Leopard
I know a few people have said that they’re "underwhelmed" by Leopard but I for one am really looking forward to it.
I’ve already written about my favorite announcements from WWDC. News continues to trickle out from the usual places.
Really great stuff
- "Lastly, spring-loaded Dock folders finally arrive in Mac OS X, allowing a file to be dragged to a folder in the dock and, when the mouse button remains held over that folder, have it spring open and provide typical spring-loaded folder navigation."
- "Safari 3.0 … sports a vastly improved in-page Find feature. Instead of hunting for where the searched term appears on a page (sometimes a nuisance when your highlight color is yellow and the page is white, for example), Safari employs some Quartz magic and tints the whole page with the exception of the matching search criteria, making them very easy to spot."
"Cool", "neat" and "nice" stuff
- "A new View Option in Leopard lets you specify Grid Spacing, so more (or fewer) icons fit in one window."
- "Mail 3.0 (840.1/840) now supports RSS feeds.": it will probably displace Safari as my RSS tool of choice.
- "The Help menu has gained some Spotlight functionality across all applications. Users can now easily invoke menu commands from Help, which tells you where you can find the command and will even point it out to you if you like.": I rarely use help myself but as a developer I think this will be great for my users, and provides a strong incentive to bundle help documentation inside the app rather than leaving it online.
- "The Trash window finally sheds its identical appearance to other Finder windows, making it easier to identify that it’s the Trash, as well as adding a button for emptying it from the window itself."
Disappointing
- "A new View Option in Leopard lets you specify Grid Spacing, so more (or fewer) icons fit in one window."
- "Mail 3.0 (840.1/840) now supports RSS feeds.": it will probably displace Safari as my RSS tool of choice.
- "The Help menu has gained some Spotlight functionality across all applications. Users can now easily invoke menu commands from Help, which tells you where you can find the command and will even point it out to you if you like.": I rarely use help myself but as a developer I think this will be great for my users, and provides a strong incentive to bundle help documentation inside the app rather than leaving it online.
- "The Trash window finally sheds its identical appearance to other Finder windows, making it easier to identify that it’s the Trash, as well as adding a button for emptying it from the window itself."
Disappointing
Looks like my initial hopes that Time Machine was built on top of ZFS were unfounded. A bit of a shame, but who knows what more awaits between now and release? Jobs said they only showed a sampling of new features and that there was plenty of secret stuff that would be revealed later on so my hopes for this new version of the OS are very high indeed. And fully 64 bit on 64 bit machines, this thing is going to scream.