A comprehensive list of Leopard features and surprises - Page 2

It's a "personal" computer which means that people want to use their computer for whatever bloody purpose they see fit, which might include playing games. Perhaps if you understood what personal meant...

Stupid comments like PC's (including those of the Mac variety) aren't for games make me angry.

Yes, people do need to grow up and realize that people make different uses of their "personal" computers...

Where are the surprises?

What interests me most in this thread are the number of new AI members. I hope it is an indication that the halo affect is snowballing and that 10.5 is attracting more attention from potential switchers.

Of all the new features, the one that actually made me rejoice out loud was that of splitting network mounts into separate threads. Will it end up being the most significant to me in the end? Probably not. But upon immediate perusal, it is the one improvement that really made me think "finally!".

I eagerly await release day. I'll go to the Shadyside store for entertaining mayhem and the defacto geek convention. Oh, and to pick myself up a copy pronto.

I know it's silly, but the new feature I'm looking forward to the most is the holographic Star Wars-style iChat video filter. That's just *neat*.

The rest is just gravy, but this is the one I want to play with.

You can buy an iPod. Does that mean you shouldn't play music or videos on your computer? I don't think so.

The existence of specialty devices is no excuse for a general purpose computer to lack certain abilities. The value in a personal computer is it's ability to perform a wide range of tasks which will vary based on the needs and desires of individual users. Even if you don't want to play games on your computer, you can't trivialize the fact that other people do.

Instead of blindly defending Apple, everybody needs to realize that games do matter. A computer that can play games is more attractive to the average consumer than one which cannot. This does affect buying decisions. The sooner the fans can agree on this, the sooner we'll have a unified voice that Apple might actually take seriously.

Poor game support is the biggest item remaining on the "list of reasons to not buy a Mac." Let's agree that we want the issue resolved. It will strengthen the future of the platform.

Does anyone know if they have updated the plugins in isync so that Leopard will be able to synch with Sony Ericsson UIQ3 phones like p990i or p1i?
Thank you.

I disagree that it "desperately needs a rewrite". You already can do all those things (selection: the in marker, out marker and play head can all be moved in single-frame steps using the keyboard; cropping: there is a "trim to selection" command, and the "cut" command; insertion: paste; dragging - to be honest not sure what you mean, a drag and drop from the QuickTime window will create a single-frame copy) so I suggest that you need to learn how to use it properly. As a streamlined, simple video editor it works extremely well and if you need more sophisticated editing there's iMovie 6, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro.

Agreed, but I don't want to assume. I suppose we will find out soon enough.

I am unpleasantly surprised by the new 3D dock floor. It just looks awkward when your screen is not on a 30 degree angle, especially when your screen is up straight. > http://www.apple.com/macosx/

My suggestion to Apple: why not dropping this fixed angle of the dock?! Every time you change the angle of your screen, the dock floor adapts itself to a pleasing angle in order to create this otherwise great 3D illusion.

Tis is a nice idea, but to work it would require special sensors calculating the angle and informing the OS about it.

Looks like you are out of luck...supported iSync devices.

I really can't believe this..... After being in the market for 2 years they still don't support the UIQ3 devices.... I m frustrated!!!!

Agreed. I hope this is the first thing to go when they realize their mistake. At least give us the option to turn it off!

That would be a bit much.

Perhaps someone will come out with some small bit of software that will allow you to adjust the angle. Sigh! Sometimes I wish I was still programming.

Come on all of you smart "developers" who are members here. Do something! Prove that you know as much as you say you do.

