Apple: Leopard - Oct. 26

Woot.

Though interesting to see what got chopped. The big ZFS file system? It’s read-only. Leopard still uses HFS+.

But I’m still going to be in line next Friday!

I’m not thrilled the student price is a measly $13 off. It used to be about half off.

Oh HELL yes. Day one purchase…

Shit, that’s awesome. I’m taking the following week off so I’ll have lots of time to play with it and check out the new stuff.

For a new operating system? WTF? Uh, what exactly on that list is so ZOMG AWSUM that you would take a week off?

No, I was already taking that week off. This is just a happy coincidence. XCode 3.0 needs a work out.

“Clip out any portion of a web page and turn it into a Dashboard widget.”

This new feature sounds pretty cool. I’ve had many moments where I wished I could do that.

Also, Preview will have an “Instant Alpha Background Removal”… I wonder how well that will work.

Students are an increasingly large chunk of Apple’s market. Chicks dig Macs for fashion reasons. Apple’s gotta take advantage…

There are a few improvements, but if the roles had been reversed i think the Apple hordes would be laughing at M$'s Leopard; “XP 1.1a LOL”.

Here’s my thoughts:
Finder: H4xor Coverflow into the system’s file browser. Performance is likely to suck, unless i hear otherwise. May be much less efficient at actually finding things.

Desktop.
-Stacks. Eh.
-Spaces. Hello Linux ripoff! Honestly, this sounds much cooler than it is in use. It takes about 5 seconds to learn how to use Spaces in Ubuntu. I do shuffle things around the spaces there, but mainly just to get them the f— out of the way.

Time Machine: Might be neat.

It even lists improvements to “Safari” as a feature, which seems to indicate a dearth of real improvements.

Where is resolution independence? Where is the ZFS file system? (Did SJ rip it out of Leopard to “get back” at Sun’s CEO bragging about it publically?).

Ok, that was harsher than i meant it to be, that’s what the work day will do to a man. Or something ^^.

I just feel rather reluctant to upgrade to this without a pretty indepth review of the new features and improvements. But on the whole it does feel very much like an iterative upgrade, and many of the improvements, like the “3d dock”, more superficial gloss like that which drove MS in many of it’s decisions in Vista.

One thing I hope Spaces does, but I doubt, is allow you to drag a window off the edge of the desktop and onto the next desktop. You can do this in Beryl and really, any other funky form of shifting windows to other desktops is counter-intuitive. Sadly, Virtudesktops has asstastic controls for what’s on which desktop.

Time Machine says it requires a “separate hard drive (not your boot drive)” to work. What does that mean for everybody with a macbook or imac? So, this is a mac tower feature only? Nah, can’t be. So, maybe it means different partition - in which case we’re going to lose a hunk of drive space to it, which I don’t like at all. 2003 R2 does shadow copy so much better than that.

USB/Firewire drive. You want it to be an external drive in case the main drive goes poof.

I’m pretty interested in grabbing it, as this is the first OS revision since I first sipped the Apple Kool Aid last fall. However, I’ve been warned by every Mac user I know to stay away from a new OS revision for a major patch or two.

Plus, the newest version of my audio app of choice drops this month, and I don’t want to find out the hard way that 10.5 compatibility is borked.

What will win out? My cautious practicality, or my desire for irrelevant new grahpical features to make my desktop extra-shiny?

Hmm. The taste for Kool Aid evidently doesn’t run in the family. My brother just bought his first Mac a few weeks back. I just caught up with him on MSN to ask if he’d bought it this month or last month, to see if he’d get a free upgrade. When I explained why, he offered a succinct summation of his experience switching sides:

“Mac blows.”

You use an Expose-esque screen that shows you all of them, where you can drag windows around. Applications can be set to a single workspace, or to appear in all workspaces (meaning they never move when you switch around – they’re always there). You can also override the screen-specific preference by opening a new window for that app while you’re in a different space.

According to the docs, resolution independence is in. There’s nothing to fiddle with, but application developers can build support into their apps. Full ZFS is available to developers as a download already, once Leopard is installed. 10.5.1?

Favorite features:

Quick-look. Get an email with 5 different attachments of various types? Select them all and hit quick-look and you’re instantly looking at them – no app loading necessary. PSD: check. XLS: check. PPT: check. PDF (duh): check. doc: check. Handy.

Back to Mac: yes, only .mac users get it. If you do, well here’s finally something to make it feel like you’re getting something for your money. It’s 1 click remote desktop to any of your machines anywhere you leave them, right from a finder window.

System-level to-do’s and notes support (both coming soon to iPhone as well, they say)

Snappy. Very snappy. Better multitasking? I’m not sure, but I like it.

UMTS support: built-in. As in, go buy an ExpressCard, stick it in, and watch an icon show up on the menu bar with the current signal strength. Click it, see “Current network: 3G” and select “connect”. Ha!

You can plug a hard drive into the Apple Extreme base station and write to it wirelessly. At least, that’s what we do. It’s great for everyone in the house to have access to a file server, too.

You can plug a hard drive into the Apple Extreme base station and write to it wirelessly. At least, that’s what we do. It’s great for everyone in the house to have access to a file server, too.

That would be awesome. I need to look into that. I hate taking my laptop downstairs and losing access to my mega drive…

Quick question. Would I NEED to buy the $179 version (http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=E507302C&nplm=MB053LL/A) or would the $100 (http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=12487AA8&fnode=home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/airport_wireless&nplm=M9470LL/A) suffice? The $100 one says that it supports a printer but that just looks like a regular old USB port to me.

Hi mate,

Yeah, you need the extreme, not the express. It was no big deal for us because we just moved downstairs the express we already had and extended our coverage.

The extreme is also faster and well worth the extra filthy luchre :)

Blargh! OK, thanks for the info!