The Mac Pro certainly is a nice beast, and I wouldn’t mind having one or two under my desk, hooked to assorted Cinema Displays (without iSight — damn, that was a simple and credible enough rumor to come true!), but no update at all to the case? Well, no update except for the additional optical drive slot? I kind of understand the reasoning — the switch to Intel doesn’t change what a Mac is, so apparent changes should be minimal — but it’s been 200 days, the whole switch thing is behind us now, and the PowerMac case is really getting old.
@apple@
Speaking of which, can you believe they haven’t changed a single thing in the GUI? Not even brushed metal. Not even Mail capsules. Not even the Apple and Spotlight menus! Could they really consider the current state of Aqua to be so perfect, it doesn’t need the slightest refreshing anymore? Or are they just still working on it?
@apple@
Time Machine: back up all your filesystem’s history to an external disk or fileserver, and restore any previous version at any point in time.
Yeah, I’m sure that’s cool. But I’m weary of my external hard drive imploding under the weight of all my files’ revisions (what happens when the drive is full? does it stop backing up your data, or does it erase the oldest backups, so that you think you have them, only you don’t?). And don’t you just love that Leopard’s most innovative feature is the one interesting feature that hasn’t been removed from Vista? Oh, yeah, those arrogant banners? That was a misunderstanding — they’re unapologetic, not arrogant.
@apple@
Mail: HTML stationery, iDVD-style. Pretty cool, but rather useless in real-world usage. (Wow. HTML email. Seriously, who would have imagined.) Notes and to-dos: I just don’t know. While Mail is certainly the best place to hold such notes, I’m very afraid that this will be a half-assed implementation at best. But then, maybe not: “Group your notes into folders or create Smart Mailboxes,
” sounds good. Same thing for system-wide to-dos: could be great, or could be utterly useless, we’ll have to see. RSS support: pretty weird. I mean, it’s always made more sense to me than having it in the web browser, and, well, why not offer a choice of subscribing to RSS either in Safari or Mail, but… doesn’t it feel odd for two system applications to compete for the same functionality? Oh, wait, that’s right, they already did a bit of that with iTunes and podcasts.
In any case, this is all hardly revolutionary — or worthy of second place in a major OS X revision’s feature list — and, yeah, Redmond, photocopiers, all that…
@apple@
iChat: Photo Booth effects and ugly background substitution. Whatevs. Screen sharing. Very cool, but very much been there, done that, too. Sharing slideshows and presentations. Ditto. Tabs. Sure. No more brushed metal. What? Why on earth is iChat the only one application to have un updated look? Finder hasn’t changed a single icon, iCal and Safari are still metal, but iChat is updated? Makes no sense.
@apple@
Spaces: virtual desktops. I never thought that could happen. Weird. I love that OS X will have system-level virtual desktops that just work, but I still can’t believe that’s going to be in the system. Isn’t that terminally geeky? Placeholder images in Mail, cheesy backgrounds in iChat, and… virtual desktops?
@apple@
Dashboard: saving any portion of any web page as a Web Clip is pretty cool (and the DashCode announcement isn’t exactly a surprise), but still no widgets on the desktops. Meh.
The unbelievable part: the leaked screenshots of Safari with an ugly, out-of-place black Dashboard icons were for real. This thing is horrendous. It’s unbelievable. It’s almost as if they were working on a completely new black, glossy theme to replace brushed metal, and hadn’t bothered to create an old-style toolbar button for Web Clips. But, well, it’s probably not that.
@apple@
Spotlight: not only don’t they bother to announce it’s gonna be faster (talk about listening to developer and user feedback), now it’s going to be that much slower because it’ll search your other computers on the network, too.
I mean, sure, the idea of the feature is cool. And maybe it works perfectly on a quad-core Mac Pro. But I’m using an iMac G5 and I just never, ever use Spotlight because I can’t bear to wait several minutes for results to appear.
@apple@
iCal: calendar sharing, group scheduling… eh, whatever. Besides not having a personal use for that, I’m not very interested in whatever requires all your contacts and coworkers to use the same tools as you to be functional (hence my lack of interest in iChat’s new features, too).
@apple@
Accessibility: the new VoiceOver voice sounds very nice, but are we to understand that Leopard will ship with all the old voices, and one new voice using the new, better algorithm? What’s that about?
@apple@
And, on the API front, the only announcements are 64-bit support (I’m sure that’s very useful for something, but I don’t suppose it changes the way any developer works, does it?) and Core Animation. Which is, well, very cool and all, but that’s definitely not going to be a reason for developers to start releasing Leopard-only software. That means the new cat will only have to rely on its own features to sell, and… there aren’t too many worthy of a full OS update. No garbage collection? That one would have been immediately adopted by whoever developed new freeware or shareware applications, and would have been a nice incentive to upgrade the OS within six or twelve months.
@apple@
Now this intensely disappointing keynote (which wasn’t even of enough interest for Steve Jobs to do most of it himself) leaves us speculating: what the hell are those top-secret features that they can’t announce yet, for fear of being copied by Microsoft?
Don’t expect virtualization — they wouldn’t have any reason to hide it, and they confirmed today that Boot Camp would be included in Leopard. It would make no sense to keep garbage collection secret, either, since WWDC is the right place to announce it, and, uh, .NET already has it, I think (unless it falls in the “not sure that’ll be ready for launch time, so better not announce it” category). And I don’t think it would make sense for Apple to devote keynote time to the Dashboard, for instance, while holding back on such details as the ability to place a widget on the desktop (alas). What’s left? What the hell could be secret?
You know it. You know you want it. And you know you don’t want to hope for it. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. A new Finder. And maybe a black, glossy Aqua variant, but a new Finder above all. Something amazing. Or just something mediocre, but pretty. Who knows.
Want to know when I post new content to my blog? It's a simple as registering for free to an RSS aggregator (Feedly, NewsBlur, Inoreader, …) and adding www.ff00aa.com to your feeds (or www.garoo.net if you want to subscribe to all my topics). We don't need newsletters, and we don't need Twitter; RSS still exists.
Legal information: This blog is hosted par OVH, 2 rue Kellermann, 59100 Roubaix, France, www.ovhcloud.com.
Personal data about this blog's readers are not used nor transmitted to third-parties. Comment authors can request their deletion by e-mail.
All contents © the author or quoted under fair use.
