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The Roadmap to Leopard?
Alexandros Roussos writes with a link to the site MacScoop, which claims to have obtained a roadmap for the months leading up to Leopard's release. It's a straightforward article, stating how much access individuals outside the company will have access to the product prior to October. "Major build on early August - In a little more than a month, Apple's development team targets a feature-full build. The build that was provided to developers during the World Wide Developers Conference earlier this month is actually not totally feature frozen. Some minor features are currently being finished for the system. These features will arrive in the August build along with user-interface improvements, sources told MacScoop. If you expect major 'wow' features or interface changes, you will be disappointed. What we may expect is additional settings and [some] user interface polish[ing]. Among the most criticized parts of the new user interface [are] the new menu bar and Dock."
OK, I watched the WWDC07 demos of Leopard and I thought the new Dock and menu bar looked good. What's the beef? I've not read any "reviews" yet. No matter what happens - come October this MacPro will be running Leopard.
Is it just me, or is the "timeline" the article talks about not just something you could reasonably deduce, knowing where Leopard is at right now and when they plan to release it?
Didn't seem like there was any real new info here, but maybe it's just me.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
...seems to be the main complaint among the bits I've read. And after having used it now myself, I'd have to agree.
Personally, I like the new look of the dock. The menu bar, however, is something I really hope they make an option. For the same reason that I (and many others) don't want or use semi-transparent windows, I don't want a semi-transparent menu bar. It's like they threw readability and usability out the window, all in the name of looking "cool".
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Won't somebody think of the dewy grass!
I think the transparent menu is unnecessary, and perhaps counterproductive, but not a huge deal. I'm curious about what is disliked about the dock though. Stacks seemed a nice feature, and other than that there really wasn't much to right home about. Oh actually I do have a complaint about the stack - smartly, the last item placed on the stack is the one visible in the dock, but when you go to fan them out, it become the farthest one away making it the hardest to click, even though it is the one you are most likely to open.
I'm also curious about how they are handling mounted volumes. I noticed that they were not on the desktop anymore (yea! I hate using the desktop for anything but wallpaper). It didn't look like they were available in the dock though either. Is the finder sidebar the only place you will be able to find them now? I'd love it if they were accessible via a special stack in the dock, with newly inserted ones showing up on the top. I use DragThing right now to do something similar.
While I'm drifting off subject, I've wondered how the shared volumes will work for large networks. Jobs mentioned that any computer will automatically be found (via netbios or zeroconf?) and will show up in the finder sidebar. What happens if you are on a company or dorm network - hundreds of computers in the sidebar? I'd hope not. Maybe after a certain number of computers, it is replaced with a "see entire network link" where you can browse and/or pick which computers should be in the sidebar.
Bullshit. In grid mode, the icons display with file names, and a right-click gets a menu, and one of the items is to open the folder in the Finder. Yeah, there are some rough spots that need fixing up, but because of the NDA I won't go into that. But I figured I'd stretch the NDA a little when I saw blatant misinformation about dock behavior, from someone whom I'm guessing doesn't actually have the beta but is just passing on misunderstood info.
> I'm also curious about how they are handling mounted volumes. I noticed
> that they were not on the desktop anymore (yea! I hate using the desktop
> for anything but wallpaper).
You can take HDs, CDs, iPods, servers, and mounted disc images off the desktop right now, if you're so inclined.
Go to Finder>Preferences, or use command-comma while Finder is the selected app. From there, just uncheck the top three ("Show these items on the Desktop") boxes in the "General" pane. Bamf... nothing on your desktop but what you purposely put there.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
is that you can't tell which applications are running and which are not. In the Tiger dock, running applications have a very visible black triangle under them. In the Leopard dock, there is a much more subtle shadowing effect that indicates running applications. It needs to be less subtle.
The more small patterns you have in the image (or section of the image near the top), the worse the menu bar looks.
I have my Mac set to change the desktop once a day. At first, everything was great -- it was picking images with sky at the top -- essentially solid color. Then it brought up a zen rock garden, which is one of my favorite images.
On Leopard, it makes the menus unreadable. The dark/light pattern in the rocks makes it impossible to find letters in the menu. I've also found many pictures will make it difficult to read or identify menu extras on the right side of the screen.
They need to fix this ASAP. Oh, and the new Finder icons are horrible too. There's zero color contrast to identify the different folders.
Wow.. do you absolute NOT know what you're talking about.
Copland failed because it was much too ambitious. They wanted 100% backward compatibility + protected memory and other modern OS goodies.
As for the menu bar reference point -- it is still fixed, as always and is still quite visible. There may be some bugs where certain images make it disappear, but I'd call that a bug at this point. It isn't a major feature (the feature is the improved desktop which focuses on removing clutter so you can see more of your digital images). Stacks is a big deal. Once you actually start using it, you'll realize it vastly improves the dock.
Why would iPhone be a nightmare? Sure, there's the Steve RDF, but it seems pretty clear that for the first time, an emphasis on usability has been placed on a smart phone. I'm sure that there will be issues, but they'll be solved with software updates and I think calls that this will be a flop are incredibly premature. I'm sure you want it to be a flop, that is clear from your statements.
Steve Jobs will not get ousted for 10.5 or iPhone.
I think Mac OS X 10.5 is going to be a very solid release. Perhaps it is not as end-user feature laden as some would like, but it has plenty of useful features that will make it worth the $129 upgrade. More importantly, the features and functionality added for developers means that there will be some very cool apps coming down the pipe.
The iPhone will do well. The secret is that much of the functionality is in software that can easily be updated via syncing with iTunes. Bugs can easily be addressed. Improvements can be made and sent out much in the same way Apple does for its standard applications. I'm sure there will be glitches (when several hundred thousand people start using something, there are bound to be edge cases that come up). And the 2nd generation will do even better.
I predict that Apple will have an iPhone battery replacement program (much like for the iPod, possibly better since you'll likely take it to a AT&T store) which, while not resolving the user replaceable battery, will relieve the anxiety of what to do after two years of battery use.
In the end, I'm sure there will be some limitations, as this is a 1.0 product, but those limitations will be worked out. There will be some very vocal nay sayers out there, but based on what I've seen thus far (and my own experience with previous phones), Apple is changing the game here. It is putting emphasis on the end user experience -- something that's apparently new to the industry -- and I think they will be successful because of it.
Can't speak for the final release, but the WWDC beta has the following versions:
apache - 2.2.4
bash - 3.2.9(1)-release
ksh - Version M 1993-12-28 s+
openssl - 0.9.71
perl - 5.8.8
postfix - 2.4.0
python - 2.5.1
ruby - 1.8.6
sqlite - 3.3.17
svn - 1.4.3
zsh - 4.3.4
x11 - Xquartz server based on X.org Release 7.2, built on ?P
I think this issue of the Finder flipping out is due partly to the finder and partly due to the automounter (autofs), both of which appear to have received a major overhaul in Leopard. Autofs has apparently been threaded. If the Finder is instrumented with NSOperation (I can find no publicly available documentation to that effect), then the combination of those efforts should be a "Finder" which appears to be much more responsive than on previous versions of Mac OS X.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.