Leopard Spotted in San Francisco

By Kelmon

What a difference a few days makes. On Tuesday night I was about ready to take Apple to task following the highly anticipated keynote address of the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2006 that’s happening in San Francisco this week. There were a number of good reasons for this but waiting a bit longer has enabled me to both understand more about what was announced and also see the announcement for myself. At the end of things what we got on Monday morning (or night, depending on where you lay your hat) was mostly what we expected but without any real “blow your socks off” stuff. This article provides a summary of what happened and what interested or annoyed me.

So, to begin with, why was I feeling so negative on Tuesday and what was I doing on Monday? Since I’m still living in Belgium the keynote address was scheduled for some time late in the evening here and past experience has shown that I stand no chance of watching the QuickTime broadcast since the servers get hammered immediately. Given this knowledge I vowed to give up Apple news from Monday afternoon until Tuesday night when I would go home and watch the broadcast without encountering any spoilers. This time I actually did do this and my broadcast managed to make it to 4-minutes before it cut-out as the servers got hammered. Even the purchase of a QuickTime 7 Pro license did not help as I had hoped that this would allow me to download the broadcast and watch it in perfect quality in a few hours. Well, that was £20 wasted. At this point I was not amused and decided to read the web site during which I discovered that Apple had not announced a Merom-based 17” MacBook Pro (the product I continue to wait for) and that the Leopard features were distinctly underwhelming for me.

The question now, of course, is why do I no longer feel so negative about the announcements? Basically, the reason is that I have now watched the complete broadcast and stuff now makes much more sense. Seeing this stuff in action and having their role explained on-stage does a much better job for me than the information currently displayed on the Leopard Sneak Preview pages on Apple’s website. Also, reflecting on things along with commentary from other websites has helped me to understand things better than I did and is certainly more recommended than just hammering away on the keyboard.

Before I get to the meat of this article (OS X Leopard), let me just say something to Apple:

Dear Steve,

We all love competition in the market place and I’m sure that some of the advancements made in OS X are keeping Microsoft on their toes and contributing new features to future versions of Windows. I hope that Apple continues to add great new features to OS X and continue to provide a great computing experience. This said, could we please knock-off the Vista bashing and accusations of plagiarism? Bringing out the funny Frenchman to poke fun at Microsoft added nothing to the presentation and, given some of the “new” features announced, smacks of double standards. Just concentrate on the demonstrations and discussions on what you are doing and don’t mention stuff that, as Apple owners, just doesn’t matter. More Leopard demonstration time is much more preferable to comparisons of how Windows Calendar looks a lot like iCal – it’s a calendar, similarities are to be expected! Tell me more about the stuff you didn’t have time to talk about, like RSS in Mail and Xcode 3 rather than what Microsoft is doing.

Regards,

Kelmon

Anyway, what was announced for Leopard? The following is a list of significant items listed and whether they did it for me.

The Good

Time Machine: Time Machine, in a nutshell, appears to be an automated system backup application and restoration tool. In order to use this you’ll need a second hard drive (internal, external or networked) in order for Time Machine to record all the updates that you made during the course of the day. At the end of the day the updates are recorded to the hard drive (and it does require a complete HSF+ partition) and this pool of data is available to you so that you can restore your computer in the event of a disk crash, restore previous versions of a file (a solution to the “whoops, I didn’t mean to overwrite that file” syndrome), or even restore data that has been deleted. New data continues to fill up your Time Machine drive until it runs out of space at which time you can elect to move the data to a bigger drive or keep less of it at any given time. In typical Apple fashion the interface to restore applications is pretty swish but apparently functional. Invoking Time Machine (done using a Dock icon in the demo but no doubt a keyboard shortcut will be more usual) causes the application to operate based on your current application (for example, if you were looking at pictures in your iPhoto library then Time Machine will operate on your iPhoto library) and for a new screen to be displayed that shows changes made to your selected application. The changes in the current application are represented as a series of windows going backwards in a 3D space where the ones at the back represent the state of the application further back in time. Going through the different states of the application is achieved using a sort of scrollbar on the right of the screen that represent time (newest dates at the bottom, oldest at the top) and a couple of arrow buttons can be used to find dates when changes occurred rather than having to scroll manually. The effect of “flying through time” is rather reminiscent of Vista’s Flip3D function but it makes more sense here. Finding the change that you were looking for (such as when a roll of film that you seem to have deleted existed in your iPhoto library) and clicking the restore button restores the missing or changed files.

