WWDC: Leopard Details

[DMann]

Expectations exceeded

• Leopard works on any machine down to a g4. (My guess is people will hack it for g3 as usual)
• Speed up using solid state NAND or faster memory (like Vista ReadyBoost)
• No restarting to use Bootcamp. Just select "Switch to Windows" from OS X, and your machine goes to sleep. Wake it up and your in Windows. You can do the same thing once in Windows to switch back to mac. VERY VERY NICE feature, no reason to use virtualization for me at least.
• Redone Unix Underpinnings (HUGE FEATURE)
• Completely Re-written Finder (This is a year + of work alone)
• The resolution independence with zoom (CTRL+scrollwheel), yes it's in the zoom, because ZOOM is for accessibility or disabled users, so having the text and controls GO sharper IS THE PROPER WAY.
• Completely New Speech. Think better than AT&T voices, seriously listening to text2speech read your documents is worth $129 to me alone.
• Completely new mail client. Much faster, better calendar support, keep notes
• GLOBAL date notice, right click on a date or time and OS X will be smart and offer to add it to your iCal
• Global Screen and Document sharing, anyone can write it into their cocoa apps to share documents from EVERY program if two users are online. This is a GIANT leap forward for EVERYONE who actually works for a living.
• transparent menu bar (optional), is EXCELLENT, you ONLY focus on your documents (and i thought i would hate it)
• Spotlight, completely re-written with faster database, and backend
• Finder, did I mention it's completely new? Networking, browsing, anything that used to beachball is SUPER FAST. The finder doesn't beachball on large folders, nor do you wait for thumbnails to come up, or wait period. You can try network shares as fast as you can click them.
• The entire system has new underpinnings, that are better threaded. No pause if you click on a menu. THIS IS REALLY, REALLY big deal, as it takes months to rewrite that code that handles this sort of thing.
• Redesigned printing servics, and dialogs, no more of that HORRIBLE 60 dropdown items. Preview of your document (thumbnail) is in every print dialog, and page setup can be reached from this window. Also printing does not put up a dialog covering the screen while it spools pages. No more stopping your productivity, while you wait to spool.

Finder has always been the primary component which needed an overhaul, and Apple has done it beautifully, after hearing your experience with it! What is the file size of this Beta? And is it possible to confirm Leopard's utilization of the Zettabyte File System? Very much appreciated Inkhead!

 

[amnesiak]

I don't mean to be insulting, but do you have eyes?? Seriously use them. The new dock is SHORTER in height than the old FLAT dock. Come-on, look before you post again.

the old dock didn't have reflections to indicate which app is opened so i think the new one is slightly bigger than the old one. thats what i see with my eyes

 

[samh004]

Also, can that transparency be switched off? It almost seems a bit child like to me. OS X has grown up now.

It didn't look too flash to me either, I'd rather just use the solid colored menu bar we have now.

Everything looks pretty good, except for that atrocious Menu Bar.

Perhaps it's s sign I am getting older that I don't like these hip new changes as much ?

I will refrain from making any final judgments until I actually see the keynote to see these features in action, but in principle, they all seem pretty solid.

Ditto that. I have to wait till the end of work today though to see it, however the load should have subsided by then so perhaps I'll be able to watch it relatively quickly after downloading it, instead of waiting for hours as it stalls under load like you guys probably are doing now

Front Row now has the AppleTV interface

Hmm, that's not so good, I like the old view, but I guess it was version 1 and they seem to have got the idea of a unified OS at last.

 

[macinfojunkie]

ZFS or not?

Can anyone who has "seen" a copy of the latest Leopard beta confirm whether (bootable) ZFS is part of it or not?

I know it was hinted at by Sun chappie back earlier in the he week, but I find it odd that nothing was mentioned in the keynote. After all, a dramatic file system change is rather a big deal for an OS is it not?

 

[TheAnswer]

why does everyone assume screen sharing is gone? Because Steve didn't show it in iChat so it 'must not exist anymore' logic?

Screensharing is now global, you can do it anywhere, not just in iChat. Sharing is covered on engadget, gizmodo, macrumors... Did I miss anywhere??/ You can share volumes, browse computers behind firewalls, support your mom who is behind a shared IP set....

