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Apple Delays Leopard to October
SuperMog2002 writes "Apple Insider has the sad news that Mac OS X Leopard has been delayed until October. Apparantly software engineers and QA had to be reassigned to the iPhone in order to get it out on time, costing Leopard its release at WWDC. For now the original press release from Apple can be found on the 'Hot News' part of their site, though Apple did not provide a permanent link to the story. 'While Leopard's features will be complete by June, the Cupertino-based company said it cannot deliver the quality release expected by its customers within that time. Apple now plans to show its developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship the software in October.'"
I guess I'll be dressing up as a Leopard for Halloween this year. I sure hop Flanders it's handing out toothbrushes again.
warning: The above content may test positive for sarcasm and/or could be a failed attempt at humor and as such should be taken with a pound of salt.
I was just bragging to the office MS pundit that Leopard would be out soon. Then I get Vista'd (tm) by APPLE.
Vista'd- to be up a creek without a paddle
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Seasons are opposite in the southern hemisphere.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Reminds me of when my boss starts yelling at me for missing a deadline and I let them know it's no big deal because what I was working on really sucked...
Hi, I'm a Mac.
And I'm a PC.
<squeaky kid voice> I'm an iPhone play with me watch this oh I got a boo-boo make it better daddy let's play catch can I have some ice cream can I can I huh huh oh look a kite I wanna kite mommieee!
Steve Jobs: Damn I forgot how much attention new products need.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The thing I've found about development is that you can't just throw more at a product. This is Microsoft's problem. They have hundreds and hundreds of developers. Every 5 developers needs a team leader, every couple of team leaders need analysts and project managers, project managers need to have meetings to discuss release schedules, then there's compatability concerns and merging issues. The whole thing becomes an incredibly hard-to-steer buraucracy, where five or six dedicated developers would have sufficed.
Companies can only really focus on a few products, regardless of size, you just can't be everything to everybody, because the friction of beuracracy will just slow to standstill.
I think Apple are right to stagger development like this, it shows patience, understanding and maturity.
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
Why so glum? Now you can look forward to it even longer.
They've gone, what, 5 releases without fixing (much) in Finder; what makes you think they'll fix it this time around? Wasn't it 10.3 where Apple claimed they were re-writing Finder from scratch, and we ended up with almost the exact same mess of poor usability and terrible bugs we were using before? Hell, I'd be happy if it just didn't utterly freeze for minutes at a time when your network got disconnected-- it's like the Finder programmers never heard of wifi!
It's sad when the one application that is hard-coded to run on every boot for every user is the worst application Apple makes.
Comment of the year
Apple just can't seem to match Microsofts's superior delay history. Microsoft has already astounded the world by an amazing THREE YEAR delay in the original Vista release date and the actual delay; this impressive delay is one of the longest delays for a product that actually eventually made it out of the front door instead of dying...
And here's Apple, trying to out-do Microsoft, and the best then can do is delay Leopard for three lousy months - and technically speaking, it's not much of a delay since the original release date was "Spring 07".
I mean, come on, Apple. Surely you can break something in Leopard to force a longer delay. Microsoft wins, hands down. Apple still lags way behind MS on viruses, as well. With my Windows machine, unpatched, I have THOUSANDS of viruses that can infect my machine if I want to. Apple just doesn't give me that ability. Maybe they just don't care.
Bill Gates had beans today. Nothing for you to see here, move along.
Great Intellect...
Windows fans everywhere, admiring the pretty Macs in the window: "If only our biggest complaint was having to wait two and a half years instead of just two years for a new OS release."
"Sufferin' succotash."
Sorry, I'm new to mac .... what is so crummy about the Finder in Tiger? I've had some difficulties using it, but always penned it as user error. What was good about previous implementations?
It has terrible usability design, with two "modes" (a Windows-esque 'browser' mode, and a Mac Classic 'spatial' mode), neither of which work correctly. The Spotlight UI, in particular, is almost criminally complex and quirky... a Linux/Windows user might not notice it, but to a Mac Classic user it's like fingernails on a chalkboard. People used to Classic are driven spare by the Command-N keyboard shortcut that used to create a new folder, but now creates a new window-- even in Spatial mode (which makes no sense.)
If you have make the horrible error of trying to open a network drive when the network it's on is no longer available (you know, like the huge number of people who use wifi on their laptops), Finder will freeze for minutes at a time. Finder will also freeze for several minutes if you have the audacity to drag-and-drop files to the desktop from some applications. DotMac will also freeze Finder for several minutes if it attempts to sync itself while on an un-reliable network. There's no multi-threading whatsoever.
Opening a window with a large number of images will frequently crash Finder as it creates thumbnails. And no, it's not a corrupt image file, because if I do the same view in Windows, Windows will create the thumbnails in seconds with no errors. When Finder's image previews do work, generating them is super-slow.
It's still missing features that were in Mac Classic, like tabbed folders. (Although to be fair, they have added Labels back in and Pop-Open drag&drop.) Text clippings are nearly useless, as you can no longer drag them directly into a word processor/edit field (like in OS 9), nor can you select and Copy text from them. Oh, and Finder will silently delete the contents of old Mac Classic text clippings, so I hope you didn't have a bunch of important passwords in one or anything... oops!
If you create a new file on the CLI, it still won't show up right away in Finder. You frequently have to 'prod' Finder into showing it, by closing and re-opening the window, or creating a new folder and then deleting it.
It's just bad. Given, a bad Macintosh file browser is still as good as the average Linux or Windows file browser, but that's not much of an excuse, especially for us old-school Mac users. I'd be happy if they fixed some of the more blatant bugs and added tabbed folders, even if it's not a total re-write.
Comment of the year
I'm personally also not too fond of the Intel switch, myself. Don't get me started on the x86 (little endian, lack of registers, CISC instruction set, etc.). However, Apple had very little choice but to switch. Besides, Intel's Pentium M and Core chips were getting very great performance for their power consumption, which is another factor. Plus, my complaints of the x86 comes from an architectural standpoint. But they do the job, and I like my Core Duo in my MacBook, thank you very much.
Once again, I have no problem with Apple branching out to consumer electronics. However, I seriously hope that Apple doesn't forget about the Macintosh platform, which is the impression that I'm starting to get. At MacWorld, there were no Mac announcements. The only hardware update that we've received since November was the new 8-core Mac Pros. Where is iWork 2007 (or even iLife 2007 for that matter)? I don't want the Mac to go the way of the old pre-Fiorina HP calculators; heavily demanded, great quality products that are no longer made (of the same quality) simply because the company wanted to rebrand itself. I've seen these trends in the technology industry before. The Mac is the heart of Apple. I know it's wrong to be attached to products, but I like my Mac a lot. It makes my job much easier, and I can't imagine having to go back to Windows, Linux, and BSD. Where will I go if something happened to my Mac and you can't get another new one? I think this is the sentiment of some of us Mac users.
Too Much Informative?
Informative gives you karma. Funny doesn't. :/
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
I don't want to defend the Finder in 10.4, but the Finder included in 10.0 sucked so much harder than the current version. On a G4, when resizing a "column-view" window, it would only refresh every couple of seconds or so. IIRC, this wasn't fixed until 10.2. There are still large complaints with the Finder (especially the networking one you mentioned) but it is unfair to say there haven't been improvements.
It's obviusly the marketing guys who's delaying it. They just want to release it 10/5.