Review of WWDC Mac OS X Leopard (10.5)

[valiar]

my pathfinder can also see word files. I want to preview both excel and powerpoint files as well, especially the latter. I think steve did show support for excel preview in cover flow but not for ppt files (although keynote, yes. but keynote is not that powerful yet IMO and cross-compatible with windows)

I use Keynote exclusively. It is way, way, way, way better than Powerpoint. Really. Try it out for yourself if you don't believe me. It is more powerful in any way you can imagine - and on the top of that, it just makes better presentations.

I go to plenty of scientific meetings, and I can tell by naked eye if the presentation has been done in PowerPoint. Microsoft's typesetting engine is THAT bad, really. And don't start me on the included templates, or the alignment tools (or lack thereof) in Powerpoint. Or the way Powerpoint renders shadows (never, ever do that to yourself). Bleh. And bleh again.

Keynote is also lives perfectly well with Windows. You can export your presentations as PDF files, as Quicktime movies, or as sets of images. Your transitions will be preserved if you choose Quicktime export. You can even export your presentations in Powerpoint format, should you ever want to.

 

[Pierremaison]

I do that for funzies all the time. Try this: make the Dock on the left and take a screenshot. Make that screenshot your desktop pic and then put the Dock on the right and take another screenshot. Make that screenshot your desktop pic and then put the Dock on the bottom of the screen. Also, open up multiple windows on the screen (a Safari window in the middle, buddy list on the upper right, the iTunes remote, etc.). Take a screenshot and make it your desktop pic. Hide the Dock now and enjoy not knowing which Dock is real and trying to click buddies that aren't there.

Hours of fun...

 

[starnox]

Transparent Menu Bar

If you go to the Media section of the Apple site (found near the bottom) you can see some hi-res shots of the new leopard desktop. I have to say looking at the menu bar close up was good.

I am SOO glad they finally got rid of the rounded corners on it. I also prefer the indented gradient they have on it.

I just hope they make the amount of transparency changeable, which I am sure they will.

So the new menu bar is a good thing for me

 

[MrCrowbar]

I use Keynote exclusively. It is way, way, way, way better than Powerpoint. Really. Try it out for yourself if you don't believe me. It is more powerful in any way you can imagine - and on the top of that, it just makes better presentations.

I go to plenty of scientific meetings, and I can tell by naked eye if the presentation has been done in PowerPoint. Microsoft's typesetting engine is THAT bad, really. And don't start me on the included templates, or the alignment tools (or lack thereof) in Powerpoint. Or the way Powerpoint renders shadows (never, ever do that to yourself). Bleh. And bleh again.

Keynote is also lives perfectly well with Windows. You can export your presentations as PDF files, as Quicktime movies, or as sets of images. Your transitions will be preserved if you choose Quicktime export. You can even export your presentations in Powerpoint format, should you ever want to.

I love keynote. Had to do some gib presentations with lots of diagrams and stuff. Gave a PDF to the attendees so they don't have to take notes during the presentation and once did the quicktime export (you click to switch slides, transitions and stuff is all still there) because the projector only had VGA and I did not have the mini-DVI to VGA adaptor. Seriously, VGA is so last century...

 

[rockosmodurnlif]

This may be retarded, but am I the only one that thinks the finder windows look TOO much like iTunes? If you have several finder windows open and iTunes (and iPhoto for that matter), you won't be able to tell a difference between them at first glance. Apps need to look like apps and finder window should look like windows.

You're the second person I've read said this, the other was Macworld during their Leopard review and I have to ask, are you kidding me? Isn't that what title bars are for? How do you switch between Finder and iTunes? I use the Cmd+Tab option and the little app icons save me from all the confusion. Or maybe you use Expose, which tells you the window name when you roll over the window and if you have an iTunes playlist and Finder window with the same name then that really is your fault. It takes all of two seconds for me to read a windows titlebar and know what it is even when I'm dragging files from one window to the next.

I, for one, welcome the interface unity that I've seen touted but got broken in Tiger (see Mail, iTunes and Finder).

 

[pherplexed]

You're the second person I've read said this, the other was Macworld during their Leopard review and I have to ask, are you kidding me? Isn't that what title bars are for? How do you switch between Finder and iTunes? I use the Cmd+Tab option and the little app icons save me from all the confusion. Or maybe you use Expose, which tells you the window name when you roll over the window and if you have an iTunes playlist and Finder window with the same name then that really is your fault. It takes all of two seconds for me to read a windows titlebar and know what it is even when I'm dragging files from one window to the next.

