Have you guys tried the new "Alex" Voiceover voice? I'm curious if it's as good as the demos - if so, I might not mind having voiceover read my news to me rather than reading it after a day of staring at a computer screen.
I remember being excited about Tiger coming out because it had Spotlight, and it's a feature I use all the time now. There's not a single thing in Leopard that really gets me excited about the OS. Sure, I'll drop the cash on it just to stay current, but the features presented aren't all that impressive in my opinion.
I thought Tiger was quite barren in features. Spotlight was cool but a bit clunky. Automator is something I'd use but it was a bit immature.
I view Leopard as a far more significant upgrade to Tiger than Tiger was to Leopard.
Leopard is just a nice and even upgrade to Mac OS X. There's really not much they could have blown me away with. I'd have liked to see Voice Recoginition get more attention but it didn't.
There are a lot of Finder nuts out there but really how much can Apple add to the Finder before it bloats up? Pathfinder is for people that want a overdose of Finder like functionality.
In the end it's the small unheralded features that make your computing life blissfull. It's the improvements to Bonjour and Spotlight and how they work together. It's the ability in Leopard to use Ruby and Python with Scripting Bridge to bolster scripting in applications.
I think the reality is that the odds of Mac users being blown away with gargantuan new features is diminishing. Computing to me is finding files...manipulating them...storing them and sharing them if I desire.
Hell I'd say that adding a built in Dictionary in Tiger has changed my life and I certainly miss it when I'm on my crappy XP notebook. Leopard improves here with built in Wiki.
64-bit support is important as memory is now affordable enough to put over 4GB in a computer.
Leopard may not seem that significant but it's going to offer no less of an impact than Tiger did.
Have you guys tried the new "Alex" Voiceover voice? I'm curious if it's as good as the demos - if so, I might not mind having voiceover read my news to me rather than reading it after a day of staring at a computer screen.
That might be nice if they implement it correctly. Perhaps they could move the speak text from Services to a button and have the computer be smart enough to read the article and auto advance to the next page if the article is on multiple pages. While we're dreaming we might even suggest voice cues because many of us have microphones in our computers or attached to them. While it's reading, if we aren't interested in the article, we ought to be able to say "next" and have Safari automatically go to the next article on the website and begin reading it to us.
I doubt Apple would do something like that, but there's always radio news.
Leopard may not seem that significant but it's going to offer no less of an impact than Tiger did.
I agree that there are some interesting features in Leopard. I'll be using the Coverflow option, as an example. I just miss the days of being impressed by releases. I'm not sure how Leopard can make that much of an impact though. I'll certainly buy it to remain current, but seriously, there's not a whole lot there, and we'll not even get into the fact that iLife and iWork have fallen off the face of the planet.
Take for instance this new Safari. The only thing in it that impresses me is that it spellchecks now. Everything else doesn't matter to me. The whole tab rearranging thing makes no sense to me. I'll never use that feature as far as I can tell. I have multiple tabs open all the time, but I don't need to arrange them.
Leopard had better support HD through the DVD Player and Apple needs to get off the sidelines and get us some HD hardware. I can't even get a Blu-Ray drive for my Octo Mac-Pro from Apple and install it in the second empty drive in order to watch high definition content on my 30" screen, much less burn a Blu-Ray disc with content I shot with my 1080i HD Camcorder.
That might be nice if they implement it correctly. Perhaps they could move the speak text from Services to a button and have the computer be smart enough to read the article and auto advance to the next page if the article is on multiple pages. While we're dreaming we might even suggest voice cues because many of us have microphones in our computers or attached to them. While it's reading, if we aren't interested in the article, we ought to be able to say "next" and have Safari automatically go to the next article on the website and begin reading it to us.
I doubt Apple would do something like that, but there's always radio news.
It's in Services so other Applications by Apple and third parties and leverage that via Services.
If they want to add a "button" and a set of primitives to do the following functions you want you'd be better off submitting such an idea rather than mentioning it off the cuff.
Quick Look was interesting, but what difference does it make to me whether I open an app that takes all of five seconds in order to read something, or click on it in a window? Seems the same to me. Either way, I'm reading the document.
Quick Look is more useful than it looks at first when you start using it. Same with Coverflow in the Finder. Still features you could live without but nice all the same. You don't always have to think about what program it's going to open in when you look at it. The amount of times I just wanted to open an image in Preview and it goes into Photoshop, which I have to force-quit and then right-click open in preview or drag to the dock. Quick Look is a big time saver.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Green
I remember being excited about Tiger coming out because it had Spotlight, and it's a feature I use all the time now. There's not a single thing in Leopard that really gets me excited about the OS. Sure, I'll drop the cash on it just to stay current, but the features presented aren't all that impressive in my opinion.
