I watched Steve Jobs’ Apple Developer Conference keynote address yesterday, where he outlined ten cool features coming in OS 10.5 (Leopard.) As I watched some of them, two things came to mind. First of all, Steve’s favorite adjective is “Cool” which I have no problem with, and second, Vista and Mac OS seem to be playing a mad game of leapfrog. Just about everything he mentioned has either been done before, or garnered a collective yawn.
1. Leopard gets a new desktop. They are changing a lot of the features of the desktop, including a transparent menu bar (so your background shows through it) and a different look for the dock. Through the years the Mac desktop has changed a few times, and one of the complaints is “every time I upgrade I have to relearn my UI.” Compare Windows 3.11 to 95. 98 to 2000. 2000 to XP. XP to Vista. Every time, MS moves things around in an attempt to “streamline” things. Mac OS does the same thing.
They are also adding “Stacks” which is a pop-up version of a folder, but it’s located on the Dock. You click on the folder, and up pops the contents of that folder. I remember doing this in Windows 98 – you drag the folder to the taskbar and you accomplish much the same thing. I was also surprised when the audience applauded the addition of a “Download” stack, so anything you download from the Internet automatically ends up there instead of cluttering up the desktop. What was so hard about creating a Downloads directory and setting your browser to default there? I have been doing this for years. And yet, Windows applications attempt this by creating My Downloads, yet where do people insist on putting everything? Their desktop. As if it will get lost forever if they tuck it away someplace else. Most of the things you download are installers, which will be used once – why keep it on your desktop for the next year or so when it’s never going to be needed? If you’re that afraid of losing it, stick it on a CD – Windows has had CD burning built in since 2002. So let’s build a download stack into the OS so people can still keep everything on their desktop because they are too lazy to go looking for things.
They also cleaned up the sidebar so it looks more like iTunes, and added some smart searches so you can quickly bring up every file you touched within the past day/week/whatever. Okay, iTunes is cool and all that, but to design the OS around it? That’s a bit much.
“Back to my Mac” looks like a neat feature – not new in its functionality but new that it’s included in an OS. Basically, you’re on the road with a Mac laptop, and you need a file on your Mac desktop at home. As long as you have a .Mac subscription, you can seamlessly connect to your Mac at home and drag files across the Internet. Programs like GoToMyPC have been able to do this for years, but it would have been a neat feature to have added to Vista. Problem there is that this technology requires a database server of some form to keep track of all these IP addresses – something that the public would NEVER in a million years allow Microsoft to do. However, Mac users seem to have no problem with Apple doing the same thing via .Mac. Amazing how selective people are when it comes to privacy. Microsoft is evil and cannot be trusted because… well… because the media said so. And the media is always right. Apple doesn’t have nearly the market share, and is therefore under the media’s radar, soooooo sure, they can be trusted. (I say, get over yourselves. It’s an IP address that changes twelve times a week. You’re not worried about your IP being traced when you download music from KaZaA, so shaddap about some evil monopolistic behemoth using it for nefarious purposes. If the media said cell phones gave you cancer, you’d all be throwing your phones… oh wait… never mind.)
Anyone who has used iTunes is familiar with Cover Flow view – you flip through your music as if you’re flipping through albums on a shelf. This view will also be available in Finder so you can flip through files the same way, with the added ability to preview the file (such as play a movie right from Cover View without launching a player.) I’ve heard people say that Windows Vista already had this ability in Flip 3D (and thus the assumption that Apple is stealing ideas) but consider that iTunes had this feature before Windows Vista was released, so who is copying what? Supposedly the functionality of OS doodads like Flip 3D and Aero are also dependent on what hardware you have (i.e. can your video card handle the load.) Be interesting to see if there are any such limitations in Leopard.
2. Spotlight (the integrated search feature) will be able to search networked computers as well as local files. Apparently Vista has something similar (and Google is suing over it because it uses Microsoft’s search engine with no option to change it. Here we go again.) Every version of Windows I have used, one of the first things I did was disable the indexing “feature” because of all the hard drive thrashing it did. I never found any use for it. Keep your files organized and you won’t lose things. Pretty simple, really. The only thing I use Spotlight for is an Application launcher – type the first few letters of the application and bang, there it is. But that’s just me. Searching other computers would be a neat addon, provided it made some way around the old “enter your login and password” – “yeah I know you entered it correctly, but enter it again because I am too braindead to apply it remotely.”
