Every blogger and his dog have been talking about the latest reveal from Apple, their next OS revision codenamed Leopard. And I’ve been enjoying reading them.
I am no exception, but I’ll try to keep this brief. Here are my highlights from 10.5 so far, and why they’re highlights.
Time Machine brings backing up to the people, into three dimensions
They’re totally right to use 3D animations in Time Machine. It’s ability to scale time and document versions is excellent.
But what’s more excellent is the existence of in-OS backup software which will take care of things properly.
iChat’s x, y and z sharing
Oh my freaking Lord. Desktop sharing is like a dream come true, because now I’ll be able to fix people problems remotely. Yay!
Presentation and photo sharing is also really quite cool and potentially useful, but there’s nothing more boring than people taking you through their holiday snaps. That’s why Flickr is so cool.
Spaces brings window grouping
This you can get already in numerous flavours. I’ve never really been convinced by it, so Apple will have to pull something good out of the bag for this one.
I would like to see some super-efficient RAM and system resource usage features included in this, so I can leave open Aperture and iPhoto and pop back into it whenever without destroying my Mac… but I am not keeping my hopes up on that one.
That’s about it, really.
Very hopefully we’ll see a lot more, because the inevitably high pricing indicates we’re getting an entirely new OS here.