blufire said:
I believe these screenshots are fake, and the reasons are:
1. It's not hard to make that Finder mock-up. I don't think that Safari-esque interface is the direction that Apple is taking. Though it looks believable, I don't find it intuitive enough.
It's not, but it looks damn real to me. Anyway, even if it's fake, I'm guessing it will look a lot like that on its finalized version.
2. The "Windows" text in "About This Mac" looks different from (less clear than) the other text. Making the window and adding the text is a simple task in Photoshop, and it looks like that's what was done here.
Yep, you're right on that one, this is the real deal-breaker. If you zoom in, you can clearly see that the above lines were displayed using sub-pixel rendering, as there's some slightly coloured pixels on them, unlike the "
Windows XP with Service Pack 2", which appears to be grayscale (especially the "Windows" part.
3. The peephole transition effect doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense here. And the desktop selector (with the "1" and "2") doesn't seem like an Apple thing to do. I'd expect thumbnails of the desktops (maybe with the numbers overlaid). The peephole transition screenshot could be made easily with Keynote. The desktop selection menu bar item is black, whereas Apple's menu bar items are a dark grey (and the circle with a number in it is very simple to make).
I agree with you on the pager thing. It doesn't look too Apple-esque to me, in fact, even the already mentioned VirtueDesktops looks more like something Apple would do - I'm figuring Apple will pull a "Dashboard" on both this project and CodeTek Virtual Desktop
. As for the transition, I'm hoping that Apple uses more sober effects than even those found on VirtueDesktops. I don't know if you have found the "suck" minimize effect, which is disabled by default (probably because it doesn't look very cool, and scale and genie are already one too many anyway), or if you noticed how they only include one transition effect for fast user switching? I'm guessing Apple won't exaggerate on this feature either (and yes, I personally think the ripple effect is cool, but this is a bit over the top. Just think about the analogies
).
Granted, if it's prerelease software, many of these details may not be in place or completed yet, but I find the appearance of the "Windows" text in "About This Mac" to be very fishy. Plus, Apple is well aware that making Windows apps run within OS X will completely open up OS X to viruses, spyware, etc. Boot Camp and virtualization are less likely to cause problems in this regard (though they're still risky).
I thought the same about that text, but was ignoring it because this'd be just pre-release software, but after further examination, it all adds up. As for running Windows apps, someone mentioned that a quarantine policy could be enforced; IMHO, Windows, OS X, and every other OS out there should have that kind of features built in already, much like the Dashboard sandboxing already found in Tiger.
So my conclusion is that these screenshots are probably fake, both visually and conceptually. Nice try, though.
Oh yeah. Apple hasn't ordered a cease-and-desist yet, either.
I agree they are fake, but they're also a very neat mock-up of some potential features that I and a lot of people here would appreciate a lot, if implemented properly. And I'm guessing many of them will appear eventually, if not in 10.5, in 10.6 or further, at least.
And by the way, when those Dashboard screenshots surfaced, Apple was also very quiet too.