I completely agree with you gastroboy. Some people are too blinded by their apple fandom to admit this. They have yet to revamp the Finder...which is in desperate need of a makeover (metadata...performance...etc). I mean Cover Flow? That'll just lower productivity and be pretty useless to me. The dock just got a facelift (and a tacky and ugly one at that...I have mine on the left and do not look forward to seeing its awkwardness with the new look) and stacks...wow. Stationary to mail? And notes/to-dos? Pretty useless...when I write a note, I pop open text edit and quickly jot down something, or use a sticky. The update to DVD Player is long overdue. I'm still on the fence about time machine...and how comprehensive its preferences are. The new "unified" icons bother me...sure they're unified in style but icons shouldn't be that similar...I now find it difficult (not to mention bland to look at) to quickly differentiate my movie folder from my documents folder (course changing icons is a cinch but by default...this new look/gui update was unnecessary, though I do agree to a more unified look as in the window themes (eliminating brush metal, etc).) Just a bunch of eye candy features (which imo make the system uglier...I like the GUI's look as it is...why need to change the traffic close, minimize... window buttons?). I'll still pick up the OS when it arrives but Jobs and co. have gotten lazier and less innovative/focused with the most important part of their mac computer consumer base. feel free to bash...

Some people are also blinded by other motives.

No, gastroboy, I read what's written, not what was supposedly intended. By the way, who are you to tell me what TerrinB meant? Beside the point.


From Dictionary.com (great site, you should try it some time)
--------------------------------------------------
most [mohst] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
adjective, superl. of much or many with more as compar.
1.\tin the greatest quantity, amount, measure, degree, or number: to win the most votes.
2.\tin the majority of instances: Most operations are successful.
3.\tgreatest, as in size or extent: the most talent.
---------------------------------------------------


Since you can only characterize a change in the OS as either "just eye-candy" or "not justs eye-candy" (one is the complementary set of the other), in order for one to be able to say "most features are just eye-candy", more than half of the 300 features listed on Apple's page have to be just eye-candy. So, why don't you list at least 151 of those "just eye-candies" for us. Oh, in case you don't know what eye-candy is, here's a definition:

------------
American Heritage Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
eye candy
n. Informal
Someone or something that is visually attractive or pleasing to look at.
------------

No, you don't have to prove to us that all 151 that you're going to list are "attractive" or "pleasing to look at". Just prove to us that they only have to do with "appearance" and have no substance behind them.


And no, I'm not holding my breath

Oh, and you can count the new dock's appearance as eye-candy, and I'd agree, so make that 150.

But of course, you can't count the entire dock out because there's so much more to the new dock that is not eye-candy.

It could be someone thinking old-school... FOND was the name of a font family resource in the classic MacOS.

At WWDC 06 they said that resolution independence would be coming in 2008.

I would like to get an Airport Express and an external Tb hard drive to share on my wireless network between my macs and PC. Is this possible? i would like to use a file system that can be written and read by both without additional software. - on another note, how do macs join wondows networks and write to them if they dont support writing to NTFS? I am hoping Leopard will support this natively. Does anyone know? Cheers

QuickTime's positioning and cropping controls are amazingly non-Mac like. You can't simply click on objects, crop, alter frames or position items by dragging them to where they should be. Graphics distort to fit the movie dimensions, without much feedback as to what those are, even if this was a desirable behaviour.

Applying and positioning text is even more frustrating as is the arcane way masking is done.

You would think deleting or repositioning frames would be a matter of scanning or counting through a QT movie and selecting the ones you want, instead you get none of that and have to ginger your way into position with markers that are crudely placed particularly on physically small movies.

The same for objects which are held in a crude "properties" list which often bares little resemblance to what you see. Hasn't Apple heard of layers palettes or object oriented GUI?

A simple slideshow requires that you rename each image into a sequence. If you don't it doesn't even tell you why it fails, it just sits there and does nothing.

Is QT "Pro" in some kind of time warp or just the Apple engineers who created it and never bothered to read their own GUI guidelines?

After sweating through all the "interface" oddities you can spend the rest of your time trying to debug why it has simply failed to produce a working movie.

To cap it off the documentation, what there is of it, tells you almost nothing that would be actually useful.

I refer you to the last sentence of my post:


I do agree that the documentation could be substantially improved.

Without going into even greater detail I have already pointed out how unMaclike QuickTime's GUI is and how indirect and crude the editing process is.

As to iMovie it is slooooooow and creates absolutely huge files at only a very few preset screen resolutions. Annoyingly it takes tiny QT movies and turns them into gigabyte size projects that it slowly recompresses back down to their original sizes (if it lets you chose the size you want and not what Apple reckons you want).

