I’m going to throw a “I agree” with Merlin about Dashboard. Those damn widgets consume a disproportionate amount of resources compared with their usefulness. I know a lot of things are moving toward web apps (I consider widgets as web apps), but I don’t find these dashboard widgets useful. Applications on the web are useful when and only when, in my opinion, when they do something a desktop app can’t. The best example of this is Facebook, which is nailing social networking.

While I’m very pleased we’re getting a new Finder, the biggest news of the day is Safari for Windows. I feel like the familiar world of web browsers on Windows has been blown apart. If I was working at Opera, I would have not been happy. Most of the blogs I’ve been reading are giving Safari a very hard time, but I think instead they have to just give it time. Competition never hurt, and webkit is still open source.

Merlin, i was listening today and i think what you were after is show all spotlight results window to appear without having to type in the tiny spotlight field.

if so the standard key combo it option + command + space

I’m not saying Dashboard is empirically useless. It’s just not something I find useful, especially given the resources that widgets consume.

Merlin, you asked a Quicksilver question during the episode:

To access the dictionary or thesaurus in Quicksilver just ‘.’ on invocation, type the word you want to look up, tab and then type Dictionary (or thesaurus) and hit return.

It doesn’t use the dashboard widget, but it functionally accomplishes what you were asking for. You have to install the Dictionary module for Quicksilver, but that’s it.

As for why anyone would use the dashboard, I use five widgets. Weather (the default one), RPG for random password generation (a task I frequently need right now so it’s perfect for the DB), the default calculator which I use more than anything else, Wikipedia (just because it’s quicker than a web browser most times) and Delivery Status.

Having seen the Keynote and the demos and listened to a bunch of podcasts….

I think you guys are a little hard on the whole Finder - Cover Flow - Quick Look.

It was kind of revealing especially with that rathole on which view you prefer.

It’s coming out of what you guys are into as Geek/Verbal/Text types. The visual end of things is not that strong for you… I think it’s why you’re more pro searching+flat file managment as opposed to taxonomical structures

There’s something to be chased down here… I don’t know what it is yet.

I have another thought on the Safari on Windows take. Perhaps Apple is doing it for the longtime Mac user who buys an Intel Mac to run Windows. So on the Windows side of the system, Apple is creating a browser so people who are forced to run Windows can have a taste of home on that system. Something to look familiar. Perhaps?

The one thing I was really impressed with from the last preview of Leopard (in ‘06) was the screen/application sharing in iChat. That functionality appears to have been dumbed down and split up between iChat and the “new” Finder.

Now it seems that you can only share screens via the Finder and only for machines on your local network. No more remote tech support for tech challenged family and friends. That feature was worth the price of admission for me as I don’t want to deal with VNC and I am not shelling out several hundred dollars for Remote Desktop.

This change seems to have gone unnoticed as people are still mentioning it as a feature (Andy even mentioned it on MBW). Sorry to see this one go.

I’m not so sure that the revenue stream from Google is the principal reason. No harm in it for sure but it’s not like Apple are hurting on that front.

The other key points, cool Mac app = halo effect, and likely safari-friendly web sites being more common…. I dunno.

The only other app Apple have released for Windows was iTunes and that was to drive iPod sales. The obvious leap to make is that there’s some future in Safari’s roadmap that would bring additional functionality to the iPhone.

Could it be some ‘integrate your life online’ with your device via Safari? Possibly with your keychain? All those sites and identities that you have on your Mac or PC are synced over to the iPhone? Your browser state is synced over?

The biggest issue for me is syncing, I want to be able to take up again on the Net where I left off, no matter what device I am working on.

But I wonder if that is enough either… Hmmm….

I must go and listen to your show, it’s downloading..,

Hey Merlin, the next time there is a MBW, you should let Scott Bourne know that Other World Computing is now selling 4GB FB-DIMMs for the Mac Pro, so he can get rid of those cheapo 2Gig chips and go up to the new max of 32GB.

Mmmmmmm… . RAM

I definitely think the developers where insulted by only offering them access to iPhone development via a web page. I did laugh at the excited fact that you can click a link and dial a phone number directly from the iPhone. WAP offers this as standard. Therefore all mobile phones can dial from a link.

I can imagine some developers felt a bit insulted, or perhaps taken.

Wasn’t the whole iPhone part just a very long winded way of saying “NO!” to those guys? And to save it for the last part of the keynote and then coming with such non-news?

Opinions might change a bit if Apple were to allow bookmarks on the home-screen, so it would appear as a separate app to the user. Also, i was thinking about what would happen if you could download a website into some sort of cache, so you could use it when you’re not online. However, a lot of these 2.0 webthingies use PHP and databases so that won’t allow for downloads, i guess.

I think my biggest disappointment was the lack of any substantial .Mac news. As a college student who will be buying her first laptop for the fall, I had really hoped there would be some way to justify paying that much for what is essentially syncing.

While I dislike the whole…transparent menubar thing, I do like the new dock. Gruber says that it looks awful on the side; I hope that’s not true, because having the dock on the bottom is probably the most horrible thing I can think of. :)

I was really excited about Quick Look—mainly because Preview sucks—until I found Xee and PDFView, which together do more for images and PDFs respectively than Preview ever could. What’s interesting about Quick Look is that it can be activated with a tap of the spacebar, according to the demo over at Apple’s site. I can totally see using it in that case, if, of course, it works with Path Finder.

I’m really excited about Spaces, though. I’m not interested in manually switching between desktops and remembering where stuff is, but just knowing that “Okay, all of my IM/chat stuff is in its own space, so when I click Adium in the Dock, it puts me in IM mode. When I click on Textmate, I go back to writing a post/researching” I can totally see using it, especially when I’m trying to way too much at once.

I’m still out on the iPhone news. If it can deliver stuff like a solid text editor, life-organization app and etc, then I’ll be happy. If I get an iPhone, that is.

I really wish we had seen more to be excited about, but it’s easy to get so caught up in criticism that we don’t look behind ourselves. We still have, what is in my mind, the best desktop OS out there. And Leopard will only be better~

@ MEP

Thank you so much for that Quicksilver tip for accessing the Thesaurus. I didn’t know that was an option!

Merlin,

MEP has mentioned one quick way to get to the Dictionary, though the interface is slightly clumsy. A more Mac-like way to get the information (esp. usefully and quick if you have one hand on the mouse) is to hover the mouse cursor over the word you wish to lookup and press Control + Command + D. This key combination brings up a nice little display with the dictionary definition; it lets you switch to the Thesaurus and, unlike with Quicksilver, allows you to launch the full Dictionary app to the highlighted word at the click of a button.

Merlin - you were looking for a way to access individual DB widgets.

Amnesty Singles will do the job. I really like it. I switch off DB, thus getting back some cpu, with MainMenu.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22226

Safari on Winders runs, but very buggy … many websites either too MSIE specific, or Safari is too buggy for now on XP.

When you guys spoke about dashboard on the podcast I did a little search and came up with this hack to enable dashboard widgets to be displayed on the desktop. I think its pretty cool.

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/dashboardwidgetsonmymacosx_desktop.html

Rock on…

I agree with you guys on Safari and why it exists on Windows. However, I would like to re-iterate something that was mentioned, and give you my own personal opinion as well.

I am running Vista on an older system for my mom’s computer, and Internet Explorer is painfully slow. Safari renders pages much quicker. Since my mom mainly uses the PC for internet surfing, this would make her experience much better without having to use an older version of Windows.

Neither here nor there in geekdom, but the speed is much more noticeable on the PC than on the Mac.