“I’ve been made aware of some great stuff that Steve didn’t talk about in his [WWDC Mac OS X Leopard] keynote address,” Danny Gorog reports for APC Magazine.
Gorog reports, “I can also say for sure that Leopard, when it’s released will beat the pants of Vista in terms of speed and functionality. Windows users should however read this article so you’ll know what to expect on your machines by 2011.”
Gorog’s list includes:
• Attention to detail 1: rounded bottom edges of all drop down menu bars
• Attention to detail 2: location options only appears if you have more than one location set
• Help Menu improvements
• New ‘Get Info’ pane
• iCal improvements
• Stacks are really useful
• Cover Flow in the Finder is really useful, too
• Contextual menu’s “More” selection
• Smarter Airport Menu
• Bind applications to Spaces
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “thereal” for the heads up.]
To everyone asking about resolution independence in Leopard:
“Resolution Independence
The old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology. Macs now ship with displays that sport native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system, including the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks, will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays.
The introduction of resolution independence may mean that there is work that you’ll need to do in order to make your application look as good as possible. For modern Cocoa and Carbon applications, most of the work will center around raster-based resources. For older applications that use QuickDraw, more work will be required to replace QuickDraw-based calls with Quartz ones.”
http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/
cover flow and spaces are great.
most iApps are not included in the beta (just iChat and iTunes), so it’s hard to judge new features like coreanimation etc.
the new iChat is great.
the finder sidebar is a lot better, it shows all networked computers, much more intuitive than the “Connect to server” menu item.
being able to display remote screens is a huge improvement, it’s so much easier to help people with their macs.
spotlight’s can search networked volumes, great !
“spotlight’s can search networked volumes”
That really is a nice improvement.
Tiger is so great that the only annoyances we have is with the details. Remember when ther was hundreds of articles complaing about inconsistent windows? Well that is solved now, and I don’t hear anybody enoying that. Remember, these are 10 out of 300 new features. Apple is too smart to release all of the details until the product is released. So, as Steve would say, stay tuned….
One thing I haven’t seen mention of is if the dock will now allow for spring-loaded folders. That little improvement would be a huge help.
Are you serious? It’s called Stacks, and it was “mentioned” as one of the principle Leopard advances in Steve’s keynote.
I think he is emphasising the SPRING LOADED concept.
So are all folders you drag into the Dock going to be spring loaded in the Dock, or only Stacks?
All folders would be useful.
Coverflow is lame. Wanna pick out one photo from a bunch of files named img12345.jpg? Choose icon view, hit ctrl + j and resize the preview icons to a 128×128. Much, much faster to look through your pics.
Missing attention to detail: the ability to resize windows from any corner. That’s gotta be one of the most requested features, when the hell will they sort it out?
@DJ Rizzo: Explain what Spring Loaded folders from the dock would accomplish that would be useful please?
Stacks do most of what I’d want a spring loaded folder to do from the dock. And frankly I’d rather have it done the way that Stacks does it without popping up a new window, far more useful for finding a file.
I won’t deny that there could be some uses for a pop up window from a folder in the dock, but extra functionality also comes at the cost of usability, adding complexity. Right now I can only see that as a negative, but please educate me if I’m wrong, what would this be helpful for?
@mindpower: “Missing attention to detail: the ability to resize windows from any corner.” Missing to PC users. Long time Mac Users do not miss this functionality. I could see how it could be useful in some cases, but hardly a make or break features. In general I’d say the small size of the tiny resize box in the corner is more of an issue, especially for large screens. That’s not something having more corners with resize boxes would fix, however.
As far as Coverflow not being useful, your example doesn’t really prove that it’s not, it just shows one example of where it’s not optimal. A dedicated program for cataloging and managing photos (like iPhoto or Apeture) would be far more suited to that. I can see myself using Coverflow for some things, but I really want to try it out myself and not depend on what others are saying.