Wincent's dog: Leopard Reaction
Seeing as every man and his dog has or is going to opine on the WWDC keynote I don’t think it’s necessary for me to add anything here.
My dog, however, feels differently, so I’m going to hand over to him:
I was a little underwhelmed by the keynote. A year after we were told that Leopard had some "Top Secret" stuff still waiting to be uncovered I expected some big things. Jobs boasted that Leopard had 300 "new features" and that he was going to show us 10 of them. Alas, 8 of the 10 features were things we’d already seen one year ago at WWDC 2006.
The new Dock
The Dock has come a long, long way from the early days of the first Mac OS X Developer Previews. This latest iteration is evolutionary, not revolutionary, but it’s still a welcome change. It’s improved in two ways: firstly, it looks better (you can see how much Apple has learned from Cover Flow); secondly; "stacks" are at once a replacement for the much-missed pop-up folders from OS 9 and also an incarnation of Apple’s famous "piles" patents. Stacks don’t just look cool, I think they’ll actually be extremely useful. I think they combine the best of OS 9’s pop-up windows with the flexibility of the NeXT shelf; you’re not just looking at a static folder, but at an arbitrarily configurable collection of objects.
The new Finder
The much pined-for Finder rewrite is here at last. Is it Carbon like iTunes? Or Cocoa like iPhoto? Who cares? iTunes and iPhoto are proof that it’s possible to write best-of-class applications in either Carbon or Cocoa. Apple pioneered a lot of things in iTunes; making it easy to navigate vast collections of files at lightning speed, intuitively and flexibly. Applying those lessons to the file browser is a good move. It gets a definite thumbs-up from me. And amazing to see how far they’ve taken the Cover Flow idea.
ZFS
No mention of ZFS. A storm in a teacup. The Time Machine demo on the Apple website shows the Time Machine is still just a backup tool for copying to a second volume. This is not powered by ZFS snapshots under the hood. There is a simple explanation for Jonathan Schwartz’s statement about ZFS the other day: Apple was never going to make ZFS the default (bootable) filesystem in the Leopard timeframe; the only evidence we had was a posting by an Apple guy to a mailing list that they wanted to port, and various signs in the other Leopard seeds that implementation was underway. No public statements had yet been made. What Schwartz meant was that Apple would finally be making public statements that ZFS would be supported (but not as a boot volume).
Well, in the end no public statements were made. The rest of WWDC will be under NDA so I don’t expect any statements to be made either. Perhaps Jobs is upset with Schwartz for inadvertently stealing his thunder. It’s happened before (think ATI).
Safari on Windows
Puzzling, puzzling, puzzling. This is like the neighbourhood computer store purchasing a corner inside the Dell staff cafeteria and opening up a stall. David dropping by at Goliath’s house proposing a few quick rounds of sumo wrestling. Why? Firefox already has the mindshare of those disgruntled IE-haters who run Windows. The only possible reason I can think of is that Safari is the new application platform for the iPhone, and this is an indirect way of getting more potential developers for that.
The rest
The remaining 8 new features that Steve talked about are all old news. Spaces will be great (virtual desktops done right) and a great complement to Exposé and the Dashboard. Core Animation will enable some cool stuff and will also be abused. Brushed metal is gone (yay!). The Terminal has tabs (nerds rejoice).
Quicklook will be extremely handy: again evolution of the existing preview mechanisms rather than revolution. This is probably the way it should be.
Making the menu bar transparent is an obvious move that will make the Desktop seem bigger and deeper. I haven’t seen it in action yet but I imagine it will become more opaque when you mouse over it. Again, evolution and polish rather than evolution.
The live coverage provided by MacRumors was awesome; almost as good as being there. They are the ones to tune in to next time we want to see a keynote and there’s no webcast.
So, my socks weren’t knocked off but I am still very much looking forward to Leopard. Tiger is currently the best desktop operating system in the world, and far better than Vista, but Leopard will be upping the ante and incresing the lead even further. I am quite looking forward to it. I just hope the beta is stable enough to actually do development work on…
The Dock has come a long, long way from the early days of the first Mac OS X Developer Previews. This latest iteration is evolutionary, not revolutionary, but it’s still a welcome change. It’s improved in two ways: firstly, it looks better (you can see how much Apple has learned from Cover Flow); secondly; "stacks" are at once a replacement for the much-missed pop-up folders from OS 9 and also an incarnation of Apple’s famous "piles" patents. Stacks don’t just look cool, I think they’ll actually be extremely useful. I think they combine the best of OS 9’s pop-up windows with the flexibility of the NeXT shelf; you’re not just looking at a static folder, but at an arbitrarily configurable collection of objects.
The much pined-for Finder rewrite is here at last. Is it Carbon like iTunes? Or Cocoa like iPhoto? Who cares? iTunes and iPhoto are proof that it’s possible to write best-of-class applications in either Carbon or Cocoa. Apple pioneered a lot of things in iTunes; making it easy to navigate vast collections of files at lightning speed, intuitively and flexibly. Applying those lessons to the file browser is a good move. It gets a definite thumbs-up from me. And amazing to see how far they’ve taken the Cover Flow idea.
