Leopard Preview Less Than A Month Away

[Timepass]

I always found the multiple desktop thing very gimmiky and not very useful. I tried it and didnt like it. Mind you I have a friend who swears by it and loves it.

Windows XP users have been able to do it since 2001-2002 (when ever M$ releases the powertoy for it). I tried it and didnt like it. It work great and everything but I just never found it that useful for me.

Hmm now that is something I would like Apple to reliease. Something like M$ windows powertoys. Nice little add on to the OS that are created later. Opitional installs and not really required.

For example some of M$ XP powertoys I like

TweakUI (lets the users do a lot of little changes to the OS it self, how short cuts look, how long is hover time and quite a bit of little things, Makes it a lot more custimizible)

Image resize (Lets me resize pictures in bulk very quickly and easily. it high light all the fills I want and right click, choose resizee image and from there I can have it resize the orginal, or make a new copy of it. I find my self using it quite a bit siding pictures to finds and home. I keep the oringal 2-4Megepix file but i resize them down to 800x600 or 1024x724 to email or aim to friends).

Open comand promp (open a compan promp window any where not really that useful)

Cleary type (font smoothing add on for XP that in repeated reviews is stated to be better than the one apple uses but basicly a really nice font smoothing add on)

and there are a lot more. those are just the ones I really use. TweakUI and Clear Type are the most popular 2

I would love to see apple start offering thing like that to user later on.

 

[Patch^]

Like what? It reminds me of the Mac commercial (linked here):
"PC: Calculator; Mac: That's cool; anything else?; PC: Clock."

Mac OS X is revenue for Apple and so is iLife. Try telling Microsoft to include Office with Vista.

This iLife/OS X integration has been discussed long ago when the Tiger release was around the corner (linked here).

Have you tried Vista? It has a lot of applications very similar if not exactly the same, they have an application almost identical to iPhoto, they have a movie editor, DVD creator and media player. Only thing that is missing at the moment is an iWeb related application. Plus they are all really good apps just as good as iLife and dare I say at times better? Plus with Microsoft you can download the latest versions for free, even XP users can download IE7, where as people on panther are stuck on Safari 1.2 etc. if you know what I mean.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/experiences/default.mspx

The Mac advert about cool apps like calculator etc is going to be made redundant when Vista comes out. Because of its new cool applications! lol even if they are a rip of iLife.

I fully comprehend that iLife is extra revenue for Apple, but I think it would be useful and a better if iLife became apart of the OS and its not like including Microsoft Office as you say, that’s a completely different type of app.

You only get iLife when you by a Mac not when you upgrade the OS. I read an article in PC Magazine (UK) about 2 months ago. Where they compared Vista to Tiger and Vista won because of its included applications, where as tiger only had QuickTime, Safari lol.

It's just an idea.

 

[bousozoku]

...
I fully comprehend that iLife is extra revenue for Apple, but I think it would be useful and a better if iLife became apart of the OS and its not like including Microsoft Office as you say, that’s a completely different type of app.
...

They need to keep themselves away from bundling applications to keep 3rd party developers happy.

 

[GodBless]

Out of interest, will the preview list all of the new features? Or will several crop up between then and release?

I think Apple will add features after the preview (like it did with Tiger) -- plus Steve Jobs and his crew can't preview all of them that they've made by WWDC in their short presentation.

 

[GodBless]

Hmm now that is something I would like Apple to reliease. Something like M$ windows powertoys. Nice little add on to the OS that are created later. Opitional installs and not really required.

For example some of M$ XP powertoys I like

TweakUI (lets the users do a lot of little changes to the OS it self, how short cuts look, how long is hover time and quite a bit of little things, Makes it a lot more custimizible)

That's what 3rd party software is for.

Image resize (Lets me resize pictures in bulk very quickly and easily. it high light all the fills I want and right click, choose resizee image and from there I can have it resize the orginal, or make a new copy of it. I find my self using it quite a bit siding pictures to finds and home. I keep the oringal 2-4Megepix file but i resize them down to 800x600 or 1024x724 to email or aim to friends).

Automator can already do that.

Cleary type (font smoothing add on for XP that in repeated reviews is stated to be better than the one apple uses but basicly a really nice font smoothing add on)

I doubt that -- macs are made for graphic designers and other artists -- how a mac displays text is very important and I doubt it would be better in Windows.

 

[GodBless]

Because of its new cool applications! lol even if they are a rip of iLife.

If they are a rip off of iLife then no one is going to be impressed -- that's not innovation that is copying.

I fully comprehend that iLife is extra revenue for Apple, but I think it would be useful and a better if iLife became apart of the OS and its not like including Microsoft Office as you say, that’s a completely different type of app.