There’s a large number of questions that I still have outstanding regarding this feature. For example, if I use the function to restore a file in a folder that I deleted and some of the files in that folder have also changed since the deletion, will the changes to the other files that I made be lost? How much disk space am I really going to need for this?

Overall, depending on the final implementation, Time Machine appears to be an admirable effort to make us all backup our data. Commentators on this feature have stated that this function is available in Windows Server 2003 and even back to the old VAX mainframe systems. However, I believe that these implementations of a backup/file restore function only operates at a file-level whereas Time Machine appears to provide an API that developers can use to implement restore functionality in a context applicable to their particular application. Given this it should make restoring data much more natural since you effectively continue to work within the application that you are restoring data to (such as restoring a contact within Address Book, which was demonstrated). Regardless, I have no doubt that the manufacturers of hard drives are rubbing their hands in glee at this announcement.

Xcode 3.0: Xcode is the development environment for Mac OS X applications and is something that I am attempting to learn at the moment as well as Objective-C and the Cocoa application framework. One of my big problems at the moment (and I admit to being a rubbish programmer) is making sure that objects created by my application are held until they are finished with in order to avoid memory leaks or application crashes associated with attempts to access objects no longer existing. Xcode 3 is bringing a number of new features including a Java-esque Garbage Collection process for Objective-C (hurrah!), much better debugging tools and support for building 64-bit applications that will also run on the current 32-bit IBM and Intel processors used in most Macs (the G5 and the new Xeon processors are the only 64-bit processors in use at the moment). This update, for me, is worth the asking price of Leopard alone.

Mail Notes & To-Dos: Mail, the Mac’s default email client, is receiving a couple of updates that takes it more in the direction of Outlook, although Address Book and iCal remain as separate applications. Mail will allow the user to write Notes that are stored in your Inbox and which can also be accessed from a dedicated Notes folder (which, I suspect, is basically just a Smart Folder with a nice icon). The rationale behind this is that some people email themselves stuff that they want to remember and Notes allows this to happen more naturally. This isn’t something that I’ve done before but I can see the use. However, what I thought was really cool was the To-Do functionality. Within anything in Mail you can set yourself To-Do actions that appear in a To-Do list (complete with Due Dates, Alarm settings and Priorities) and also in iCal. This is so far so normal but what makes it cool is that there is an API that allows any application to set To-Do items and I can see this being really useful as long as the developers take advantage of it.

Spaces: Blatantly ripped from the Linux world (KDE, I think) is Spaces, a means for organising windows into virtual desktops that can be switched between with a simple key press. As many Spaces as you like can be created and applications can be dragged-n-dropped between running Spaces using an Exposé-like interface. I’m unsure as to whether this will be truly useful for me or a bit of a gimmick but I’ll give it a bash when it comes out.

iChat Theatre: iChat Theatre will allow one person to, for example, make a presentation across an iChat video conference where they will appear in a small window in the bottom-left of the screen while the application they are showing will appear in the rest of the screen. I’ve used Microsoft NetMeeting to achieve a similar result but without video conferencing and it’s a bit kludgey. You can also now share desktops with other users and this will be great for remotely showing stuff to people or, more likely, sorting out problems. However, the problem will remain that the other users will also need to be running iChat (as best as I can tell) and that this probably doesn’t work in multi-user conference calls. If you work in an Apple-centric business then I’m sure this function is the bomb.

iChat will also be adding tabbed chats whereby you can selectively group together on-going text conversations. I’m not that much of a fan of tabbed chats (having tried both Adium and the Chax extension to iChat) but it is handy sometimes and being able to selectively apply it does appeal.

iCal Group Calendars: Again, not a revolution given that Lotus Notes and Outlook have supported shared calendars for years but a good addition to iCal. However, given that this appears to be based on the new CalDAV standard I have a feeling that this won’t be allowing interaction with Exchange calendars. Again, I’m sure this feature is great if the people you are working with are using Macs but probably not that much use in a Windows-centric organisation.