ZFS
No mention of ZFS. A storm in a teacup. The Time Machine demo on the Apple website shows the Time Machine is still just a backup tool for copying to a second volume. This is not powered by ZFS snapshots under the hood. There is a simple explanation for Jonathan Schwartz’s statement about ZFS the other day: Apple was never going to make ZFS the default (bootable) filesystem in the Leopard timeframe; the only evidence we had was a posting by an Apple guy to a mailing list that they wanted to port, and various signs in the other Leopard seeds that implementation was underway. No public statements had yet been made. What Schwartz meant was that Apple would finally be making public statements that ZFS would be supported (but not as a boot volume).
Well, in the end no public statements were made. The rest of WWDC will be under NDA so I don’t expect any statements to be made either. Perhaps Jobs is upset with Schwartz for inadvertently stealing his thunder. It’s happened before (think ATI).
Safari on Windows
Puzzling, puzzling, puzzling. This is like the neighbourhood computer store purchasing a corner inside the Dell staff cafeteria and opening up a stall. David dropping by at Goliath’s house proposing a few quick rounds of sumo wrestling. Why? Firefox already has the mindshare of those disgruntled IE-haters who run Windows. The only possible reason I can think of is that Safari is the new application platform for the iPhone, and this is an indirect way of getting more potential developers for that.
The rest
The remaining 8 new features that Steve talked about are all old news. Spaces will be great (virtual desktops done right) and a great complement to Exposé and the Dashboard. Core Animation will enable some cool stuff and will also be abused. Brushed metal is gone (yay!). The Terminal has tabs (nerds rejoice).
Quicklook will be extremely handy: again evolution of the existing preview mechanisms rather than revolution. This is probably the way it should be.
Making the menu bar transparent is an obvious move that will make the Desktop seem bigger and deeper. I haven’t seen it in action yet but I imagine it will become more opaque when you mouse over it. Again, evolution and polish rather than evolution.
The live coverage provided by MacRumors was awesome; almost as good as being there. They are the ones to tune in to next time we want to see a keynote and there’s no webcast.
So, my socks weren’t knocked off but I am still very much looking forward to Leopard. Tiger is currently the best desktop operating system in the world, and far better than Vista, but Leopard will be upping the ante and incresing the lead even further. I am quite looking forward to it. I just hope the beta is stable enough to actually do development work on…
No mention of ZFS. A storm in a teacup. The Time Machine demo on the Apple website shows the Time Machine is still just a backup tool for copying to a second volume. This is not powered by ZFS snapshots under the hood. There is a simple explanation for Jonathan Schwartz’s statement about ZFS the other day: Apple was never going to make ZFS the default (bootable) filesystem in the Leopard timeframe; the only evidence we had was a posting by an Apple guy to a mailing list that they wanted to port, and various signs in the other Leopard seeds that implementation was underway. No public statements had yet been made. What Schwartz meant was that Apple would finally be making public statements that ZFS would be supported (but not as a boot volume).
Well, in the end no public statements were made. The rest of WWDC will be under NDA so I don’t expect any statements to be made either. Perhaps Jobs is upset with Schwartz for inadvertently stealing his thunder. It’s happened before (think ATI).
Puzzling, puzzling, puzzling. This is like the neighbourhood computer store purchasing a corner inside the Dell staff cafeteria and opening up a stall. David dropping by at Goliath’s house proposing a few quick rounds of sumo wrestling. Why? Firefox already has the mindshare of those disgruntled IE-haters who run Windows. The only possible reason I can think of is that Safari is the new application platform for the iPhone, and this is an indirect way of getting more potential developers for that.
The rest
The remaining 8 new features that Steve talked about are all old news. Spaces will be great (virtual desktops done right) and a great complement to Exposé and the Dashboard. Core Animation will enable some cool stuff and will also be abused. Brushed metal is gone (yay!). The Terminal has tabs (nerds rejoice).
Quicklook will be extremely handy: again evolution of the existing preview mechanisms rather than revolution. This is probably the way it should be.
Making the menu bar transparent is an obvious move that will make the Desktop seem bigger and deeper. I haven’t seen it in action yet but I imagine it will become more opaque when you mouse over it. Again, evolution and polish rather than evolution.
The live coverage provided by MacRumors was awesome; almost as good as being there. They are the ones to tune in to next time we want to see a keynote and there’s no webcast.
So, my socks weren’t knocked off but I am still very much looking forward to Leopard. Tiger is currently the best desktop operating system in the world, and far better than Vista, but Leopard will be upping the ante and incresing the lead even further. I am quite looking forward to it. I just hope the beta is stable enough to actually do development work on…
The remaining 8 new features that Steve talked about are all old news. Spaces will be great (virtual desktops done right) and a great complement to Exposé and the Dashboard. Core Animation will enable some cool stuff and will also be abused. Brushed metal is gone (yay!). The Terminal has tabs (nerds rejoice).
Quicklook will be extremely handy: again evolution of the existing preview mechanisms rather than revolution. This is probably the way it should be.
Making the menu bar transparent is an obvious move that will make the Desktop seem bigger and deeper. I haven’t seen it in action yet but I imagine it will become more opaque when you mouse over it. Again, evolution and polish rather than evolution.
The live coverage provided by MacRumors was awesome; almost as good as being there. They are the ones to tune in to next time we want to see a keynote and there’s no webcast.
So, my socks weren’t knocked off but I am still very much looking forward to Leopard. Tiger is currently the best desktop operating system in the world, and far better than Vista, but Leopard will be upping the ante and incresing the lead even further. I am quite looking forward to it. I just hope the beta is stable enough to actually do development work on…