Open Thread: Leopard Preview
Submitted by Merlin on August 7, 2006 - 8:27am.
Apple - Apple - Mac OS X - Leopard Sneak Peek
Like most of you, I’m keeping an eye on today’s previewed features of the upcoming “Leopard” (OS X 10.5) release.
Looks like some interesting ideas – many of which, as usual, seem inspired by existing third-party products.
I think I’m most intrigued so far by the idea of “to-do” functionality from within Mail.app (thanks for the tip, Matt); let’s hope that also means I can deep link to a given email from my iCal task list. I also welcome the concept of built-in email templates – although I’m kind of bummed that they seem more focused on execrable 1999-style HTML emails than on the kind of functional time-savers found in the peerless MailTemplate.
To be honest, on first blush – and I’m sure there’s much more to come by the time of release – this feels a bit cute and a little light on really revolutionary stuff (the long overdue promise of something like Time Machine notwithstanding). Stuff like (yet. more.) iLife integration is handy enough for the notional Swithcher and Grandpa Joe, but in general I guess I’m hoping for some serious power-user improvements to the core functionality. Maybe that’s just me.
What do you think? What’s “Yeah!” and what’s “Meh?” Anybody else holding out hope for some really deep Finder rewriting and more functional iCal updates?
Other coverage
- Merlin's blog
- 4221 reads
I was glad to see...
I was glad to see some emphasis on backup; it was long overdue. Yes, they did make it more whizzy than it needed to be, but that’s Steve. It’s a step toward making the use of computers more fail safe and that’s a good thing.
The mail/notes/todo integration sounds good, but I’ll have to use it to see if it works for me.
The other little sleeper that sounded really cool to me was the ability to make a snippet of a web page into a widget. That could be really neat and highly useful. There are usually a number of web pages with info that I track, and if I could just get at all of them by going to the dashboard, I think that would be great.
On the whole, though, I found the whole presentation a bit disappointing, especially with most of it devoted to something that’s not coming until next Spring. I know they don’t usually do iPod stuff, for example, during WWDC, but they’re way overdue for something in the iPod line. Not to mention all the phone rumors…