Final Cut Express may or may not be better, or have the same problems as iMovie and I'm not paying US$299 to find out. Final Cut Pro costs $1299. Both have steep learning curves.

I personally am totally excited about Leopard. There's few areas that I don't see improvement in and some areas that have improved yet Apple doesn't seem to be mentioning them (like the dedicated thread to the GPU for UI)

I typically find that OS releases have to coverer a wide range of people and as they say "one man's trash is another man's treasure" not all features will hit us the same way. I know for a fact that I'm going to LOVE the new iCal features and when I get my iPhone I'll love them even more. The ability for external apps to write to iCal now is huge to me. I love the Data Detectors in Mail. Maybe I'll finally get my Addressbook up to par.

My son is almost ready to start using a computer and the Parental Controls to me are a godsend here.

I personally didn't thing Tiger was that big of an update either but I realize that it contained some core technologies that would make future apps better. I find Leopard to have much more spit polish and it also contains many core technologies that will make future apps faster and more intuitive. The Developer tool updates were great as well. This is certainly a home run release to me. Had they added Voice Recognition and some other small things it could have been a grand slam but I'm ok for now. It's an easy $129 purchase for me.

I'd wait to see what Java 6 has in store for Apple and WebObjects right after when Sun releases it's redesigned threading model for the December Java 6 update and the fact that Sun is in transition with it's OpenJDK initiative.

It makes more sense for Apple to take a pragmatic approach and coordinate with Sun and the OpenJDK community before it commits a bunch of engineering resources to it.

I use it all the time for quick edits and it seems ok to me. For anything complicated, I'd use Shake or Final Cut but for quick editing, I'm ok with quicktime. I agree that it could be better though, just the way the markers work is a bit stupid IMO. It's so hard to move one of the end markers precisely without having to just hold down the arrow keys and go frame by frame. I don't know why they couldn't have hotkeys to set in an out points like most other editing software so you can at least play through a movie to get to an edit point and mark it instead of playing the clip, then having to drag the marker (clicking which makes the playhead jump to that position so you lose your place) and then trying to drag it to where you remember the point was.


That's because it's converting to an edit format from a delivery format though and edit formats are much bigger (5-10 times usually). When you edit in iMovie or Final Cut, you generally want frame accurate editing, which codecs that use temporal compression don't give you. Still, it is nice to be able to use the original codecs without recompression even if that means losing a couple of frames, which often doesn't really matter and Final Cut lets you do this. You just make the sequence settings the same as the source format.

As for the size Apple reckons you want, this would probably be a DV thing again. It is a standard format and it will usually always come out at either 720x576 in widescreen or 4:3. That's just the way DV is. I think imovie lets you use mpeg-4 as your working format, which would keep the space down but you might lose more quality.


Not really, they are set up pretty much like imovie but with all the options they deliberately missed out so that you'll buy Final Cut. I actually find the pro apps easier to use in most cases than the dumbed down apps because I usually find myself wondering where a particular feature is or how I would do a particular task with just the limited controls Apple gives you.

I've actually seen myself giving up doing a simple movie in imovie in favor of Final cut. The conversion to DVD is so slow with the iapps.

You just have unrealistic expectations. The editing aspect of QuickTime Pro does what it is meant to do very efficiently. The problem is that you are trying to do advanced things in a stripped-down editor.

The main thing that you are paying for with QuickTime Pro is the ability to export to a plethora of different codecs and file formats. Aspects of QuickTime Pro really do need re-writing; it'll be interesting to see these "significant" improvements that Leopard is supposedly bringing to H.264, because at the moment QT is pathetically slow at exporting H.264. It also doesn't support playback or encoding of High-Profile H.264, and doesn't support encoding of Advanced Simple Profile of MPEG-4 part 2 (can be played back with the free Perian plug-in).

They do. Get the playhead where you want it, and press shift-right arrow on the keyboard. This will move the out marker to the playhead. Press shift-left arrow and this will move the in marker to the playhead. Alternatively, pressing "i" will move the in marker to the playhead, and pressing "o" will move the out marker to the playhead.