I think the main concern is...is it limited within a LAN connection? The previous iChat screen sharing description was:

Originally Posted by Apple
Share and share alike

Remote control takes on a whole new meaning with iChat in Leopard. Thanks to iChat Screen Sharing, you and your buddy can observe and control a single desktop via iChat, making it a cinch to collaborate with colleagues, browse the Web with a friend, or pick the perfect plane seats with your spouse. Share your own desktop or share your buddy’s — you both have complete control at all times. And when you start a Screen Sharing session, iChat automatically initiates an audio chat so you can talk things through while you’re at it.

So long distance iChat troubleshooting/tutorials of my newbie friends seemed to be a possibility (along with group collaboration from a distance). If I'm limited to the newbies in my LAN versus the newbies in my buddy list, that means I'm still left pointing my iSight and my screen shouting "do this" or "haga clic" at my friends.

Since that original wording is gone from the iChat page, I just want to know if the functionality is still there or if that feature has been removed/postponed/reimagined.

 

[daneoni]

Pretty impressed the Keynote hasn't stalled actually, its a little bitsy laggy but overall watchable. Apple must've upgraded streaming servers

 

[SiliconAddict]

command - drag and drop = move = cut and paste

How do you go back a level when you are in icon view? You can't even use Apple up when you are drag and dropping.

 

[jlange]

Back-To-My-Mac?

Do you think it will resolve issues behind routers? I imagine that it's got some sort of notification system. Maybe the remote computer is maintaining a link with .Mac that listens to it waiting for incoming requests, or something.

 

[John-S]

yeah, its not that steve didn't say it thats the problem. Its that steve didn't mention it AND it disappeared from apples leopard page. It seems pretty reasonable to think its not there to me...

Also, it makes me laugh when mac users act like new eyecandy is pointless and bla bla bla. Just like the jealous windows users acted for so many years. You use OS X. You like it currently? The transparent dock and 3d icons now serve as no workflow purpose they are just eyecandy and we love them (aside from resizing and magnifying). It just makes me laugh when people act like they ONLY want functionality and no flashy stuff.

You can go buy a saturn and it will get you from point a to point b but wouldn't you rather have something that is solid, reliable AND flashy : )
(besides, most the people that say that are merely running text edit apps...LOL. Got to have a solid workflow...)

 

[Lonon]

My round up, and probably will voice many opinions here:

- New Desktop & Finder: gr8!
- Rest of features.. well.. not really that "new" or "top secret" were they...
- Is ZFS part of Leopard or not?

BUT... didn't we see ZFS in some screenshot of a preview build? At least an option that said "ZFS". I recall that...

Translucent menu bar? that's a feature? You're kidding, right? RIGHT? Vista has that!

And BTW Steve didn't say: "This are the top secret features." He didn't say anything. What i saw today was... lame. The good part is that there's 300+ features in Leoapard and THEY ARE NOT in the Apple site, so...

The complete list of Leopard features are secret. And among those are the "omg, i going to get laid" secret features. [Fingers crossed... ]

 

[ajhill]

Should of....

I think we are getting spoiled looking at Leopard and how smoothly and intuitively it works. What would have been an even better demo of Leopard would have been to have another computer running windows trying to keep up and showing how much more elegant the Leopard user interface is.

With each iteration of OS X, we get a more useful and supercharged version of the OS, that is a much better user experience than I get from windows machines.

Maybe today's speech fell victim to Mac faithful expecting a Miracle product that would go all our work for us.

The beauty of Leopard is that it just works and in MANY ways it makes life a lot easier.

Al

 

[FJ218700]

How do you go back a level when you are in icon view? You can't even use Apple up when you are drag and dropping.

sorry, not sure I know what you mean. I never use icon view for folders, just list or columns.

Maybe bring it up in the basics, others will probably be able to help.

 

[72930]

I hope Menufela will work with the translucent menu bar...

 

[samh004]

the old dock didn't have reflections to indicate which app is opened so i think the new one is slightly bigger than the old one. thats what i see with my eyes

Yeah, it had little triangles underneath the application, which were/are probably less graphics/processor intensive than what Leopard will have. I hope it'll all hold up on integrated graphics.

Does anyone know how I can download it to my HD instead of watching it streamed in Quicktime?
The Save-As option seems to just save a reference I believe.

It'll probably be on iTunes soon enough, if not already, by the time I have posted all of this.

Global Screen and Document sharing, anyone can write it into their cocoa apps to share documents from EVERY program if two users are online. This is a GIANT leap forward for EVERYONE who actually works for a living.

