Jobs faced a very tough audience this past Monday as he delivered his keynote speech to over 5000 attendees at Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference. With the previous announcement of the iPhone and the delay for Leopard, everyone was wondering what Jobs would pull out of his box of tricks this time.
Sadly enough, this WWDC wasn’t quite as exciting as we’d been led to believe. At last year’s conference, I was thrilled with several of these features and spent a week in hands-on sessions learning about the technologies. Therefore, most of this was a repeat for me. I had still held out hope for the “secret” features to be announced. There were a few new features announced, but nothing that blew me away like I was expecting. However, Leopard is a huge release and should thrive for several years. It will really shine once we start seeing applications that are Leopard-only. The possibilities are simply amazing. Let’s discuss some of the finer points of Leopard.
Multicore Support
This is a major improvement for all Intel Mac users. Even first generation Macbook users and all the early Intel adopters should see performance gains in Leopard. Tiger was designed to run on one-core processors, which was fine at the time. However, all Intel Macs have at least 2 cores, with the high-end “Ocho” Mac Pro having 8 all together. Can you see the reasoning here? With Leopard optimized to make the best use of all those cores, and new ways for developers to further improve their programs (read more about NSOperation and NSOperationQueue ), Leopard should see a significant performance improvement.
Safari 3 for Windows
I’m not sure if Safari 3 for Windows is a “secret” feature of Leopard or not. I’m actually using the beta on Windows right now to write this article and so far it has behaved itself rather nicely. The attention to detail in making Safari for Windows just like Safari on Mac is incredible. Even the contextual menu (right-click) gives you the same options, such as “Save Image to Desktop”. I mean, that’s just crazy.
Boot Camp
Most were hoping for Jobs to announce some amazing virtualization technology built right in to Leopard. I’m rather glad that this approach wasn’t taken for a few reasons. First, there are already two options on the market today: Parallels and VMWare. Parallels has proven they are dedicated to providing new features and constantly improving the software. I love Apple, but if they incorporated virtualization into Leopard, the updates would be few and far between when compared to Parallels. Just check out Parallels new 3.0 release to get what I mean.
What Jobs did tell us is that Boot Camp will allow you to switch between Windows and Leopard faster. Quick example: If you’re in Leopard and need to switch to Windows, be sure to use the “Restart in Windows” option from the Apple Menu. This will place Leopard into a hibernating state and, if you’ve previously used Windows, should start Windows from where you left off. This will make the process much more relatable to “Suspending” a virtual machine in Parallels.
New Desktop
The redesigned Desktop is touted as the number one feature for Leopard. However, I don’t see anything revolutionary or amazing about it.
- The Menu Bar has a new look. It’s very comparable to the trashy-translucent taskbar in
- The Dock has seen a facelift. Your icons now sit on a silver background that reflects any window behind it, making it look 3D. Might look cool, but is that really a feature?
- No blue background. I’m very sad. For me, the Mac experience has always included a new, cool Aqua background with every major release. Jobs explicitly stated that no one ever uses these and it’s a waste of time. I like them Steve!
- Anyone else notice that the hard drive icon wasn’t on the Desktop. Very minimalist look.
- Stacks. I’m actually fairly excited about this new feature. Basically, it’s a way to organize your files and preview the contents in a cool new way, without opening a Finder window. This was originally rumored to be included in Panther, then in Tiger, and now in Leopard. Nice to see it finally made it in. All the demos show the stacks being used in the Dock. I wonder if we’ll be able to use them other places. I love the concept, but won’t use it that much if I have to use them only in the Dock.