I, for one, welcome the interface unity that I've seen touted but got broken in Tiger (see Mail, iTunes and Finder).

No, i'm not kidding you. I work several different ways...depends on what kind of project i'm working on. Most of the time i use cmd+tab which isn't a problem with look-alike windows. Sometimes I use Expose which,yes...if you rollover a window it shows you the titel of it...but again, you have to rollover to see it. And where it takes you all of "two seconds" to read a title bar, it takes me a millisecond to determine what i'm looking at by the way it looks. So even though Tiger has multiple looks across the UI, I can instantly rule out certain windows just by the way they look...instead of having to read a title bar. Also, sometimes I'll work on projects with several finder windows open so i can grab from here, move to there, upload from here, etc. In this scenario, I will just use my mouse to click on the window I need that may be behind the current app i'm using. So, in this instance, having all the finder windows and apple's apps look the same will be annoying.

As i said before, a unified UI will be great. I was just hoping for a little more visual distinction between finder windows and Apps. I'm sure I'll adapt...just a minor annoyance.

 

[Counter]

Have you tried rebooting? After installing the new dock you probably need to reboot.

I tried to do that and it didn't work. Hopefully this problem of not being able to click on apps in the reflective dock will be ironed out. It is only the beta stage remember. I think it might have something to do with the reflection.

I do that for funzies all the time. Try this: make the Dock on the left and take a screenshot. Make that screenshot your desktop pic and then put the Dock on the right and take another screenshot. Make that screenshot your desktop pic and then put the Dock on the bottom of the screen. Also, open up multiple windows on the screen (a Safari window in the middle, buddy list on the upper right, the iTunes remote, etc.). Take a screenshot and make it your desktop pic. Hide the Dock now and enjoy not knowing which Dock is real and trying to click buddies that aren't there.

If I did that I would never be able to get my computer back to normal. I'd have to take it to the genius bar and I seriously doubt they'd be able to help. I mean, the entire screen is clearly locked up but the mouse moves? And you can get the selection rectangle but it doesn't select anything? They'd probably have to call Steve....

Steve: 'Did he set his desktop background to be a screen shot with windows open?'

Genius: 'One second sir!'

Genius: 'Yes! How did you think of that straight away?'

Steve: 'I'm Steve Jobs. And you're fired'.

 

[Ranks]

I still can't believe this but...

What can PowerPoint do that Keynote can't? The only compatibility issues I have found is multi-column text (which is something keynote can do but powerpoint can't), text shadows (something else keynote can do but PP can't), and table background transparency (another thing Keynote does that PP doesn't). I have yet to find anything that PP does that Keynote can't. And even in the above instances, Keynote always handles exporting to PP quite well. It also has always handled importing from PP completely fine, every time. And yes, this is sharing with PP on a windows computer, specifically PP 2003 (I understand 2007 is very different, but I haven't used it yet and that's a whole other issue as most people will not have upgraded yet).

Last time I tried, Keynote couldn't display a QTVR and PP could.
I would love to be able to show VR pano's and use all the other cool keynote stuff, but until they enable the VR bit of Quicktime in keynote I have to go back to PP. Come on Apple! QTVR is your own technology. I still can't believe it...

 

[lazyrighteye]

Are you sure you cant do that? Unfortunately I sold my MBP a few days ago, and i'm waiting for my new one, so i'm in a limbo period where I can't answer this question. But I thought you COULD do it this way:

Bring up the Open box, then highlight what you want to delete, and press Apple + Delete. That SHOULD send it to the trash can. I swear i've done this before...

I just tried your suggestion in TextEdit.
No dice, FYI.

 

[tkn]

MacFUSE and Time Machine

Has anybody with WWDC snapshot tried using Time Machine with a network drive (like an AirPort Extreme drive) yet?

Or set up more than one machine using Time Machine on the same drive?

How about using MacFUSE?

 

[bankshot]

Had they went with ZFS it wouldn't have taken any time to set up.

It would still have taken the 30 minutes to copy the first snapshot out to an external drive. The config is fast, the backups are like any other backup. It copies a ton of files from one spot to another. ZFS isn't a magic bullet here.

I think FunkyELF is talking about the possibility that ZFS opens up, which is "inline" backups on the same drive. By using ZFS's copy-on-write and snapshotting features, you don't have to copy anything to another drive at all. It's instantly on and constantly running.