VoiceOver: If you have eyesight problems or just want the computer to read a document to you then the updated VoiceOver function provides much more natural sounding speech when compared to the demonstrated voices from Tiger and Vista. It isn’t perfect but it is a great improvement such that it doesn’t sound like you’re being dictated to by Metal Mickey.

The Bad

Mail Stationary: Why in God’s name do we need HTML stationary in Mail? Full marks to Apple for, at last, allowing users to construct HTML email messages (it’ll be useful for sending pre-formatted blog updates to my weblog since it doesn’t understand RTF messages) but what makes them think we want horrible HTML backgrounds to the messages that we write? Sure, the layouts look better than what you normally get (if you are familiar with the kinds of templates available from Pages then you’re on the right track) and you can not only customise the existing ones (drop in your own pictures from the iPhoto library explorer) but also add new ones created by yourself or others, but they still don’t do much beyond slow things down and annoy. I hated these things from Lotus Notes and I continue to object to them today.

iChat Backdrops: With Leopard you’ll be able to, without the use of a green screen, add a photograph or movie as a background to your image in iChat (queue Apple’s Phil Schiller pretending to be on a rollercoaster). Further, you’ll be able to apply Photobooth real-time distortion effects to your image that others see. Question: why on earth would I want to do this? Further, please tell me that Apple didn’t devote resources to implementing this when there’s other more important stuff that they could have been working on. This is pointless fluff and I was not amused.

The Ho-Hum & Not Sure

Web Clips: Reminiscent of the old Windows Active Desktop is Dashboard/Safari’s Web Clips. The upshot of this is that you can navigate to a web page that you want to track in Safari, click a button and get a new widget for Dashboard that shows the web page (or the area of the web page that you specified by sizing the widget created), updated each time you open Dashboard. Sounds useful and is very simple to use but since I don’t tend to use Dashboard that much I have a feeling that the appeal of this may wane as well.

System-Wide 64-Bit Support: In Panther and Tiger the Unix layer of OS X was 64-bit but the User Interface and Cocoa/Carbon applications were 32-bit. Now Leopard is bringing 64-bit support to everything. Sounds cool but I really have no idea how this will impact me in real-life. I suspect that the scientific community will love this one but I suspect that for Joe Public this will make no difference beside making the applications that we install larger because Xcode will be including 32- and 64-bit code in the binary.

Core Animation: Over the course of OS X’s evolution Apple has added a number of frameworks to make application development easy. Core Audio made it simple to add audio functionality to an application, Core Data provides pre-written data models for loading/saving/managing application data, and Core Video allowed you to take advantage of cool graphical effects and filters (especially if the Mac running the Core Video application has a Core Video compliant graphics card that it can use rather than the processor). Core Animation appears to be adding the same for animation effects by allowing the developer to specify the start and stop positions of graphical elements on whatever layer they appear on and letting OS X do the actual animation work. The demonstration of the music album artwork flying around the screen much like a previous Apple commercial looked great but the benefits of Core Animation will only be felt if applications make use of it in ways that add value. I am worried that some applications may add Core Animation effects just for the heck of it. Apparently the flying through time effect of Time Machine is achieved by using Core Animation so it does have some use.

