Apple Releases Leopard Previews
Well, the WWDC06 keynote is over. One of the things that Jobs and Co. spent the most time on today was the next version of OS X, Leopard. There are a lot of great new features that are coming to Leopard. Many of them were not talked about for fear of the photocopiers firing up in Redmond.
One of the nicest new features is Time Machine, an automatic backup utilitiy for OS X. Think of it as SVN for your files. Tim Machine will backup your files as you change them, either to a hard drive or server. As more and more of life is moved to computer (iPhoto, iMovie, etc), backup is more important than ever.
Mail is getting a big update, with new features like better HTML e-mail, stationary, RSS, Notes and a To-Do list. When you create a To-Do in your mail or notes, you can have them automatically appear in iCal.
Spaces will let you create up to 4 virtual desktops. This is great for productivity. You can have spaces set up for specific application groups. Your iChat and Mail may be in one space, while your iTunes and iPhoto are in another. I have always loved the way that Expose lets me move stuff out of the way easily to get to my desktop or switch applications. Spaces seems to take that one step further.
Dashboard is getting some new features and widgets. The Web Clip widget lets you create a widget from any web page. This seems a little bit like Active Desktop in Windows, but I have always had stability problems with Active Desktop. Leopard will also include the first official release of Dashcode, which is a WYSIWYG editor for creating widgets. There was an early version of this app out on the web at one point. It was an early beta and very rough around the edges. This final version should be a killer app for creating widgets.
Aside from these few higlights, iChat, Spotlight, and iCal are slated for improvement, as well as the addition of 64-bit technology and Core Animation, which will help developers give their applications a better experience. There are also going to be big improvements to Accessibility, including a new voice output tool, VoiceOver.
August 7th, 2006
What are the chances that someone wouldn’t understand what an automated backup utility is but would understand SVN? Just curious.
August 7th, 2006
I’ve actually been meaning to look for some type of third party utility that would do what it sounds like Time Machine will do. I’m not even sure if any exist for the Mac. However, now I might just wait.
Although, it feels like I just updated to Tiger.