Of course, there are both advantages and disadvantages to this approach. There's no initial copy required at setup, backups are made at the block level instead of the file level (this is a big deal for very large files), and it's continuous and instantaneous. On the other hand, it doesn't protect you when your drive fails, and you can't keep as much data+backups on a single drive as on two drives (mitigated by the block-level backups, though).

It's too bad that ZFS apparently wasn't further along for Time Machine to take advantage of these features. At least then we'd have the choice.

 

[GrueHunter]

Anyone else bummed that this seed isn't up for download via ADC?

 

[pieman02]

Your beachball frequency could be caused by a low physical RAM to Virtual Memory ratio, or, more likely, that your hard drives are spinning up due to the 'sleep drives when idle' option in the Energy Saver pref pane.

Nah, I have 2 gigs of RAM and a 7200 rpm hd, and I have that idle option thing turned off most of the time - My main problems with finder right now (besides appearance) are networking and previewing certain video formats.

As far as normal finder things like browsing through music and documents, it works great though...I can't wait until Leopard is more stable to see how well it performs

 

[Nym]

The funny thing about Leopard's GUI is that some are loving it and some are saying it's "hideous", so, not even the greatest design team in the world could do something that would look good for all of us, it's about the majority.

I personally don't have a formed opinion yet... Was I expecting more? Yes.. I was hoping that the Finder windows had a thumbnail size bar (like iPhoto) to switch thumbnail sizes on the go, without having to change views or press Cmd + J and tick "this window only" checkbox.

I was expecting to see some more Core Animation goodness, for example, when your mouse is hovering a Finder window, there should be the ability to click the "Info" little icon on the right low corner (just like Dashboard Widgets have) and flip the windows around to see the "Get Info" dialog and other details about it instead of Cmd + I or moving the mouse all the way up to the Menu Bar.

What I wasn't expecting was a transparent Menu Bar. It's not that I "HATE" it, it's just that was one of the "kewl" features of Vista and to let M$ think, if even for a second, that Apple used their idea is absolutely ridiculous.

IMO Apple should have made the gap between Vista and Leopard much bigger than it actually is.
Instead, Windoze fanboys are having a big laugh that Apple "copied" Vista's taskbar transparency and it doesn't matter that Apple used to have transparency too in 10.2, what the press will say is that the Menu Bar transparency was a "Vista ripoff".

However, it's sad to see that people were very eager to criticize Vista's taskbar transparency but when it is shown on OSX suddently a lot of them change opinion and start to "grow fond" of it.

Talk about "distortion field"

Personally, right now I'm only concerned with the "under the hood" changes, that will be the killer feature for me and, FWIW, as far as I can tell, the menu bar transparency ISN'T customizable.

 

[0racle]

On My Macbook (sig) I won't be able to have multiple finder windows open (coverflow) and iTunes open in coverflow due to the ghetto Graphix Card....

I'm actually pretty concerned about this

So don't use the coverflow view in every Finder window. What's to be concerned about, it's not that hard to use one of the three views available now.

 

[milo]

Not so, I've downloaded Buffy and Angel series, made a DVD with the AVI's using iDVD, then saved it as a "Disk Image". Using that image, I was able to compress the DVD to fit onto a 4.7 single layer disc, burned using Roxio Toast 8. Each season was about 40 discs, which cost considerably less than buying the series.

What's not so? I'm not sure what your point is. Of course pirating content is cheaper than buying it, what does that have to do with 10.5? Or are you just saying you're going to pirate that as well instead of buying it?

 

[bigwig]

Seriously, Mail 3 has sold it to me. I hate having to keep a seperate RSS reader open, and those notes will be really really useful.

I supposed it's convenient, but I have difficulting believing that Mail 3 is going to be a better RSS reader than Vienna. Dedicated apps tend to work better than all-in-one apps, in my opinion, because they don't have to compromise.

What I want to know is if Mail 3 has improved the correctness, reliability, and speed of its IMAP support. Mail 2.X has some serious defects in that regard.

 

[TenaciousPZ]

How long before the first set of instructions on how to disable/delete Time Machine?

 

[pengu]

How long before the first set of instructions on how to disable/delete Time Machine?

DISABLE it? you have to ENABLE it for it to actually do anything.

 

[oogje]

Anyone else bummed that this seed isn't up for download via ADC?

Yes.