So, I saw over on TUAW that Apple has released a preview video today of Leopard. To me, the funny thing is that I wasn’t going to check it out until I noticed a mention of there being a girl in the video.
Aside from me just explaining that reaction away as me just being a guy, I think we have officially hit the critical mass of marketing conspiracy (I use sarcasm, of course). But really, there used to be a time when I would migrate to things like this video naturally. Now, I’m finding that I have some prerequisites, like whether or not there’s a chick involved. Not that I’m complaining, but I feel like I’ve been programmed to expect my geeky world to be considerably dressed up to the point where I shun it if it’s not. Damn you, Beauty and the Geek, what have you done to me?!?
Anyway, after viewing the video (my first real taste of the upcoming Mac OS X, 10.5 “Leopard”), I wanted to put in my two cents about it. So, here goes:
- Coverflow in the Finder is cool and hugely useful, I just hope that it doesn’t involved any caching. That would make it a huge security risk because the Finder would essentially be making copies of your files and storing them god-knows-where. I do government consulting, so I can’t afford to have sensitive data strewn about willy nilly.
- I HATE that they’ve used iTunes as their model for the Finder. Seriously, that blows. This is such a Windows mentality, using a vertical bar on the left like that (“the sidebar”). It creates so much wasted screen real estate. Previous versions of OS X at least looked better. Now they’ve taken out the window dressing.
- It’s cool how The Dock now reflects things behind it, but no matter how you dress up The Dock, it’s still The Dock and needs to die. Long live the customizable Apple menu! Oh, wait, that’s been dead for years. Dammit!
- Quicklook — can anyone say OpenDoc?
- Time Machine — I like the idea of Time Machine. I just hope it doesn’t ask me every time I connect an external drive if I want to use it for Time Machine. That’s going to get VERY annoying VERY quickly if it does. I also hope you can encrypt your backups.
- Spaces — love it! I can tell I’m going to be spending a lot of time figuring out how to use it best, but I love this feature.
- Mail — I like some of the new features like Data Detectors, integration with iCal, notes, tasks, etc, but I don’t use Mail. I use Entourage, so I’m still waiting for MS to get me a new Universal version. Ho hum…
- iChat — Can anyone say “Knowledge Navigator?” iChat Theatre totally reminds me of Knowledge Navigator. I LOVE it! And the background effects reminds me of The Jetsons. Man, the future really IS here!
- Installation process — I love how he says “next, read and agree to the software license” and he just click “Accept” without even so much as a glance at the agreement. He should at least scroll through it to the bottom or something. Lol.
- Installation process 2 — it takes an hour or two to install?!?! WTF?
