Leopard Previewed

[jlewis2k1]

ok well now that i know that there will still be support. do we even know if apple will continue support for the PPC family after leopard though?

 

[boncellis]

Just wait until Apple coordinates Time Machine backup with the iPod--I think there's some great potential with Leopard's feature set.

Now, if Apple would go ahead and put 802.11x compatibility into the iPod, then you could feasibly have your machine back up wirelessly to it via Time Machine. Imagine using that rationale for trying to get your job to pay for your next iPod. (I doubt it would work, but it's worth a shot 😉.)

 

[Zadillo]

ok well now that i know that there will still be support. do we even know if apple will continue support for the PPC family after leopard though?

I don't think Apple has been specific about how long, but I think we can expect it for a number of years to come.... long enough for people to have plenty of time to replace PPC-based machines with Intel-based ones.

I think I heard at least 5 years, but I don't remember where, so don't hold me to it.

I'd certainly expect Apple at least to keep supporting PPC and Intel for a number of OS releases though, and with their own apps. I would also expect most third parties to make universal binaries for quite a while.

-Zadillo

 

[michaelrjohnson]

ok well now that i know that there will still be support. do we even know if apple will continue support for the PPC family after leopard though?

No, but we also don't know what the windspeed will be at the time and location of Leopard's release. There's simply no way to know. (Besides, Leopard's replacement won't be released until 2009, at least.)

 

[oober_freak]

Did someone put a gun to Jobs' head and make him use IBM?

I just knew some one saw me doing that 😱

 

[codo]

I'm having a hard time deciding what I'll pull out of the dock first...

The only thing that sounds half useful is the "virtual spaces" - Is it worth £90? I'll get back to you on that next year.

 

[ImNoSuperMan]

I don't think Apple has been specific about how long, but I think we can expect it for a number of years to come.... long enough for people to have plenty of time to replace PPC-based machines with Intel-based ones.

I think I heard at least 5 years, but I don't remember where, so don't hold me to it.

I'd certainly expect Apple at least to keep supporting PPC and Intel for a number of OS releases though, and with their own apps. I would also expect most third parties to make universal binaries for quite a while.

-Zadillo

I second that. A minimum of 4-5 years before Apple dumps PPC support.

 

[bankshot]

(I wrote something about indexing all network drives, regardless of them being Macs or not)

I don't see how this would work for anything other than other Leopard (maybe Tiger, with a software update) Macs. Spotlight has to have the indexes pre-generated, after all.

Not necessarily. The experience will be more seamless and always up to date if the index is pre-generated by the host machine (requiring that it be another Mac). But there's absolutely no reason why I couldn't tell Spotlight to index my remote Windows share once a week. No, it's not perfect, because the index is never 100% up to date, but it's good enough for 99.999% of uses. And it's about 1000 times better than no Spotlight support at all.

The only real consideration here is that in large corporate (or school) environments, administrators of those file servers wouldn't want many Macs separately indexing their shared drives. It could easily bog down a file server if a few hundred Macs are all trying to index it at once, unaware of each other's duplicated efforts. And unfortunately I'm afraid that Apple may not support indexing non-Mac (or non-Leopard) shares for just this reason, despite the fact that there are many other situations where it doesn't apply. Like my home network, where I control all of the machines, so I should be able to set it to do this.

 

[JoshH]

It's a weird choice of background music for their preview videos. Isn't that the dungeon music from the original Mario Bros.? 🙄

 

[Kelmon]

Embittered By The QuickTime Presentation

I think I made a mistake with this WWDC. I made the decision that I wasn't going to follow the coverage on Monday night (I live in Belgium at the moment) and avoid checking news and Apple's site until this evening when I was going to watch the broadcast (bookmarked the Apple Events QuickTime page to avoid seeing spoilers). Then I tried watching the keynote and gave up after 4-minutes due to dropped connections. At this point I was not pleased.

Ultimately I was most disappointed by no update to the MacBook Pro which I am chomping at the bit to buy. The new Mac Pro looks pretty kick-ass and XServe is no doubt interesting, particularly to any more universities out there looking to construct a new XServe-based supercomputer. Still, good humour having gone out of the window I read through the information on Leopard and came away with it with a ho-hum feeling.

XCode 3.0 looks marvellous from what I can see and I'm hoping that this can help me become a better developer since my first application suffers from a chronic memory leak and crashes. After this, however, I'm struggling to find stuff that I'm interested by.

iChat presentations and sharing looks really good but the backgrounds thing, complete with the awful demo movie, really looks cheesey.

Mail appears to be improved but since I have HTML stationary since the days of Lotus Notes I'm not thrilled to see it in OS X as a feature.

Spaces may well be useful and Time Machine could be useful but I suspect that both may end up as features that I don't use much. Time Machine does worry me more because I don't understand how it will work in reality on a notebook with a limited hard drive.

I have no idea what to make of the 64-bit everything announcement. As best as I understand things this will simply mean that the OS will understand bigger numbers but what difference will this make to how I work?

