WWDC ‘06: 10 Leopard Features
Posted by Dan Moren | Monday, August 07, 2006 11:27 AM PT
Steve has demurred to talk about all of Leopard’s features, for fear that Microsoft is watching very very closely. After pointing out a number of features in the upcoming Vista that mimic OS X features, Steve brings out the big guns: 10 things he can talk about that you will see in Leopard when it ships in Spring 2007.
There’s quite a bit (and it’s secret) so I’ve cleverly concealed it in the extended entry section. Follow me down the rabbit hole.
[Photo via Engadget]
- 64-bit support. No surprise there, given the touted 64-bit Xeons we’re seeing in both the Mac Pro and the Xserve. 64-bit apps will run in anything from Cocoa to the BSD layer and everything in betwee; they’ll run side-by-side with 32-bit apps.
- Time Machine. Only 4% of Mac users use backup software. Who has time for backing up? Leopard does. It’ll backup your files automatically, everytime you alter it, to a hard drive or a server, and if anything happens, you can always restore, either an individual file or the entire drive. Better yet, it also has version control, meaning that you can retrieve an earlier version of the same file, even if you’ve edited it accidentally. It sits in your app and allows you to “rewind” through your file states. It’ll also work with Address Book and have an interface for third-parties. Cool beans. The demo crashed, but it seems to have worked.
- The Complete Package. Leopard will include new versions of Front Row, and Boot Camp which will be “even better.” Photo Booth will work with more cameras.
- Spaces. Basically virtual desktops. Wow, I said Apple wouldn’t intro this, but apparently I was wrong. Lets you move windows between workspaces.
- Spotlight. Can now search remote machines as well, if you’ve got privileges. Adding boolean operators (hurrah!) And they’re beefing it up to make it a better application launcher (I’ll believe it when I see it).
- Core Animation. Like the other Core technologies (Core Image, Core Audio, Core Data), but for animation. Pretty cool. Allows you to reduce something like an Album Art screensaver from 4000 lines of code to 400. In some ways, it looks like a simplified version of Flash: starting point, end point, Core Animation does the heavy lifting in between.
- Access. Support for the disabled, such as Braille, improved VoiceOver, closed captions for QuickTime (that’ll be helpful even for me).
- Mail. Mail’s getting some big enhancements. Stationary for HTML e-mail (think iWeb for email…wonder if the HTML is any cleaner); Notes support, they appear in your Inbox and in a special mailbox (nice); To-Do List (a systemwide service!); Photo Browser for adding images to Mail (eh).
- Dashboard. They’re announcing Dashcode, which we saw leaked a while back. It’s an IDE for developing widgets. They’re also releasing Web Clip, which apparently allows you to turn part of a web page into a widget. For example, pull a comic strip off the web and pop it in, WYSIWYG-style. Or the weather. Or an eBay auction. Think of the uses! You could have a MacUser widget. Woo hah.
- iChat. They’re adding multiple logins, the ability to be invisible, animated buddy icons, video recording and (thank the Maker!) tabbed chats. Enough to make me switch back from Adium? We’ll have to see. They’ll let you apply PhotoBooth-like effects for video conferencing (won’t that slow things down?) and show slides in video conferences (that’ll be nice). It also seems to have some sort of “bluescreen”-like feature, where you can have it replace your background with a backdrop, either image or video. Best of all, no bluescreen is needed. Great, now I can pretend to be at the office while I’m at home. Wait…my home is my office. Doh.
- Okay, I know we said ten, but there were a few loose ends. Like the fact that iCal is going truly multi-user, and that Leopard Developer Preview is available now.
So that’s what they’re announcing for Leopard. There’s much more, of course, but it’s oh so very secret. We’ll have more information as we get a chance to pour over the technical documents and the blogosphere, so stay tuned.
Remember, you can follow along with MacCentral’s live coverage of the keynote.
This "Wait and see" thing reminds me of microsoft.... and then I cry inside....
I'm a bit skeptical about the need for secrecy at this point. The odds of Microsoft being able to implement a feature they saw today at the keynote seems unlikely. Heck, they can't seem to get the thing out the door after removing several features....
I suspect that either Apple just liked using the idea to poke fun at their rival or there are a few things that are not ready for prime-time and Apple's not even sure if they'll ship them.
Oh, and the Finder wasn't mentioned at all. Oh well.
Will the macbook run Leopard?
no MSN support in iChat??? Why oh why Apple!