How hard is it to make Mail + Calendar + Address Book as functional as Entourage. I mean, COME ON!!! It’s an embarrassment!

@Jonathan

“Most of us have worked out a back-up system anyway, so it seems kind of obsolete.”

Actually, most people do not backup, as was pointed out during the keynote. I think Time Machine will come in handy for many average consumers.

As far as the todos within Mail…I use Entourage for the simple fact that it allows me to instantly create a todo from an email. That’s one of the features of Outlook that I absolutely must have since a lot of my action items derive from an email.

man, i haven’t seen anything like spaces since fvwm!

I’m curious why so many are going off on the Finder now, disappointed that any changes/improvements to it were not shown off today. I’m quite pleased with the state it’s currently in.

However, since it seems that there were no apparent changes shown today in it, that means it is likely going to get a huge facelift in Leopard.

Also, regarding Time Machine… I was really impressed on all fronts. It looks like a super-easy backup method for novices yet still has a lot of power to it. The address book demo on the website really impressed me as there have been several times when I was sure I had an address and found out I no longer did.

If there were two features I’d liked to have seen today it would have been a replacement of the Tiger-style Mail interface and Steve using Spotlight to find a document by it’s filename. I would have stood up and cheered for that one.

WWDC is for developers, it is hard to understand why many were expecting ipods and MacTablets to go.

Time Machine on the other side is for consumers, not tor sysadmins who will keep digging their specialized backup apps.

The 64bit foundation addresses all who need to run scientific apps but also the ability to run terabytes of storage without middleware. This alone is an impressive achievement which Vista can not anymore deliver and a solid element in Apple adverts for years.

All in all some of the dizzling features dripping into iChat, Mail, iCal etc show an impressive degree of integration and ability to listen to user’s request, I believe this is the stuff that is going to confuse Microsoft in this last few months of refinement.

I’m not sure how you feel the new iChat is inspired by Adium. Tabbed chatting isn’t exactly an Adium-only feature. I think iChat SHOULD HAVE been inspired by Adium, and support more protocols, logging and more customization features.

Best new feature we’ll be looking forward to in our office is actually Wiki Server. Finally we can ditch MediaWiki and wiki markup!! Yah!

Someone needs to steal the bong away from the Time Machine UI designers, for the interface is triiiiiiipy. And not in a good way. From the cosmos backdrop to the perspective glass buttons, it just looks silly. IMO, the team should focus their efforts on the timeline at the right edge. Could be much classier looking.

I’m not sure if I understood this right… But if there’s a feature that let’s my wife see - AND edit - my iCal schedule. And the opposite…

…then that is worth an upgrade alone.

I like Time Machine. It looked way cool, and I’m sure it will be used a lot. I have more than once replaced the original folder with the empty copy. Doh.

I admin six editing stations (FCP and ProTools) and I sure would use Time Machine in that professional enviroment. Just add an extra internal drive for each G5/Mac Pro, and let Time Machine backup to that. Excellent solution.

I agree with Anthony: Ditching Mediawiki on our work server will be a joy. What a nightmare to install…

Bigggest WOW: Core Animation. As a video editor, I can think of a million uses for that.

I’m sure Apple will present bigger and better iPod nanos, more iTunes content (read: movies) and Mac mini with a tv-tuner well in time before christmas.

@Daniel: “Time Machine seemed very nifty and welcome. This hit me as one of those “Duh, why don’t more OSes have this?” features”

Windows does have it. It’s just another one of their myriad features that no one knows about. Man, I sometimes wonder if the unknown functionality of Windows and the marketing machine of Apple could get together… we might finally know what Windows can REALLY do besides “get viruses”.

Anyone else find the ‘PC Guy’ video before the keynote to be overly arrogant? I get the humor, just didn’t find it all that funny. Just me?

News Floozy: Leopard and YouTube - Short But Sweet…

43 Folders on Apple’s Leopard preview:  "…this feels a bit cute and a little light on really revolutionary stuff (the long overdue promise of something like Time Machine notwithstanding)."  Here’s Engadget’s summary of the new …

For those hoping for more group aware ical, it simply wasn’t in the keynote.

Have a look here: iCal Server

If nothing else, Finder needs to be fixed so it stops dropping .DS_Store files everywhere.