Spotlight: Spotlight was meant to be a wonderful system-wide search engine so that you can instantly find anything on your computer. During the Tiger demonstrations back in WWDC 2004 the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field was apparently in full effect since Spotlight, while it will find the files that you are searching for, is very slow when faced with a ton of data. Worse, Microsoft’s Desktop Search add-on for Windows seems to work faster. Apple will be enhancing Spotlight in Leopard to be faster (I’ll believe that when I see it), allow more complex queries to be submitted by power-users, make it better for launching applications (will it rival QuickSilver?) and include the search results from other Macs with Spotlight (presumably with Leopard as well) if the File Sharing service has been enabled. I love the idea behind Spotlight and a lot of the current implementation but it has sufficient kinks that I only use it when necessary rather than constantly. I hope that these kinks are ironed out in Leopard before the new functionality is added.

The Complete Package: New Macs since last year have been shipping with the FrontRow software to access media on your Mac using a remote control and Photo Booth (useless software for taking your own picture using a webcam). Leopard will apparently make these applications available to older Macs and update them, although whether this means that FrontRow will finally be able to show/record television remains to be seen. Additionally, The Complete Package also refers to the addition of Boot Camp for booting Windows on your Mac although, again, whether this means that there will be differences between what is available today and what will ship as Boot Camp 1.0 is unknown.

The Secret

The first thing announced was that not everything was being announced. Allegedly there’s more features coming that Apple don’t want to show yet in case they are “copied”, which is good news since I’m not exactly back-flipping over the features that were announced. Whether or not there are any significant unannounced features remains to be seen, as this could be so much hot air. On the other hand there is the suspicion that these secret features could be announced just before Vista launches in order to try and reduce its impact. The truth, as usual is likely somewhere in between but given that some applications seen in the demonstration (especially the Finder) were still sporting the brushed metal look (which Apple has been moving away from with Tiger and iLife ’06), I suspect that these may see updates.

New Hardware

While my long coveted Merom-based 17” MacBook Pro didn’t make an appearance, Apple did announce the replacements for the Power Mac workstations (now renamed the Mac Pro to no one’s surprise) and the Xserve (oddly not renamed to something like Mac Serve), both now sporting Intel’s Core 2 Duo Xeon processors. The use of the Xeon was not a surprise but it was surprising to discover that both workstations and servers would be sporting dual processors in all models. Prices have allegedly also been cut to make the new systems more attractive and competitive (comparisons to Dell’s systems was made but probably didn’t involve rebates and the graphics card on one model looked suspiciously higher-end on Dell’s product) and a quick check of previous prices for the Power Mac/Mac Pro shows a reasonable drop. For example, in the UK the base Mac Pro is going for around £250 less than the old Power Mac Quad with the base Mac Pro coming with more memory (1GB rather than 512MB) and a faster graphics card (GeForce 7300GT rather than GeForce 6600). The Mac Pro is also benefiting from using the same enclosure as the previous model since the reduction in cooling requirements means that 4 SATA hard drives can be added (total 2TB storage), 2 SuperDrive DVD writers, wider expansion card slots at the back and a couple more ports on the front of the unit for convenience. The new Xserve gets some more processing power and redundant power supplies which, given the reaction by the audience, is presumably “a good thing”.

Conclusions

This was a presentation pretty much by the numbers. We expected a new Power Mac and got the Mac Pro. We expected the Xserve to be updated and, golly, we got an Xserve updated in all but name. We were also told that we were going to get a first glimpse at Leopard and, shockingly, that’s what we got – a look at a few features but not the complete package. What we didn’t get were the things that were rumoured (an iTunes Movie Store was abscent and the mythical iPhone continues to be as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster) and we didn’t even get the now expected “one more thing”. In fact, we didn’t really get that much of Steve himself, which is a shame since he’s typically an excellent presenter, and instead got a sort of tag-team thing complete with the comedy Frenchman. While the announcements were all good in themselves, despite my misgivings about a few of Leopard’s features, I have to admit to being somewhat disappointed at the end. Leopard didn’t really blow my socks off and the jibes at Microsoft just seemed to ring a bit hollow. The new OS certainly will be an improvement over what I’ve got now but for some reason I seem to expect more from Apple and perhaps I should face the fact that they can’t always deliver on our expectations.

My overall negative tones at the end have absolutely nothing to do with the lack of new notebook. Well, mostly nothing…

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