Anyway, I'm still pissed off about the broadcast not working for me. Hopefully I'll feel happier later when the details of what is coming becomes a bit firmer and I have my MacBook Pro to cuddle. One thing is for certain is that I won't bother waiting to get the news next time...

 

[happyadam]

Core Animation looks promising ...

"Core Animation opens up the power of Apple’s graphics technologies and proven interface aesthetics to every developer. Look for whiz-bang visual effects in an upcoming crop of scientific visualization tools, media organizers, and whatever else you can dream of."

I could imagine that a new organizer type app using Core Animation could be part of Leopard - maybe one of the top secret features or maybe just part of iLife '08.

Maybe something like Stacks/Piles in a 3D virtual space - with Spaces you wouldn't have to worry about cluttering the desktop. It makes use of multi-core as well and since most new macs have at least 2 cores it would be nice to make more use of them. Navigating the file system in a 3D space might be cool - you might need the mighty mouse scroll ball to make it more useable. I guess this might be a bit hopeful (maybe 10.6).

 

[virus1]

what i always found so amazing was how apple does it all. they don't leave apps like ical, itunes, dvd player, and ichat to some crappy 3rd party developers, unlike microsoft. now that i take a step back, and especially with leopard vs. vista, microsoft does nothing..

microsoft does so much less than apple in terms of it's os. all it has is the bare os, notepad, ie, outlook, and a few games. the bare os is total crap. i mean, look at the system prefrences of widows compared to osx.. look at anything.. the tray compared to the dock.. the speed of the os in general.. and on top of all that, windows sells for $50 more! the best designed software that comes out of microsoft is notepad and freecell.

 

[Zadillo]

what i always found so amazing was how apple does it all. they don't leave apps like ical, itunes, dvd player, and ichat to some crappy 3rd party developers, unlike microsoft. now that i take a step back, and especially with leopard vs. vista, microsoft does nothing..

microsoft does so much less than apple in terms of it's os. all it has is the bare os, notepad, ie, outlook, and a few games. the bare os is total crap. i mean, look at the system prefrences of widows compared to osx.. look at anything.. the tray compared to the dock.. the speed of the os in general.. and on top of all that, windows sells for $50 more! the best designed software that comes out of microsoft is notepad and freecell.

To be fair, Microsoft faced a tremendous amount of scrutiny and criticism for bundling that kind of stuff with the OS (in particular with the whole Internet Explorer thing). It probably isn't fair to then criticzing MS for NOT doing it.

I do agree with the general sentiments about the core OS itself though.

 

[virus1]

To be fair, Microsoft faced a tremendous amount of scrutiny and criticism for bundling that kind of stuff with the OS (in particular with the whole Internet Explorer thing). It probably isn't fair to then criticzing MS for NOT doing it.

I do agree with the general sentiments about the core OS itself though.

hmm.. then how does apple do it? i guess because there aren't as many developers for them, and because they wouldn't even work on os x when the features came out.

 

[Zadillo]

hmm.. then how does apple do it? i guess because there aren't as many developers for them, and because they wouldn't even work on os x when the features came out.

Well, that's part of it...... although Microsoft also did a lot to abuse their monopoly position, especially in the 80's, so that laid the groundwork for the anti-trust investigations in the 90's. Netscape was able to show Microsoft's prior bad acts with stuff like Stacker.

Apple probably hasn't done anything quite as bad, and even in times they did, they probably wouldn't have the same history behind them that MS did and does.

 

[Project]

finally

 

[Squire]

finally

Um...finally what? Is "Springing" that important to you? (Please explain what it is. Thanks.)

-Squire

 

[virus1]

finally

what is springing?

 

[sebaz]

what is springing?

I believe that's the Icon "bounciness"

 

[BGil]

So how to you get a previous version of a file that has been deleted with Windows' previous versions? Or can you roll a whole folder and its contents back?

What if you want to undelete a file, but not affect other files in the folder? You don't want to roll back the folder because that will roll back all the files, but you can't select the file only because it has been deleted. Do you have to roll back the folder to undelete, then roll forward every other file to where they were?

Is there an option to view folder contents including previous deleted files that exist in that folder's history?

And the Apple Time Machine doesn't require an external hard drive, it is an option however which will allow you to recover from a dead hard drive. This suggests to me that it is an application-level facility, rather than a file system facility like ZFS.

Also I'm sure that the Time Machine graphical look will be altered by the time of the final release to be far more professional. At least, I hope it will be.

From Help in build 5456:

Show all
Hide all
Previous versions of files: frequently asked questions
[This version of Windows is still in development, so some Help information might be inaccurate or missing.]


Previous versions of files and folders are copies that Windows automatically saves as part of a restore point. Any file or folder that was modified since the last restore point was made (usually 24 hours earlier) is saved and made available as a previous version. You can use previous versions of files to restore files that you accidentally modified or deleted, or that were damaged.

How are previous versions created?
Previous versions are automatically saved as part of System Restore. If System Restore is turned on, Windows automatically creates previous versions of files that you modify. If your hard disk is partitioned or if you have more than one disk drive on your computer, you need to turn on System Restore on the other partitions or disk drives.