Another interesting development often glossed over: the new iCal group-oriented tricks and tools are accomplished through an iCal Server app, the core of which Apple has apparently open sourced under an Apache2 license. Look around for news of MacOSForge.

Further possibilities mentioned here, a new app called “Teams”:

MacAchaia on ArsTechnica

Mentioned here.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have a Powerbook at home and do tech support for XP at work, and totally thought, “trying to look like XP, are we?”

Seriously, adding in notes and to-do makes Mail look more like Outlook. XP has a function similar to Time Machine already - you have to uncheck it before cleaning off virii so it will reset to “take pictures” of a clean system rather than retaining the virused version.

Not to say that XP is actually better or anything. You’ll pry my Powerbook from my cold dead hands. I swore I would never give M$ another dime a long time ago. Supporting PCs does that to you — the best thing I got from Windows was job security! But I have to wonder if Apple’s seeking out things that XP has that OS X doesn’t, and tweaking so users will see equivalents and make the switch. I never really felt the absence of any of the features in the preview, cause as someone else said, there are apps that will do a lot of that already.

Yes, third party apps from MailTags to You Control Desktops (Spaces) will be hurting… but I like the look of the expansion of options in iChat. The Shared Desktop is seriously useful. That is something I can see working very well. I also like the presentation mode, being live and presenting a Keynote would be great.

I am pumped for Time Machine but I am curious as to how much HD it will take up.

“IMO, the team should focus their efforts on the timeline at the right edge. Could be much classier looking.”

I was thinking the same thing. Imagine Dashboard’s widgets bar as a timeline at the top of the screen. No new-age effects, just the dates and you scroll back. While we’re at it, a slight overhaul of the Time Machine icon could be useful, too

To everybody who cheers at the “To Do” feature in mail, or the tabbed iChat - I’m sorry, but this is supposed to be an OS upgrade and it’s gonna cost a lot of money. I’m not even willing to spend money on an “improved finder”, I expect a lot more. Time Machine certainly is a good feature, it’s just not my thing; but that’s the kind of new features I expect from a major OS upgrade. Unfortunately it’s the only one in Leopard. Don’t even get me started on mail stationary or iChat backdrops. Please! PS: even Tiger only had 2 major new features: Dashboard (previously available as shareware, sort of) and Spotlight (free on other operating systems). Previous OS X releases were must-haves (remember Jaguar), but I could still happily live with Panther, and I’m certainly going to keep Tiger until 10.6 comes out (with hopefully new and useful features).

A few things people seem to be glossing over and/or weren’t covered directly in the keynote, itself:

1. Spotlight now supports a more reasonable, powerful query language (AND, OR, NOT, explicit associativity, date:/format:/etc.) It’s really, really sad that I’ve historically found it easier to find email by cmd-tabbing to a browser and running a search shortcut against my Gmail archive than searching directly in Spotlight or Mail.

2. ObjectiveC 2.0 Garbage Collection, significant runtime improvements, and new syntactic sugar to reduce verbosity. This is huge, the average user just won’t realize it for a while until the average app starts getting faster, leaner, more stable, and more rapidly-evolving.

3. DTrace for OS X

4. Xcode 3.0 [http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/xcode.html] Among other things, the debugging and profiling tools (using DTrace — #3), look dramatically improved.

Now I just hope Time Machine is as powerful as I first imagined when reading the real-time news feeds (real-time snapshotting in the filesystem, with lazy mirroring of the version tree to external and/or networked volumes), and not some lame batch process as I now fear. This could be either so good or so non-functional, depending where they’ve gone in the implementation.

This definitely seems like a more minor upgrade than Tiger was, and it still hasn’t become obvious to me that the latter upgrade is entirely worth the cost and bother. That said, I use very few of the default Mac applications (Mail, iCal, etc) and have filing systems going back to the days of DOS that make Spotlight not particularly necessary.

Does anybody know whether the Time Machine includes a mechanism to permanently delete files you really want gone? Things like internet caches come to mind as an example.

Tiger had more than Spotlight and Dashboard if you’re a developer, and Leopard will be similar - the really important stuff is what comes downstream of the release.

Operating systems enable applications, but it is applications that drive operating system sales. (Unless you are talking a DOS to Windows transformation, or OS X pre 10.3 where the system was - realistically - incomplete).

