Valhalla Island

You no doubt know a bunch of Leopard features were announced at this year’s WWDC. There were 10 big features presented by Steve Jobs, some good, some bad. I consider myself a bit of a software coinoisseur so I’m going to talk about them all.

The New Desktop

I have a problem with a few of Job’s assumptions about the desktop. “Nobody uses the default wallpaper”. I love the default wallpaper and have been using it on my second screen forever and I’ll occasionally switch back to it on my primary screen I like it so much. “We all have messy desktops”. I don’t, I keep things organised and that makes stacks something that I probably won’t use.

The crowd went wild after seeing the reflective dock shelf and the transparent menu bar. I’m not such a fan of either. The dock shelf is a big improvement on the current dock background but the reflection is simply adding unnecessary visual clutter. The transparent menu bar looks plain bad, I really hope there’s an option to turn off the opacity, I’m sure there will be.

Apart from that, a consistent look window and a more predominant active window are welcome feature additions.

The New Finder

Brilliant! Many of the people I know really dislike the current Finder, I’ve never had the same problems, I quite like it. After seeing the new Finder I no longer like the current Finder. I love the look of the new sidebar, it’s in exactly the same style as the iTunes sidebar, something I’m a huge fan of.

The new, much easier way to share files between computers could not be more welcome. Sharing files between Macs at work is actually much more difficult than it is to share files between two Windows machines or even between a Mac and a PC. If I had a desktop computer at home the Back to my Mac would be worth the investment in .Mac. It looks really handy.

As for the new cover flow view, Apple seems to have gotten really carried away with cover flow. I agree with John Gruber on the subject:

The most unintentionally funny moment, though, had to be Jobs’s claim that Cover Flow view in the >Finder was “really really useful”. Really cool? Sure. Really useful? Uh-huh.

Cover flow view is not something I use in iTunes and it’s not something I want to use in the Finder.

Quick Look

When it takes less than a second to open most files, quick look is superfluous. I really don’t think having to open something in an app is really such an inconvenience.

64 Bit

This is good news. Simply speeds things up. The best news about this is that 32 bit and 64 bit apps run side by side in Leopard, there’s not two separate versions.

Core Animation

Most of this seems like superfluous rubbish. The demo is certainly impressive and I’m sure there’ll be a lot of developers that do some brilliant things with core animation but I’d rather the apps I use regularly didn’t use it.

Boot Camp

Built-in. Will be great for Windows converts that just can’t let it go. Not for me.

Spaces

What Virtue Desktops has been doing for a long time, built-in, with a little more functionality. Being able to drag apps between spaces is great, something that wasn’t easily pulled off with Virtue. I tried Virtue for a while and tried to use it full time but it never felt right for me, I’m sure I’ll feel the same way about spaces.

Dashboard

It seemed so strange that Jobs wasted so much time demoing the Movies widget, who cares? It’s just a widget. The other Dashboard news is WebClip and I am in love with it. This kind of thing is what makes using a Macintosh great. The way it selects different parts of the page is clever, his examples made a lot of sense. WebClip is something I can really see myself using.

I also heard on the grape vine that the Automator in Leopard has a similar feature for recording actions on any app. So even apps that don’t support Applescript or Automator actions can still be taken advantage of with scripting! This is really something I’ve been dying for.

iChat

Ridiculous. All the new features are a waste of time. Who wants to pretend they’re using iChat in front of a waterfall? Tabbed chats is good news and so is better audio quality but it’s all useless to me until iChat adds more protocol support.

Time Machine

We’ve already seen Time Machine, it looks really good. I just feel sorry for all those backup software developers like Shirt Pocket who just won’t be able to compete with Time Machine.

Other Stuff

No ZFS was a big surprise, ever since reading about it I was sure that Time Machine would rely on ZFS. I had absolutely no idea what that guy from id was talking about with his game? Did anyone? Safari 3 is brilliant, more on that later. Safari on Windows is something I’m not sure about.

Overall, I’m really looking forward to Leopard but the keynote really wasn’t what I (or anyone else) was hoping for. No new machines, no product updates, only a few new Leopard features and no iPhone SDK.