June 18, 2007
Just a few random notes re: things shown in the Keynote. This isn't commentary on every single point, just the ones that matter to me--mostly with regard to UI.
- Clear menubar—gack! PLEASE give me an option to make it solid. Lacking that, I'll take a hack.
- Prominent active window—FINALLY! Hopefully it'll be as easy to tell what's in the foreground as it was in System 7.
- Stacks—eh. Looks like OS 8/9(?)'s tabbed folders (that thing where you would bring a folder to the bottom of the screen and it would turn into a tab), reborn.
- Downloads folder—BFD. I (eventlally) organize my downloads and my desktop in general.
- Dock on the side—I don't leave mine there, but I think the whole "stand" effect is lost. Icons on a pretty glass table—looks great. Makes sense. Icons... um, next to an angled glass pillar, for no particular reason? Um, OK. There are already lots of Dock hacks; I think one of the first we'll see for 10.5 is "Go back to a transparent box and don't show reflections." Might be as simple as a defaults write command.
- Applications folder in the dock—ooh, what a concept! (For those too lazy to follow that link—I've been dragging the Applications folder into the Dock since 10.0. C'mon Steve, how much of a hint do you need to realize that taking apps out of the Apple menu was a mistake?
- Note that the icon in the dock for the Applications folder shows the first icon in the folder—in the case of the Applications folder, it showsn an icon for Address Book, not the Applications folder itself. Mightn't that be confusing if you've already got an icon for Address Book in your Dock? And how useful is it that the icon always changes? (To get around those two problems, I'dd add a folder called ' Applications' ('Applications' with a space in front of it) with the proper icon. But man, what a workaround) And what if that folder just contains folders? Then you're back to having a plain folder icon once again.
- While showing the Disney PDF, Steve said "affordance."
- New Finder—has it been rewritten so dragging 500 files to a server doesn't result in a beachball?
- "Back to my Mac"—looks interesting. I've had file sharing, SSH, and Timbuktu access to my Mac for years, and none of those require .Mac, though DynDNS makes things easier, and it looks like .Mac is doing the same thing. I wonder how many Apple employees have a similar setup and said "Hey! Why don't we build this in?"
- Coverflow in Finder—might be handy. Maybe. Once every few months. If I did more work with images, PDFs, etc., it might be more useful. But hell, I barely ever even use thumbnails currently. (BTW, looks like they're using 512x512 icons now?)
- QuickLook—haven't we seen this before? Seriously—I forget if it was Mac or Windows, but I swear I've heard of this whole see-what-the-document-is-without-opening-it thing before.
- Spaces—I've seen, but never heavily used, similar systems on Mac, Windows, BeOS, and Linux—I even put SmackBook onto my laptop. I wonder how well it works with multiple monitors?
- WebClip is the one reason I might start using Dashboard. Neat that it looks at the page and determines where table cells (or divs) are. (The original demo was just a crosshair thing, right?) I wonder how well it works with content that changes size every day, like the Astronomy Picture of the Day?
- iChat theater looks great; the Photo Booth effects I doubt I'll ever use. Backdrops look kind of neat. As far as I know, iChat is still based on the 640x480-pixel image that an iSight camera produces—I wonder how readable an Excel sheet will really be? I wonder how much of this will work with older versions of iChat? The effects should work, but the theater things can't, as far as I can tell.
- I think Time Machine is the greatest thing, ever. It does incremental backups (and it also seem to handle versioning) and it's totally automatic? Awesome. I wrote about automated backups with rsync two years ago (funny—almost to the day)... but I don't use it. (Mostly because I hate Tiger (Spotlight, actually)) and rsync on 10.3 doesn't support two-part Mac files. Time Machine is what will get me to leave 10.3 behind.
- Safari for Windows—too bad it doesn't work in Windows 2000 (which is the only version of Windows I use, whenever possible.) Will the final version work on 10.4? I wonder if Google apps that currently run only under Firefox will ever work with Safari? If so, will they work with Safari 3 only?
- Poor dev's. Steve is talking about the iPhone and says "What about developers?" and everyone cheers. Then they're told they will be limited to web-based apps. Poor guys.
- The guy showing the directory app—was the URL 'nice try'? I can't tell from the low-res web video. And he said "boom"—LOL. The funny thing is, I've already built a web app almost just like what he showed—I have no need for an iPhone, but I'd love to get one just to look at my cool floormaps in it. :-)