I don’t buy the ‘we’re keeping hush-hush about the new features in case Microsoft find out’ line. Microsoft are one of the biggest developers on the Mac (Office). I suspect it is much more along the lines of ‘don’t promise what you can’t deliver’, and that the Finder revamp, etc, are still in development.

Overall feeling : The keynote is a PR exercise aimed at the media and public as much as anything else - in a way, the developers conference is the wrong place for it, but Apple are very insistent that they don’t do public vapourware demos, so the WWDC is a better excuse than a consumer trade show.

The really interesting stuff are the bits barely covered - what’s changed in Obj-C 2.0 and XCode 3, what’s this X-Ray app, and how well does Core Animation stack up against rival technologies from Adobe and Microsoft?

most of my thoughts on this have already been posted by others here (i totally agree with eric’s comment), and i’d feel a bit dirty for shamelessly copying my comment that i already posted at kottke.org over here (but head there if you’re interested ;-).

just one more thing: i don’t think time machine will impart a big performance hit. many of the more performance-intensive tasks time machine has to do are already done by spotlight. OTOH, i’m worried for this exact reason: spotlight only lets you search media that are currently mounted. it works well enough if you like to have all of your data on hard drives, but it doesn’t help one bit for a large collection of backups scattered over many CDs or DVDs. what i’d really want from spotlight is searching all my files and being told which medium i have to insert to actually access the files i want.

similarly, i won’t be impressed with time machine as long as it just gives up as soon as my external HD is filled up. i want the option of moving older stuff off to DVDs, or tapes, or other HDs, without removing them from the index.

iTunes and iPhoto suffer from the same problem. if there’s any way to move a part of your iPhoto library off your computer wihout removing it from the iPhoto library, i haven’t found it yet. with time machine, i’ll have at least the option of just deleting older stuff from iPhoto after having it backed up — essentially what i do now — and later getting it back in there — as i do now, but with metadata, ratings etc., restored. a step in the right direction, but a tiny step.

The problem with having a mature OS (as Apple now has w/ OS X) is that it’s…mature. And incremental improvements just seem so…incremental.

Still, I like Spaces, and the Spotlight improvements, and some of the bells & whistles in iChat, like iChat theater.

I’m thrilled to see tighter Mail/iCal functionality and integration, though I admit that I was hoping for an all-in-one Entourage-style app with that Apple touch.

And as for the Finder, can someone explain to me what’s so awful about it? I hear a lot of folks saying that it needs to be revamped and rethought, but I don’t quite get why.

That said, I’ve been wading deeper into Quicksilver for months now and don’t use it much!

I’m pretty excited about finally having boolean Spotlight searches. And Time Machine sounds totally great, though I’m kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of performance and space requirements.

Other than that, it was kind of, “Oh, okay.” Nothing I’m freaking out about, but nothing I won’t be happy to have.

Next to Time Machine, the iChat functionality really has me excited. No, not the ability to blue screen my background with a picture of hawaiian beaches. With it’s screen sharing I’ll finally be able to easily troubleshoot my friends and families computers! All without crazy router setups, VPN, or SSH tunnels.

I’m not worried if this feature is Mac only. I still can’t video chat very well with anyone on a PC. Someone might come up with a third-party app for PC connectivity, but I don’t really want anyone bothering me with their PC problems!

I understood this as giving developers a preview of what neat features they might be able to design around in the upcoming OS. The account I read said that they made clear that the real revolutionary things are still to be revealed… they don’t want to tip their hand too soon, especially with a new Windows update coming… eventually?

I too was disappointed. Spaces, app launching from spotlight, and ichat enhancements are all features I have already by using 3rd party apps. I was looking for some real revolutionary re-thinking of the finder/dock and major major spotlight enhancement as well as deep speed optimization etc. and that’s just not happing

My apologies for my wonky original post. I had no idea an asterisk before something will transform it into indented text when commenting.

I just watched the preview video for Spaces and really think this might also turn into a big thing for many people’s workflows. My own ADD-addled brain would benefit from it’s organization greatly, even with Apple-Tab, Expose, and QuickSilver. It’d clear my screen up nicely, allowing me to concentrate on just one task at a time.