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Open Thread: Leopard Preview

Merlin Mann | Aug 7 2006

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?

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TOPICS: Apple, Macs & OS X, Mac OS X, Macs, Mail.app, Personal Productivity, Vox Populi
jrk's picture

A few things people seem...

Submitted by jrk (not verified) on August 7, 2006 - 12:51pm.

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.

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