You only get iLife when you by a Mac not when you upgrade the OS.

Sounds Exactly like Office -- most PC users get Office with their new PC but it is not upgraded when they buy a new version of Windows.

I read an article in PC Magazine (UK) about 2 months ago. Where they compared Vista to Tiger and Vista won because of its included applications, where as tiger only had QuickTime, Safari lol.

Wow you mean that Applications were the most important factor in the OS comparison article? I guess the author had to make Vista win somehow so he/she tried to cover up Tiger's superiority with a lame excuse like how many Applications it has. What about the rest of the OS design? I bet the author ignored the fundamentals. Ignorant PC users might believe the author is fair but not me.

 

[theBB]

I can think of a lot of incremental improvements. Finder lacks some basic features, such as cut and paste, that I would appreciate. Multisession burning through Finder would be very useful, too. I guess Spotlight could improve its usability as well. However, I don't see myself paying $130 for these changes. Apple needs much much more to hang on to its marketshare, let alone increase it. I switched from XP, because Tiger had more features and it worked much more smoothly than my current XP laptop. However, if Vista and OSX becomes comparable, then Apple's only advantage would be better design for its boxes and I don't think that will be good enough.

 

[theBB]

Leopard has to have revolutionary features. Even when Tiger is so much better than XP, Apple only has 5% marketshare. Can you imagine how much worse it would get if both operating systems were more similar?

I switched, because Tiger had many more features and it ran more smoothly than my XP laptop. You can yell "MS copied those features from Apple" until you get blue in the face, but most consumers would not care that MS implemented them 5 years late. If they both do the same things, why bother switching? I guess MS could still end up making Vista and its bundled apps to be more buggy and less user friendly than OSX+iLife, but Mac's future should not rely on just that.

 

[Monkaaay]

I'm surprised to hear so much "XCode is just as good as Visual Studio, if not better" chatter in here. Put simply, Visual Studio 2005 is light years ahead of XCode. I use VS 2005 8+ hours a day and I've tried my best to work in XCode. It's just not as easy to use, powerful, nor fully featured. I know Microsoft bashing is the cool thing to do but before you bash Visual Studio at least use it on a regular basis. How funny that someone above talked down on VB6 saying "real developers" don't use it, they use VC++. The icing is that person followed by saying they're not a developer. So glad your experience can clarify that VB6 isn't used to create real applications.

 

[bousozoku]

I'm surprised to hear so much "XCode is just as good as Visual Studio, if not better" chatter in here. Put simply, Visual Studio 2005 is light years ahead of XCode. I use VS 2005 8+ hours a day and I've tried my best to work in XCode. It's just not as easy to use, powerful, nor fully featured. I know Microsoft bashing is the cool thing to do but before you bash Visual Studio at least use it on a regular basis. How funny that someone above talked down on VB6 saying "real developers" don't use it, they use VC++. The icing is that person followed by saying they're not a developer. So glad your experience can clarify that VB6 isn't used to create real applications.

I hope you're not complaining about my post because I've been a developer since the early 1980s and I've used a lot of the various DOS and Windows-based products as well as those on Macintosh and OS/2 and other systems. In fact, I used the first Microsoft development product.

Visual BASIC is used to create some terribly pathetic applications. If that makes them real in your world, then, they're real.

 

[OldCorpse]

Hate to say it, but I don't think Leopard will have any revolutionary features. In fact, I expect to skip it, and get whatever comes after that (i.e. when I buy new gear... I'm not going to update from Tiger on my iBook).

Folks underestimate the change from Panther to Tiger. Yes, on the surface perhaps some felt there weren't many changes, but the biggest change was under the hood. Tiger realiy finalized the kernel. From now on, any changes (unless far into the future like 10 years, where the mach issue might be re-visited), you'll be essentially working with Tiger's guts. So the biggest "under the hood" changes within the OS X system happened from Panther to Tiger.

That's why I'm totally unexcited by Leopard. I merely hope they'll get things that already exist in Tiger to actually work. Spotlight is in dire need of improvement. Disk burning, especially DVD burning is still a disgrace under OS X. FTP... 'nuff said. iCal - what is the point of this app? Does anybody actually use it? It's so badly designed, I think they're better off starting from scratch... it is 100% useless as it stands right now. Safari, still bug-ridden, crash prone, spinning beach ball prone, and falling ever further behind Firefox... I have seen zero improvement of Safari from 10.4 to 10.4.7. Finder... well, I think they need to scrap it and start over, but that won't happen . And so on. As it is, I'd be way happier if they fixed Tiger than whatever they'll come up with in Leopard... I expect instead that Leopard will feature tiny improvements to features that already exist, and a couple of undercooked not ready for prime-time new "features" (like Spotlight, tfu, in Tiger). What used to distinguish Apple was the attention to detail, user-friendliness and reliability "it just works"... I'm sad to see them go for the glitz at the cost of bugs and unreliability... reminds me of another company... APPLE! FIX WHAT'S ALREADY OUT FIRST!