It's usually better to use the "i" and "o" keys, as pressing and holding shift-arrow key causes the playhead an marker to move frame-by frame (so if you just want to move the marker to exactly where the playhead is, you might move the playhead by mistake if you use the shift-arrow method)

Thanks for the tips guys, I'll add it to my notes on QT but you'll understand if I stick by my view that Apple hasn't made it easy on the user, nor maintained their usual standards of usability.

A shame because a few simple and obvious improvements could do so much for the Mac and QT in particular. It just looks like another area of neglect.

\

i really hope the sarcasm in this post got lost during transmission through the interweb \

That's weird, I'm sure I tried that before. I had no idea about the shift-arrow thing. Thanks for that, this will make my quick edits so much easier.

Another thing I noticed is that on one quicktime installation at work, it has an option to click the timecode area to get the frame numbers. I don't think that's done by a quicktime component. There's probably an extension somewhere. It's quite handy when dealing with animations.

That was added by Apple in the 7.2 update.

Hey! I read a lot of complains here! STOP WHINNYING BEFORE YOU'VE SEEN THE KID! Today I had a chance to play with it for an hour or so. I've seen all the info on Leopard on Apple's website and John's demo of course. I am following all the reports, screen dumps etc. and I thought I knew a lot about Leopard and there is nothing which could surprise me. But I was wrong!
You see, most Apple products look better in real life than on the site or on a printed page. Same applies to Leopard. I could not try Mail features, Time Machine and screen sharing for example but what I've seen is AWESOME. Make a search in Leopard using the new Spotlight boolean searches and you end up with a search results - some 50 documents. What I do in Tiger in this situation is to look carefully the filename and the path to get additional hint whether this is the doc I want and then, if in doubt, open it. No? - go back to search results and so on. When I finally find the document I searched for I end up with TextEdit, Acrobat, Preview and MS Word opened. In Leopard, press the spacebar and Voila! - Quick Look opens a nice preview instantly! Yes, I knew this should work this way! But it is really fast! You may never need to open the application if you don't need to edit the document. Quick Look played a DivX movie (I guess some of the available QT extensions was installed) ALONG WITH THE SUBTITLES (the subtitles file was in the same folder). And you can go fullscreen with a click. You can select multiple documents and open in Quick Look and show in a slideshow.
Stacks are great. I don't like the Fan view, but the grid one is OK. What I really like - it is fast! In Tiger I have the Applications and Utilities folders in the dock. But I rarely use them to access an application because it is slow: first, there is a delay before they pop up. Then, the list of applications is long and it takes time to scroll. In Leopard I have them instantly!
Spaces is very impressive as well. One small detail I liked - you can keep some applications, like iChat or Skype, in all spaces. Works great with VMWare/Windows in fullscreen mode in a separate space.
Finally, Disk Utility can make a live resize of the partitions, as well as adding/splitting/deleting partitions without formatting the entire drive.
I can write a lot about what I liked but it will not be new for you I guess. The real news for me is that advertised features work really great!
There are some shortcomings of course: I could not find a way to set the Windows workgroup besides editing the smb.conf file (sharing is greatly improved however, better than used to be in System 9 for the first time!), some of the slideshows launched in Front Row did not show images, some others - no sound, the majority were OK (may be rebuilding the iPhoto database would help - did not try it, but the same slideshows were playing OK when launched from iPhoto). I could not find glitches in other apps but I did not have time to test them thoroughly.
I am certain that some controversial appearance tweaks like Dock and Menu transparency will be easily changed with 'defaults write' command.

May be I will wait till 10.5.1 to install on my Mac, but I will order now!

Oh, the Leopard I played with was installed on a 24" aluminum iMac.

While Leopard overall doesn't seem all that exciting to me as an end-user, every developer I know or follow seems to be very excited. This matches most of the stuff that Steve has talked about, so I think the apps will be more exciting even if the user experience isn't all that different.

I still wish they would fix the Finder and start really integrating metadata more...

I know what you mean, but I have to admit that the Finder is better than ever. We now have coverflow, quicklook, and an iTunes-esque interface. I can't wait to use it.