I had a brief look at the “Leopard preview material”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/ on Apple’s website this morning before work (Jobs’ WWDC 2006 keynote started around 3am Australian time), and was disappointed. “Time Machine”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.html looks gimmicky (and, as someone who already has an automatic back-up mechanism, is not the sort of thing I need), though Apple’s long-overdue multiple-desktop feature, “Spaces”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/spaces.html looks intuitive and useful, a good replacement for “Desktop Manager”:http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/ and “Virtue”:http://virtuedesktops.info/, which I expect it to kill off. Otherwise, the major updates were updates to apps like Mail, and iChat, which I don’t and won’t use because there are open-source alternatives.
In the keynote video, which I got to watch tonight, Jobs promises that there’s “top secret” stuff in Leopard which they don’t want to reveal too soon. When we’ll start to see these, I don’t know. Leopard is due in May 2007, and if Vista appears before then, I expect Apple will show its trumps to the media soon after. But they’d better be good. Improvements to Spotlight are in the works, and with “Google Desktop”:http://desktop.google.com/ and “Beagle”:http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page around, they need to be. Nautilus on GNOME is already a far more capable file-manager than the anemic Finder, and it’ll be more so by May. If we don’t see serious improvements in MacOS’s usability in Leopard, top-flight Linux distributions like “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com will probably eclipse MacOS as the most useable desktop OS by the time 10.6 comes around. That’s a healthy thing: free and open-source is the future of software, and a usability victory over OSX would be a great achievement. I’m thinking of switching. Apple, you’d better make Leopard a revolution, because it could be your last chance to keep me on the platform, and I won’t be the only one to go if you don’t…
