam is about to burst. At the same time, though, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t show a little caution about how you use your Mac.

You see, it’s far too easy to download files willy-nilly without paying a lot of attention to where they came from and what they’re designed to do. Even when a password prompt appears, how often do you just enter the login information without considering the consequences of what you’re doing?

In the end the simplest thing to do is just download your stuff from trusted sources, such as Apple or a software developer’s own site. As an alternate, you might go to one of the well-known software update repositories, such as VersionTracker.com. These steps alone will help protect you from getting the wrong file and launching it.

Even then, before you open a file, make doubly sure you know what it’s designed to do and whether you rally need it. Leopard adds a little warning prompt first time you open a file you downloaded, and you should read the message to confirm you really want to open that file.

I do, however, think it’s still premature to go the whole hog and acquire virus prevention software. The time may come, but it’s probably not worth buying a product and keeping up with annual subscriptions for the rare exploit that does appear. If they become ubiquitous, though, then maybe you’ll want to rethink your position, and I surely would as well.

One more way to protect yourself from visiting the wrong sites that might offer up potential malware, and speed up your Web access slightly, is to switch your DNS settings to the free OpenDNS. Libraries, schools and private companies are embracing this free service, and I highly recommend you consider it carefully. The setup process, explained at the site, takes less than a minute, and you’ll be delighted with the results and your enhanced security.

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