About 10.5: Leopard Developer Preview shows off small new features
Posted by Dan Moren | Friday, August 11, 2006 8:00 AM PT
Are you drooling for the latest news of Leopard? Techpedia has published a number of screenshots from the Developer Preview that was handed out WWDC, which hints at a number of smaller improvements that didn’t make the infamous Steve Jobs Top 10. Of note to me were the following additions:
The Finder’s View Preferences now allow you to specify grid-spacing in addition to icon size.
The Screen Saver preference pane appears to let you display multiple RSS feeds sequentially, interspersed with slideshows from .Mac accounts.
Spaces can support at least a 4-by-4 grid of virtual workspaces.
Preview.app now supports annotations, and its buttons have been replaced with the bubble button style from Tiger’s Mail.app.
The Accounts preference pane now allows the creation of groups, thus letting you assign the same permissions to multiple users.
Accounts also lets you create a temporary guest account, whose home directory is wiped after logging out.
The Finder’s contextual menu has added options for “New Smart Folder,” “Clean Up,” “Arrange By,” “Create Disk Image from <folder>,” and “Burn Disc from <folder>.”
The Help menu, in iChat at least, now appears to bear a Spotlight-like interface.
I’m sure there are plenty more little improvements where those came from, but I’d have to guess that, despite Steve’s assurance that they’re keeping features under wraps, if there was something big unannounced, I’d guess that we’d have heard about it by now. I mean, if you think Microsoft didn’t have developers from the MacBU at WWDC, then denial ain’t just a river in Egypt—the explanation that they’re trying to prevent Microsoft from stealing their ideas doesn’t really hold water.
[via digg]
Your comment presumes that all of the features slated to be in Lepoard, including the "top secret" ones not disucssed at the keynote, are included in the Leopard preview relesae given to developers at WWDC. I think that's an improper assumption.
All the features you list look to be minor modifications to already-existing applications, not the sorts of things that Jobs would want to keep under wraps. Do you really think Jobs was worried that Microsoft might find out that Leopard's Finder has new options in the contextual menu?
Unless Jobs was just blowing smoke -- always a possibility -- I'm guessing that there's something very new in Leopard -- a new Finder, perhaps -- that's not ready to be shown, and that's why it wasn't displayed at the keynote or included in the preview release.The fact that there are changes in the Leopard preview release not discussed in the keynote doesn't change that. Remember, Apple is often pretty good at keeping secrets.
Wow. I didn't know that Spaces could support up to 16 spaces!
That's awesome. I kind of think that spaces is cooler than Time Machine. I just feel like Time Machine is goingt o have too many catches. Like HDD space, copying 10GB files 3 times in one day because you made three seperate changes/saves.
There's got to be some type of super-smart-meta data-type thing for giant files that can break the backups down to ONLY the changes in files.
I'm certain that Leopard's not going to ship with the same version of Safari. Jobs didn't talk about what changes we would see there, so he's holding onto at least one secret.
Also, his statement about Microsoft ripping off ideas does hold water; he may also not want the Mac develpment community to rip off ideas. We've already seen that after the WWDC preview. Web Clips has been made for Tiger.
All these links are now dead?