First Hand Reports on WWDC's Leopard 9A466

[Multimedia]

Bye Bye G3

Well we now know that Tiger is the end of the road for G3 Macs. Glad to see all the G4's are still included. 256MB of minimum RAM is not too big a threshold to reach.

 

[MrSmith]

Forget touch screens - let's have better voice recognition. "Scroll up" is much easier than scraping the screen, even with the top surface of your fingernail.

 

[jhande]

See, everyone's complaining about multitouch and saying its flawed... We're just not used to it. We've been using traditional keyboards for decades - it'll take a little while to get the hang of an input device lacking tactile feedback.
The thing is though - you'll get the hang of it. Remember the first few times you used a keyboard? Searching for each individual key, pushing them in instead of tapping them... Remember how it would take you two minutes to type anything more than about eight letters? Now look at you - how things have changed!

There's another take on it as well: Look at fretless stringed instruments (violin etc). Unlike a guitar, you develop a 'point sense' (like in fencing) for each of your fingers, where they are in relation to your hands, and where each hand is in relation to the other. All it takes is practice (however, given that the vast majority of keyboard users still are of the hunt and peck variety...)

I had an iBiz laser projection keyboard for a while (until it broke), and apart from the sunshine problem, I could almost touch-type.

Getting people to practice, tho', that's the Achilles heel in all of this.

 

[c-Row]

RE: Dock on the side

From the keynote:

Well that's nothing really new... you can move the Dock to the side in the current version of OS X just fine.

 

[GregA]

10.6 is probably three years away from right now, so I think that it'd be feasible to have multi-touch as a way to interact with the system. I don't think we'll get rid of our keyboards with the introduction of multi-touch on desktop/laptop computers because it's probably not practical for entering lots of data.
-Chasen

I think it is feasible now.
Remember - the mouse didn't replace the keyboard - the mouse is simply not practical for entering lots of data. It has its own uses.

See, everyone's complaining about multitouch and saying its flawed... We're just not used to it.

Agreed. I also don't think we (or Apple) know how we'd use it. Either it'll take extensive testing - or they could enable it with existing things like 2 finger dragging inside window content (like touch pads), pinch zoom in/out (like iPhone) for changing window size, iPhoto and quicktime size, along with single-finger replacements for mice (use for stacks, drag movie clips into your iMovie timeline, etc)... and then see what people do with it.

It'll take yonks, but eventually someone will release a multitouch screen to serve as a keyboard... It won't sell much to begin with, but slowly people begin to realise its power - imagine being able ot personalise your keyboard layout? Even better - imagine being about to set up a custom layout for each app?

I don't want a keyboard replacement.

 

[NewSc2]

Forget touch screens - let's have better voice recognition. "Scroll up" is much easier than scraping the screen, even with the top surface of your fingernail.

i disagree. touching is far easier than speaking

 

[indraunt]

Forget touch screens - let's have better voice recognition. "Scroll up" is much easier than scraping the screen, even with the top surface of your fingernail.

"I'm afraid I can't do that Dave"

 

[c-Row]

i disagree. touching is far easier than speaking

And more secure I think - "No! I meant I wanna read my files, not delete my files!"

But then again that's what Time Machine is built in for...

 

[Aranince]

All these cool Mac features makes me want my first Mac so much more. Must....find....job......

 

[TBaggins]

Well that's nothing really new... you can move the Dock to the side in the current version of OS X just fine.

I think people were worried that you couldn't because there's a 3Dish 'shelf' in the Dock now...

 

[MrSmith]

i disagree. touching is far easier than speaking

And more secure I think - "No! I meant I wanna read my files, not delete my files!"

OK, for non-destructive actions speaking must be quicker than dragging your arm across the desk.

 

[Yixian]

Hate to break it to you all but I read that blog MR mentions before it was taken down, and it had about twice as many negative bullet points as positive ones, mostly random bugs and a list of 3rd party apps the beta completely broke, such as Word.

Sounded irritatingly glitchy for an OS that has been in alpha/beta for so frickin long...

 

[MrSmith]

Let's hope Quicksilver still works!

 

[Evangelion]

Hate to break it to you all but I read that blog MR mentions before it was taken down, and it had about twice as many negative bullet points as positive ones, mostly random bugs and a list of 3rd party apps the beta completely broke, such as Word.

Sounded irritatingly glitchy for an OS that has been in alpha/beta for so frickin long...

