Anyone else "underwhelmed" by 10.5 announcement?

Oh god, not another FTP discussion.

I share your sentiment, some nice stuff, but most of it application level.
I Like Time Machine and Places but definitely nothing mind-blowing or completely new.
and sorry, but what the f(^% is corny email stationary doing in a keynote on osX??

I'm kind of expecting some good 'top secret' enhancements to osX not just incremental app and technology updates...

Oh, and one more thing: STOP the microsoft bashing, apple! It makes your company look like a spoiled 13 year old so cut it out!!

I thought it was a decent rundown. I just have to hope more exciting things are the so called "top secret" additions. However, I think it is unfair to hold Apple to some bar where each release has to have a revolutionary feature. Inspirations for massive paradigm shifts do not come everyday. Plus I think apple has to balance what they show in the keynote. I mean people are complaining they didn't show revolutionary features but then also wanted them to mention they fixed FTP? How lame would that be? Talk about something that never should have been broken for so long in the first place, give me a break. Even I would have been embarrassed. If I recall the best recorded quicktimes to watch for tiger were the Quicktime State of the Union (maybe it was Media State of the Union) and another one which I have forgotten what they called. I think another dissappointment comes from the fact that we did not see or really hear about deep level updates to the OS. Although system wide "to do's" and Time Machine probably can give us a clue. Perhaps Apple really is keeping its cards closer to its vest this year.

Honestly, if Jobs didn't send the clear message that he wasn't showing everything (which was also transparently clear by their minimal, piecemeal, omission-filled "preview", even without that disclaimer), I would be seriously underwhelmed.

And if the "top secret" stuff is just a Unified UI across the entire OS, I'll continue to be seriously underwhelmed.

But it isn't. And I don't think I will be. But we'll just have to wait and see.

i stand by my theory that steve stuck to those things that wouldn't crash, and labeled the rest "top secret." i mean, they're shipping next spring? that means there is still a lot of work to be done. and recall that they said tiger would be their last major update for a long time. likely because they knew what was ahead of them. and finally, as it was, they already ran a few minutes longer than they wanted, and that was just with ten items (though i feel like the mail demo could've just been axed in favor of something else... like no demo of spotlight? not even a quicktime movie showing application launching and boolean searches? i smell kernel panics backstage yesterday when they tried the demos and said, screw it, let's just talk about the features). and, of course, the audience was developers. you can't wax poetic about the new version of, say, itunes, unless it has cogs that the developers can hook into easily.

anyway, that's my take on it.

I've felt the same way after every preview.
10.1: Should have been 10.0.
10.2: Sherlock, iChat.
10.3: Expose, Safari.
10.4: Spotlight, dashboard.
Among other things, of course. But, outside of the move from 9 to X, or maybe 6 to 7, I've never felt the earth move.

Quite the contrary: I thought is was an excellent preview.

Time Machine: best backup mechanism I've seen anywhere.
Spaces: best implementation of Virtual Desktops I've seen (and I've tried a lot of really horrible virtual desktop clients)
64-bit top to bottom: big news for developers. I can't wait to use goobs of memory in my apps.
Core Animation: great developer tool to create super visually rich applications.
To-Do & Notes service: about time that Mail got these MS Outlook features. They are done right however as a service so any app can access them nicely.

Apple releases those features that developers can build upon. The snazzy UI stuff will come later.

Another thought: this preview presentation was pretty long and they only demoed 10 features. Maybe Apple just didn't have enough time to demo everything in one Keynote. It could well be that there is so much new stuff in Leopard that is has to be spread out over the next few months. We might be in for 10 new features every month until it is released. What do you think?

I think you need different medication

My thoughts.

Time Machine- Like any backup tool it's not that exciting until you have to recover that file that was deleted of corrupted. Then it's a freakin lifesaver. I love the UI it shows what Core Data can do if that's what's behind TM. I'd give it an A- right now.

Mail 3.0- I agree nothing groundbreaking but I think the To Do's that sync with iCal will prove to be very nifty for home users who don't need biz level contact/calendar/scheduling. I give it a C+

iChat- Nice support for Gmails IM tool and with iSight being built in the features here stand a better chance of getting used. The collaboration features are a nice start in the right direction. I'd give it a solid B

Spaces- With the popularity of Parallels or VMware I think managing a clean windowing system will improve with Spaces. It's not groundbreaking and has been around for a while but Apple will popularize this feature for all users. This one gets a C

Dashboard- Nice feature in the ability to turn a webpage into a widget. I"d love to see that the memory footprint of widgets drops but we'll see. Dashcode is nice. Solid C

Spotlight- Boolean searches(finally) search by filetype, keyword or Author (yes!) Spotlight Server on Leopard Server. Built in and improved app launcher. "Quick Look" allows you to preview results in an overlay including QT movies without launching an app. Solid B here.

Core Animation- - Wow! I asked for Core 3D previously and I got more in the bargain. Core Animation is layer based. You can put multiple items on multiple layers and then keyframe them. Then you can spin the animation around in 3D space. Foks not only is this going to enabled Motion with z axis but EVERY app that has a need for such control or output will be able to do so and it's core to the system which means speed and availability! Get ready for the possibility of data info increasing exponentially as it can be represented in 3D and on many levels/layers. Solid A

Accessibility- Any improvements to this feature are welcome. Alex is a nice and natural sounding voice. I give Apple a C+ here


Was I knocked out? Nah. Do I expect that Apple has few gonzo features for us later on? Yup. Core Animation is the crown jewel here. It's going to enable the 3D interface that we all have conjectured about. I'm excited....hasta la vista vista.