Namely...is screen sharing limited to the Finder and within a LAN or will it be accessible over an internet iChat connection.

It looks like "screen sharing..." is now a feature in the new Finder. But, it looks like it may be limited to computers on your network.

Regarding these 3 posts, I am curious to know if this is just a LAN feature or not. I'm not too fussed and have seen it talked about from both sides of the fence throughout the thread.

If an answer is allowable without breaking an NDA, that'd be useful, to clear the matter up .

From a consumer standpoint Panther was a big upgrade; Tiger was mostly smoke and mirrors to con people into upgrading the core OS components. Leopard is the real deal, there are serious new features for consumers and developers alike.

I'll agree that Panther did have a lot more revolutionary features than Tiger, and Leopard looks to be heading that way, but also looks bit more bloated as well, with eye-candy.

It's just four-way Universal binary, with ppc32/ppc64/intel32/intel64.
That's it !

That does sound so simple.

Hmmm, was hoping they'd add tabbed browsing in Finder...guess not. Would have preferred that to CoverFlow personally.

Hmm... I would have agreed with you, tabbed terminal windows, Safari, iChat etc... why not finder. But most of the time I only have 1 window open anyway, and close it straight after. I can see some usefulness of tabbed finder though, so here's to hoping.

Anyone else notice that there seems to be a new Exposé application in the Applications folder of Leopard? What is this and how is it different than the Tiger version?

Just like Dashboard has an application icon, Expose does too.

And BTW Steve didn't say: "This are the top secret features." He didn't say anything. What i saw today was... lame. The good part is that there's 300+ features in Leoapard and THEY ARE NOT in the Apple site, so...

If you look at all the Tiger features that were "secret", you'll see a lot don't actually mean that much to you.

 

[aswitcher]

Seems to me that 64 bit and the need for a real graphics card to get the most of Leopards eye candy - Finder, Quick Look, iChat, Spaces, etc.

So by or for October;

Mac Mini needs an upgrade or redesign for 64bit, wireless N and a graphics card.

MacBook needs a graphics card.

iMac could do with more graphics power to easily handle all this stuff.

 

[Iroganai]

I don't understand NEITHER of you !

I don't mean to be insulting, but do you have eyes?? Seriously use them. The new dock is SHORTER in height than the old FLAT dock. Come-on, look before you post again.

the old dock didn't have reflections to indicate which app is opened so i think the new one is slightly bigger than the old one. thats what i see with my eyes

Dock size can be adjusted, right ??

 

[macinfojunkie]

Just because Steve didn't personally mention this little feature in leopard just for you doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You can't cut a file for a good reason. Cutting it then accidentally copying a snippet of text will overwrite your file genius. But if your using tiger "gasp!" you can just drag the file, then hit command key, and it switches from copy to "move" which is nice when moving large files between drives. CTRL+X? I assume you mean COMMAND+X which I just covered. Now wasn't not a single step about drag and drop again? Also "gasp!" using tiger open automator and create a new "move file" save as a plug-in, now right click on a file and you'll see under automator, things that you created like "Move to Applications"

Please guys, don't turn this into a support thread. If you think a features not in OS X, make damn sure you are certain before asking, and I will continue to post.

Pardon me for saying anything negative about OSX. It is a fabulous OS, but not perfect by any means! And I'd be happy for you to ignore my posts if your tech support manner is anything to go by!

I've cut and paste GBs of files in Windows and never overwritten a single file genius. (BTW do they work at the Genius bar?)

Of course I was not expecting SJ to cover that little feature in the keynote, that would be preposterous! My point was that there was a lot of focus on "fancy" graphical - and impressive - improvements to the GUI, but that simple additions which are widely available in other OSes are still missing. I'm aware of the key modifier to enable a "move" when you drag and drop, but it would be nice to be able to do with cut/paste (as with Windows, hence my ctrl slip up in previous post).

Also it is not always convenient to drag files from one folder to another, especially if you need to copy files to multiple locations and navigate deeper info a folder structure. What is odd is that you used to be able to do this from windows when accessing a mac file share using an utility called Dave, but I've never been able to find a way to do it natively in OSX!

As for using automator, yes that is an option, but that would mean I'd have to know in advance where I was going to move the files and since a lot fo the moving is a one off task, kind of defeats the point of "automating" it somewhat.