Um, the number of various points is irrelevant. What if it had listed "Absolutely kick-ass Finder" as a positive, while listing "reflections in the dock could look better" and "There's slight corruption in the corners of the iCal-window" as negatives? Would you then think that Leopard sucks since it had twice as many negative points as positive points? And the negatives you listed are to be expected. Some random bugs and problems with some third-party apps. Well, that's why it hasn't been released yet. If those problems weren't there we would be running Leopard as we speak.

 

[MrCrowbar]

Let's hope Quicksilver still works!

I know, I sure hope so. They're working on it apparently, so it might not be ready day 1, but will be soon enough. Maybe with some core animation stuff? Would make it more efficient.

 

[Lixivial]

Hate to break it to you all but I read that blog MR mentions before it was taken down, and it had about twice as many negative bullet points as positive ones, mostly random bugs and a list of 3rd party apps the beta completely broke, such as Word.

Sounded irritatingly glitchy for an OS that has been in alpha/beta for so frickin long...

Oh?

I see, well, then perhaps you missed the line that said:

All in all, if this is the stability we we see four months before release , this is going to be a terrific version of MacOS X.

EDIT: So, then, that's a short list of third-party apps borked and a longer list of ones that work or mostly work. Four of the negative bullets can be condensed into one. Changed link to screenshot image to adhere to MR's policy of not linking directly.

 

[Bye Bye Baby]

Love it

I think some people are just more visual than others. Some people like icon view. I live in list view.

Do they have Coverflow for DOS?

Rocketman

I must say that I really love cover flow. For someone who has thousands of documents with very similar titles the ability to be able to look into documents while searching will be of great value. Quicklook is also a great feature for that.

I must say that the biggest feature is that Apple has finally worked multi-core into their system software. If it's done well it should bring some major advancements to the system. IF IT"S DONE WELL...

 

[CJM]

Tsk tsk... Leopard is already being seeded by certain naughty torrent sites...

 

[dopeytree]

limited memory

Yeah, at some point, Apple might want to have Cover Flow be the default view in iTunes. As soon as most people's systems can handle it easily. I think we might be there already... my iBook G4 800 MHz deals with Cover Flow pretty well... though of course it does not have ze crappy Integrated Graphics that MacBooks have nowadays.

Or at least label Apple could label the different views in the iTunes UI... right now, its just 3 small, obscure, unlabelled buttons at upper right.

.

the ibooks only had 32mb of memory on the gpu anyway didnt they? which is probably about the same available to the macbooks?

 

[dopeytree]

Real Voice

Forget touch screens - let's have better voice recognition. "Scroll up" is much easier than scraping the screen, even with the top surface of your fingernail.

I seem to remember something about steve saying they were making the speech thing in leopard much more 'real' sounding?

 

[mungler]

Tsk tsk... Leopard is already being seeded by certain naughty torrent sites...

if you're talking about oink, it was a fake and has since been removed.

("amusingly", it was a Vista ISO).

 

[CJM]

I checked again... they're older builds anyway..

 

[Vinnie_vw]

Well all I can say, is that multitouch + coverflow will do wonders for the pr0n-industry

(personally, I think there'll sooner be a Surface-keyboard than an iPhone one anytime soon. Mouse-wise, there could be a trackpad from Apple eventually, who knows. Actually it already is fairly multitouch. But if you think about it, is the pinch really necessary on a large screen?)

 

[SPUY767]

It's almost comical that we complain that it's not appreciably faster. I, for one, am happy when I perform a windows update and my computer isn't noticably slower. I noticed slowdown when I went from XP vanilla to SP1 oh so many years ago, and again with SP2, granted, this was on rather mediocre hardware at the time. I would be thrilled if the speed generated in the benchmarks was the same, let alone a little bit faster. I think we've gotten so spoiled by the OS speeding up as the code was optimized, that we're kind of upset that it's about as fast as it's going to get. Spotlight was the only sticking point for me, ever. And even with spotlight, I only had to wait a second or two for it to catch up to my typing. As for carbon not being 64 bit, that's a big "meh" from me. Carbon was never meant to be a development API for OS X it was always a transitionary module from Classic. If Leopard comes out with all the features that were mentioned, I will be a happy camper.

 

[zgh1999]

I like the idea of being able to preview and browse contents of files in a folder quickly, as in Leopard.

But I am just not too sure about the translucent menu ba and the 3D dock.

I am usnig Vista now by the way, and Leopard kinda reminds me of Vista. Hah.