JulianSchrader.de

Apple Keynote at the WWDC 2006: Mac OS X Leopard

Yesterdays biggest event in the community of macusers was the keynote at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. Held at the city’s “Moscone West” a Quicktime stream from the show is available over at Apple’s site. Don’t miss the intro as well – performed by “the PC” from Apple’s latest ads.

My favourite changes are:

iChat: Very cool. Since there are Macs with built-in iSight cameras around, I was playing around with greenscreen (or bluebox) effects to change your surroundings in the picture. iChat in Leopard introduces a simpler method to replace the background: Drag & Drop a photo or video into the iChat window – it will automatically use this as the new background. Of course, this is another toy like PhotoBooth, but there are other new features as well: Show your photos from within iPhoto to your contacts and have a little picture of yourself in the corner, describing what they see. Another one: Give a remote talk. Ever wanted to speak to your audience and to control your presentation from somewhere else? With the new iChat AV, everything’s possible. Just start your Keynote presentation and iChat will beam it and your live-spoken comments to another Mac. One Two more things: Share your desktops and remote control them as well – great feature to show my grandfather how to upload his photos to flickr. With Leopard you won’t need to have Chax installed anymore to use tabs while chatting. And there will be the possibility to change the status to invisible, which makes the world think you’re offline, even when you aren’t.

Mail: …has been renewed as well. Top features are the integration of the new systemwide To-Do-Manager, rich mail templates in iWeb style (Drag & Drop your images in there) which I probably won’t use very often, because I don’t like HTML in emails except in newsletters. And additionally, there’s a Feedreader built right into it – I will have to try it, but I don’t think it can beat NetNewsWire that easily… Mail is getting transformed into a real communication/organisation center.

Spaces: Next to communication, there’s productivity. Apple introduced Spaces – well, not very new: virtual desktops. Arrange your apps on virtual desktops to fight the usual cluttered desk and jump to another “space” easily, it works just like Exposé or the Dashboard.

Dashboard, Spotlight, Accessibility: Improvements here and there. With the (now officially) announced application “Dashcode” you can build your own widgets on the fly.

Time Machine: Backup. On a new level. Time Machine backs up everything for you – you can undelete files via travelling in the past and restore it. Well… It’ll surely eat up a lot of disk space… And sometimes I’d like to really delete a file…

What I missed this time:

I have an iPod 5G, with video functionality and a 60GB harddrive. It can remind me of appointments I entered in iCal. But I cannot use it to make up new ones – you can’t enter anything but the ranking for your songs directly on the iPod. Day for day I carry around my iPod, my mobile phone, my Ixus and so on. What about an iPod with built-in high-quality digital camera, a larger display and mobile connectivity? What I’d like to have is a device, that unites all the gadgets I use. I want something like a PDA with Mac OS X on it, a big harddrive, a camera that shoots better pictures than my mobile does. And of course, some iPhone functions. GSM, UMTS, WLAN – the ideal companion for a web geek like me

Conclusion:

I hope Apple keeps up the good work on both ends – hardware as well as software. After having announced it so many times I finally ordered a MacBook Pro 17″ today and Tiger works very well for me – although I’m eager to get my hands on Leopard to test the new nifty features. But I think, they really should do something for the iPod as well. It seems to me like a repose at the moment – in fact they are really successful with the iPod at the moment. But they have to continue the development, or it will get difficult to compete with the technology the others bring on the market.