 

[VanNess]

Hate to say it, but I don't think Leopard will have any revolutionary features.

Well, I think it depends on your definition of "revolutionary" as there may be several various interpretations of that word floating around in the near future, including that of the reality distortion field wizard himself - Steve Jobs.

But I do think Apple realizes that, with Vista waiting in the wings, there is going to be a lot more attention paid to this release of OS X, much more attention than has ever been paid in the past since 10.0. And the comparisons to Vista after WWDC are not only a given, they will be fast and furious. I expect that's going to be the topic de jour of tech articles and nerd blogs throughout the net for the remainder of the year. There is going to be a huge amount of attention about this.

In other words, Apple cannot disappoint. Some portion of general public will never pay much attention to this sort of stuff, but opinions from some respected tech reporting are picked up by institutional analysts who will factor in how well Leopard resonates in the coming months in determining whether Apple's stock is worth buying, keeping, or selling. I don't think Apple will want to give them any pause for concern. Leopard has to get up to the plate and hit a home run, because it won't be too much longer before Microsoft starts spending colossal amounts of money to hawk Vista in the media to all the suckers out there. OS X, in some ways, has benefited from Microsoft's past inability to follow-up XP. This time around it's very different.

Folks underestimate the change from Panther to Tiger. Yes, on the surface perhaps some felt there weren't many changes, but the biggest change was under the hood.

That's correct, but they already spent that hype on Tiger. Fine in the days of XP, which trailed in that regard (and to an extent, Vista still trails) but it's still from the look-how-different-we-are-from-XP era of OS X. Apple can parlay those technologies in Leopard, but not rely on previous generation Tiger goodies exclusively and expect that will counter the Vista assault.

I'm sad to see them go for the glitz at the cost of bugs and unreliability... reminds me of another company... APPLE! FIX WHAT'S ALREADY OUT FIRST!

I don't agree with (and in some cases, can't confirm) some of your examples, but I do agree with the overall message. Now would be a good time for Apple to start dotting all of it's i's and crossing all of it's t's in OS X

 

[Patch^]

If they are a rip off of iLife then no one is going to be impressed -- that's not innovation that is copying.

True, but people who have never heard of OS X and Apple will be.

Sounds Exactly like Office -- most PC users get Office with their new PC but it is not upgraded when they buy a new version of Windows.

Office is a productivity application, not multimedia applications and they don't get Office Bundled with Windows, they some times get Microsoft Works, but I'm not sure if they still make that. Even if they do it's normally due from a Vendor like HP or Dell.

Wow you mean that Applications were the most important factor in the OS comparison article? I guess the author had to make Vista win somehow so he/she tried to cover up Tiger's superiority with a lame excuse like how many Applications it has. What about the rest of the OS design? I bet the author ignored the fundamentals. Ignorant PC users might believe the author is fair but not me.

No, they judged every part of the OS, GUI, Security and much much more. The thing that made me laugh about it was that they said Windows Vista had better security! lol. The reason OS X scored slightly lower (I think it scored something like 68% where as Vista got 77%) was because of its lack included applications :S. I would try and find the article if I could but I can't find it lol.

I'm talking if you buy a Retail version of Vista or OS X not a computer btw.

Plus I'm not saying Vista is better, I think OS X is and Leopard will be even better, I'm just suggesting it would be nice.

 

[dongmin]

Don't know if this has been mentioned, but I'd like to see Google, Wikipedia, IMDB, etc. integrated with Spotlight. And preferably, Spotlight can be activated by voice or jestures, as in: "Computer, What is the capital of Nebraska?"

 

[GodBless]

Don't know if this has been mentioned, but I'd like to see Google, Wikipedia, IMDB, etc. integrated with Spotlight.

Maybe something like Quicksilver would work better.

 

[theBB]

Don't know if this has been mentioned, but I'd like to see Google, Wikipedia, IMDB, etc. integrated with Spotlight. And preferably, Spotlight can be activated by voice or jestures, as in: "Computer, What is the capital of Nebraska?"

Sorry Dave, I cannot do that.

 

[CubaTBird]

Don't know if this has been mentioned, but I'd like to see Google, Wikipedia, IMDB, etc. integrated with Spotlight. And preferably, Spotlight can be activated by voice or jestures, as in: "Computer, What is the capital of Nebraska?"

that would be a feature that i would actually use often.