7 August 06
Mac OSX 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard, was unveiled today at WWDC and everyone’s been desparate to find out the new features. Even my work’s internet connection apparantely got knocked out because of high demand for this event. So as a semi Mac fan-boy, I thought I’d give my very first impressions of Leopard.
Time Machine
Looks absolutely mental. I can’t tell whether the graphics incredibly tacky or actually amazing. It does look like one of those things you need to see in real life for it to appreciate the true Star Trek quality of it, but the idea of a SVN/CVS-type file system is brilliant for losers like me who always forgot to back up things. The name is atrocious though.
Mail.app updates
The new email templates work great, but in practise, they’re awful. The last thing anyone needs are huge HTML emails clogging the internet tubes. To-do lists and feed reader seem a bit… meh. Personally, I don’t like doing to-do lists in a program, or the internet [see Ta-da lists], I much prefer paper and pen; and if you’re serious about RSS, you’d get a better feed reading program like Newsfire or NetNewsWire, rather than some half-way house between those and Firefox Live Bookmarks.
iChat updates
Pointless and gimmicky.
Spaces
Name very reminiscent of MSN Spaces – don’t know if that’s intentional. Again, looks impressive, but unsure of how useful it will be. Jon Hicks says it’s very similar to Virtue Desktops and he’s absolutely correct. Should be handy for pretending to do work and switching when someone important walks past.
Dashboard updates
Again, pointless and gimmicky.
Spotlight updates
Looks like it incorporates a similar functionality to QuickSilver which is only a good thing. Advanced search looks impressive and quite useful too, especially the boolean logic searches.
iCal updates
Not really much to see here. Let’s move on.
Accessibility updates
One of the more important updates for me, personally. The new synthesized voice, named ‘Alex’, sounds like KITT from Knightrider, so that’s a big plus point. Seriously though, these accessibility functions are years ahead of Windows and Linux, and hopefully the disabled market will take notice.
Core animation
Looks very fancy. Lots of spinny things… yes… lots of things flipping over… yes… lots of processing power being pointless used… probably. Just hope the 12” lappy can manage the intense power (power said in a monster truck style voice of course) of core animations.
No, it’s not a feature film, it’s your desktop.
Indeed.
Update
Looks like Rails will be included as default, which is rather exciting. There’s obviously a lot more reaction across the blogosphere, such as here, here and here. Overall, I will give the 10.5 release a B-, as there is a lot of room for improvement, but some features do look very promising. I think we’ll just have to wait and see how they pan out…
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Let’s just hope the features they have locked away aren’t as anti-climatic as the ones they revealed! There was nothing majorly innovate in yesterdays show, hopefully they’ll bring out a feature that will really wow.
Comment by Kevin on 7 August 2006, 23:02
Apple does have some features locked away under Top Secret, so I’m sure we’ll have plenty more to look forward to. Just have to be patient so that Microsoft won’t get a clue what hit them. :)