 

[Lonon]

Overall I'm happy with what we've seen of Leopard so far and I think that in the coming months we'll hear about all those "little" 280 other features that might just add together to form a very significant OS X update.

280? To make 280 you are asuming that in the last year we saw 20 new and different features. We don't. Many of the features we saw today were the same from last year.

So, i would say we have something around 286 features left or more...

If those are the secret features, then i'll drop my hopes right now and buy an iPhone, because apparently Steve doesn't care about the desktop version of OS X.

 

[samh004]

Seems to me that 64 bit and the need for a real graphics card to get the most of Leopards eye candy - Finder, Quick Look, iChat, Spaces, etc.

So by or for October;

Mac Mini needs an upgrade or redesign for 64bit, wireless N and a graphics card.

MacBook needs a graphics card.

iMac could do with more graphics power to easily handle all this stuff.

Certainly looks that way right now... or the consumer models just wont look as pretty as they wont be able to support it.

Dock size can be adjusted, right ??

I think they were referring to the fact that in general, the new dock will be bigger or smaller than the old dock. So if you get them side by side, same size in system preferences, one will actually be bigger (or smaller) than the other, just because of the new design.

 

[Lonon]

does anyone else think that the transparent menu bar looks absolutely disgusting?

Yeah. I think Time Machine is taking us back to 10.0 with the translucent fetish in the menubar.

 

[3282872]

Meh.


Is the new FS bootable? Finder being cocoa. Where did you see this? I'm not finding any reference to this on Apple's site.




Until I see something really useful come out of this...meh.


You are talking two different things. The .Mac thing is only useful if you have multiple Macs. Or if you have a Mac account, something that most Mac users don't have because its a piss poor value.
File searching on multiple desktops. No brainer. Apple should have done this YEARS ago.



Options are good. Options are always good. Its a nice feature. I question if its worth a price tag of 3 figures.



Stacks is nothing more then a popup folder that displays content. You can already do this now sans the effect and previews.



I don't use iChat for one reason. Many of my contacts aren't on AIM. So another useless feature I'd be paying for.



I've had an on again off again affair with multiple desktop utilities. Never cared for them. Even Leopards version is little more then a streamlined version integrated into the OS. Nothing overly new.



Firefox and it extensions. enough said.



So we are paying for something that should have happened years ago. Got it.



I think we can safely say that Apple had a feature lock on Leopard at this point. As for iLife '07 and integration. Meh. iPhone I couldn't give less of a crap about.
Stellar OS is relative. If I can cause the Finder to beachball because of a network share I call it status quo OS.

Meh. There is NO pleasing you. Every point everyone has made you've shot down. That's a shame.

 

[Lonon]

Is anyone else confused with the "unified" interface? It's like they began to change all the apps over to the iTunes look, and stopped halfway. The scrollbars and a lot of buttons are still Aqua. Maybe the interface isn't finished yet? (I can't find any traces of Aqua on apple's site.)

Whatever, I'm sure UNO will be updated to restore OS X to normalcy...

I notice that myself. Same thing with Safari for Windows: all the widgets are aqua. Shouldn't they be iTunes-ish?

And... iTunes is Aqua or "new-aqua-with-pale-blue-panel" or what? Because the Leopard page doesn't explicit say "Aqua" as a feature. Maybe they're changing the name?

 

[amnesiak]

Dock size can be adjusted, right ??

i know you can resize the dock..im just quoting that guy coz he says the new dock is smaller than the old one. we can clearly see that the new one takes more space than the old one. at least thats what i see in the pic..

 

[SiliconAddict]

Seems to me that 64 bit and the need for a real graphics card to get the most of Leopards eye candy - Finder, Quick Look, iChat, Spaces, etc.

So by or for October;

Mac Mini needs an upgrade or redesign for 64bit, wireless N and a graphics card.

MacBook needs a graphics card.

iMac could do with more graphics power to easily handle all this stuff.

If the new Intel graphics cards that come with Santa Rosa can handle Direct X 10 and Aero I'm pretty sure it could make short work of Leopard and its graphics. No need for a discreet graphics solution for the low end.

 

[Lonon]

I was thinking about how this a "halo effect" play by Apple. The first experience most Windows users have with Apple software is iTunes. Should they choose to move to Mac, they will perhaps be more comfortable with the Finder interface.

Yes, that and Safari are the best ways to bring people in. And iPhone at least makes "OS X" come to mind to windows users.