3. Quick Look, which lets you preview files from Finder without launching the application. By “preview” they mean view the entire file, not just the first page. I have seen claims that Vista already does this, and other claims that Mac will do it better (and really, at this late date, what would be the point in adding a feature that doesn’t beat the competition?)
4. Leopard will be 32 and 64 bit in the same release. You don’t have to be sure you bought the right version, or buy a new version because you changed hardware, just buy Leopard and be done with it. I saw a thread a few weeks ago from someone who installed Windows Server 2003, then later learned that he installed the 32-bit version on a 64-bit AMD system. He said that something should have told him that he had the wrong version. Ummm like what? Other than the specs on the packing list for the system you bought, where else would it say “hey, you have a 64-bit system, and are installing the wrong version of Windows”? At least for the people too stupid to know what they bought, the operating system is smart enough to know.
5. Core Animation – this built-in toolset allows people to make flashy animated applications, complete with zooming windows. I don’t know enough about this to comment.
6. Boot Camp is built in. Boot Camp allows you to run Windows on an Intel-based Mac, and has been available as a beta download for about a year. Parallels and VMWare have programs that let you do this without rebooting, whereas Boot Camp requires you to reboot (although there are rumors that the Leopard version will let you put your Mac OS to sleep, switch to Windows, then put that to sleep and go back to Mac OS. Quicker, but still not as useful as running in a VM.) The natural response to this would be, if you wanted to run Windows, why did you buy a Mac? The common answer is “stability,” which a Mac does offer, but you’re kidding yourself if you don’t admit that it’s a Windows world. You still might need to be able to run Windows applications, either because there is no Mac version, or the Mac version sucks (sadly, QuickBooks for Mac is one of those apps that looks like it was thrown together in a rush so Intuit could proudly crow “hey, we have a Mac version!” It is missing SO many key features present in the Windows version that Intuit has nothing at all to be proud of.) Boot Camp/Parallels/VMWare allow you to run Windows apps on a Mac, either by rebooting or side-by-side with Mac apps under OS X. The cool part is that you’re running Windows, Linux, and Mac on the same hardware, whereas you cannot run Mac OS on anything but a Mac. Again, there are a lot of people who ask, “who would want to?”
7. Spaces, or Virtual Desktops. This splits off your desktop into different sections, so you can have all your apps of one type on the same space, while not cluttering up another space with your e-mail on it. A third space can have a game running (Steve was running World of Warcraft in one space.) I know I have seen this ability in Windows, but it was usually through the video card and not the OS. Personally I don’t see much use for it – why have that many applications running at the same time? Just bogs down your system needlessly.
8. The Dashboard is getting an upgrade, adding a tool that lets you clip a section from a web site and make a widget out of it. I posted my opinion of this whole widget thing earlier and how out of control it’s getting. A lot of widgets are in fact useful, but others just scream “hey, look, I made a widget! Download it so I can feel important!”
9. iChat is being enhanced to not only let you use backgrounds and special effects, but also run applications via your camera. So if you have a document or a movie you want to show someone, you drag it to the iChat window and it’s shared over the Internet. The concept of a Whiteboard over the net is not new, but Apple has a thing for integration. If it’s possible from one application, why not make it accessible to others? And again, it’s built into the OS instead of being a third-party app. Last time I tried to use a whiteboard app for sharing a document, it was so slow we gave up on it. Good luck with that.
10. Time Machine is an automatic backup feature for people who are too busy/lazy to use backup software. It automatically backs up your system to an external drive or network storage, and allows you to easily search through those backups in case you lost something. Again, the concept of an automatic backup is not new, it’s the simplicity that everyone tries to improve. Postings have been made about how Time Machine is nothing more than a copy of Vista’s Volume Shadow Copy. True, they are both built in backup systems, but Shadow Copy still requires you to not only know WHAT you are looking for, but WHERE. Anyone ever tried to backup their Outlook files? Any idea where they are? To make it easier for you, Microsoft made the folder hidden by default. How is this helpful? Time Machine claims to make it easier to find missing files because it uses the same Spotlight that powers the rest of the Mac file system. PROBLEM IS… despite which one is “better” or “easier to use,” you still have to turn it on. My guess is, people will enable it, their drive will fill up with backups, and they will turn it off because, like other backup systems, it’s just too inconvenient. It won’t occur to them to get an external drive for their backups – oh NOES, that costs MONEY! Then when they booger up their system and call for someone to help them, the backup logs will be checked, and wow, no backups in six months! Nothing’s changed here folks, move along.