Shiny
It’s Apple’s worldwide developer conference this week and today was the opening keynote from Steve Jobs, telling us everything we can expect from Leopard, the next version of OS X, when it’s released later this year. Straight off the bat, the new transparent menu bar looks stupid and the idea that the dock is a table on which things reflect is pointless eye-candy (and the icons are still flat, rather than having depth like the dock itself, which makes it worse), and both seem like change for change sake, rather than actually bringing anything new and worthwhile to the table.
The rest of the system is all incremental updates and improvements, and I’m not sure how many of them will actually affect me in my day to day usage. I don’t work with lots of files so being able to search through them quickly is rarely required, and while Quick Look looks helpful almost everything I look at is online anyway. I don’t use iChat, have never found a need for virtual desktops (Spaces), don’t have a secondary drive to backup onto and never make meetings via iCal.
But what will make me upgrade is the potential for software developers to do cool things with new API’s like CoreAnimation, or the addition of all those little features that you’ll run into every day, like Stacks. There’s also the fact that every OS X install I’ve ever done has made the computer feel faster than every before, which is more than can be said for any Windows upgrade. Plus, like a magpie, I like new, shiny things.