To turn on System Restore
Click to open System.

In the left pane, click System Restore.

If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type your password or click Allow.

Under Automatic restore points, select the check box next to the volume where you want to turn on System Restore, and then click OK.

How do I access previous versions of my files and folders?
Right-click a file or folder, and then click Properties.

Click the Previous Versions tab.

You'll see a list of available previous versions of the file or folder. Depending on the type of file or folder, you can open, save to a different location, or restore a previous version.

How do I restore a previous version of a file or folder?
Before restoring a previous version of a file or folder, open it to make sure it's the version you want. Then, follow these steps:

Right-click the file or folder, and then click Properties.

Click the Previous Versions tab, click an item in the list, and then click Restore.

Warning
The file or folder will replace the current version on your computer, and the replacement cannot be undone.

Note
If the Restore button is unavailable, you cannot restore a previous version of the file or folder. You might be able to open it or save it to a different location.

How is restoring previous versions of files and folders from this computer or a network location different from restoring files and folders from a backup?
To restore a previous version of a file or folder that is saved on this computer, you right-click the file or folder, click Properties, and then click the Previous Versions tab. Then you select the previous version of the file or folder that you want to restore, click Restore, and the file or folder is restored. Restoring a previous version from a network location is similar, as long as your computer is connected to the network and the network location is available (the computer is turned on and you have permission to access the computer or disk). To restore previous versions of files and folders from a backup, you open the Windows Backup wizard, which guides you through the process. You need access to the removable storage or media (such as an internal or external hard disk or a CD or DVD) that the backup is stored on to restore items from a backup.

Why can't I find previous versions of some files?
There are several possible reasons:

System Restore might not be turned on. If System Restore is not turned on, Windows can't create previous versions of your files and folders.

To turn on System Restore
Click to open System.

In the left pane, click System Restore.

If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type your password or click Allow.

Under Automatic restore points, select the check box next to the volume where you want to turn on System Restore, and then click OK.

The file might be an offline file. Offline files are copies of files that are stored on shared network folders. Previous versions are not available for offline files. For more information about offline files, see Understanding offline files.

If your computer is on a corporate network, your network administrator might have disabled previous versions.

Are previous versions unavailable for some files or folders?
Previous versions are unavailable for files and folders that are required for Windows to work properly. Examples of these include the system folder (the folder that Windows is installed in) and files in the system folder , which is usually C:\Windows. Windows provides a way to restore system files using System Restore. For more information about restoring system files, see System Restore: frequently asked questions.

Can I restore a file or folder that was deleted or renamed?
If you accidentally delete or rename a file or folder, you can restore a previous version of that file or folder, but you need to know the location that the file or folder was saved to. To restore a file or folder that was deleted or renamed, follow these steps:

Click to open Documents.

Click the arrow next to Folders at the bottom of the Navigation pane.

Using the Navigation pane, open the folder that contained the file or folder that was deleted or renamed.

Right-click somewhere in the folder (without selecting a file or folder), and then click Properties.

Click the Previous Versions tab, and then double-click a previous version of the folder that contains the file or folder you want to restore. (For example, if a file was deleted today, choose a version of the folder from yesterday, which should contain the file.)

In the folder, drag the file or folder that you want to restore to another location, such as your desktop or another folder.

The file or folder is saved to the location that you selected.

Tip
If you don't remember the exact file or folder name or its location, you can search for it by typing part of the name in the search box in Documents.

See also
System Restore: frequently asked questions

 

[Project]

No - its spring loaded icons in the Dock.

 

[aswitcher]

I believe that's the Icon "bounciness"

No transparency option yet it seems.

 

[bankshot]

And the Apple Time Machine doesn't require an external hard drive, it is an option however which will allow you to recover from a dead hard drive. This suggests to me that it is an application-level facility, rather than a file system facility like ZFS.

Oh wow, that's horrible. So apparently this isn't at the filesystem level (as I originally assumed, based on the first reports yesterday). Which means:

• Requires an extra drive or partition
• That drive/partition can't be used for anything but Time Machine
• It's almost 100% useless for laptops (you know, the fastest growing market segment for computers?)

At least if this article is totally correct.

Really only about 10% as useful as I originally thought. I don't understand -- with all of the work they obviously put into this, they could have had it all by integrating ZFS into OS X. ZFS is open source and already has all the features necessary for file versioning and rollback at the filesystem level. They could have slapped the same fancy interface on top of that, and it would have been usable for anyone without an extra drive handy. I'm afraid this is gonna turn into another Spotlight -- incredible concept, almost useless due to limitations that shouldn't be too hard to overcome. Bleh.

 

[virus1]

No - its spring loaded icons in the Dock.

and what is that?

 

[ingenious]

Whats the point? Its history.

My guess is, that its how Tiger is now.

Well, it matters to those of us who have G5s. Is the PPC version of Tiger that runs on the G5 64-bit?