I was the same with Tiger actually. The difference here is that Leopard has the performance improvement I was hoping for in Tiger. Leopard actually has more for me than Tiger did.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ericjames
Have you guys tried the new "Alex" Voiceover voice? I'm curious if it's as good as the demos - if so, I might not mind having voiceover read my news to me rather than reading it after a day of staring at a computer screen.
Yeah it's pretty good actually. I was hoping that it was going to be a new speech engine though and not just a new voice. I'm a heterosexual male, I don't want my computer to be another guy, I want a nice hot female voice. Vicki's the best but she sounds a bit handicapped.
It didn't seem to work just reading a selection from a PDF in preview though, it always started from the top.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Green
The whole tab rearranging thing makes no sense to me. I'll never use that feature as far as I can tell.
The most useful part is when you drag a tab off a window into a new one and vice versa. Just drag down and it will open a new window. Pull a tab from one window that only has one tab onto another and it will close the window.
I still wish they'd make the downloads panel into a sidebar or something though, I'm forever losing that thing.
It's in Services so other Applications by Apple and third parties and leverage that via Services.
If they want to add a "button" and a set of primitives to do the following functions you want you'd be better off submitting such an idea rather than mentioning it off the cuff.
If I honestly believed that Apple took suggestions seriously I would write them.
That might be nice if they implement it correctly. Perhaps they could move the speak text from Services to a button and have the computer be smart enough to read the article and auto advance to the next page if the article is on multiple pages. While we're dreaming we might even suggest voice cues because many of us have microphones in our computers or attached to them. While it's reading, if we aren't interested in the article, we ought to be able to say "next" and have Safari automatically go to the next article on the website and begin reading it to us.
Listening to articles wouldn't be too much of a problem since proper spelling and grammar are at least attempted. The problem will be "speaking" the comments people write because of the "smiles" and punctuation used to relay feelings, not to mention the "words" made from letters and numbers or so-called acronyms.
Listening to articles wouldn't be too much of a problem since proper spelling and grammar are at least attempted. The problem will be "speaking" the comments people write because of the "smiles" and punctuation used to relay feelings, not to mention the "words" made from letters and numbers or so-called acronyms.
One would think that with the computing power of todays computers that we'd be able to pull this off without much of a problem. I think it comes down to voices and believability. If you can't have your head turned and believe that you're hearing a person rather than a computer, it won't catch on. Both the male and female voices need to be redone to make them sound real. If they manage that, then they can focus on some of the points I made above, or at least, one would hope.
Leopard had better support HD through the DVD Player and Apple needs to get off the sidelines and get us some HD hardware. I can't even get a Blu-Ray drive for my Octo Mac-Pro from Apple and install it in the second empty drive in order to watch high definition content on my 30" screen, much less burn a Blu-Ray disc with content I shot with my 1080i HD Camcorder.
You cheeky bastard! LOL...no wonder you don't care about Quick look...I forgot that apps fire up in a nanosecond on your Mac Pro...must be nice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
I still wish they'd make the downloads panel into a sidebar or something though, I'm forever losing that thing.
QFT
Marvin...what's your thoughts on Spotlight improvements? I'm finally ready to jettison the OCD like need to put PDF into the "PDF Folder" and over "folderize" my enviromnent. If Spotlight is faster and smoother I'm just going to toss all my files into my Documents folder and attempt to create savvy Smart folders to manage things.
The advantages here to me are if I want to start scripting more of my OS having less folders will make it easier to target the data I want.
You cheeky bastard! LOL...no wonder you don't care about Quick look...I forgot that apps fire up in a nanosecond on your Mac Pro...must be nice.
Yes, it is nice. I have the system I wish everyone had. The OS is night and day different between this Mac Pro with 13GB of RAM and my old MBP that had 4GB of RAM in it. There's literally no delay when it comes to starting up apps. I think the speed boosts provided in Leopard will help a lot of people out who still have those G4's and such. I'm not sure if G3's will even be supported with Leopard. Anyone know?
If Apple would release a drive for the Mac Pro's that is for Blu Ray and setup burning in iDVD, I'd be a lot more happy. I'm hoping Leopard will usher that in, because I can't distribute any of my footage I've shot of the Olympic Peninsula, or even the fireworks from Gasworks, without cluttering up my desk with external drives and having to use Toast to get everything to work. Apple needs to get on the ball here and get us the ability to do this stuff. There's nothing better than having a HD 30" screen and not being able to play HD movies on it!
Marvin...what's your thoughts on Spotlight improvements? I'm finally ready to jettison the OCD like need to put PDF into the "PDF Folder" and over "folderize" my enviromnent. If Spotlight is faster and smoother I'm just going to toss all my files into my Documents folder and attempt to create savvy Smart folders to manage things.
The advantages here to me are if I want to start scripting more of my OS having less folders will make it easier to target the data I want.
I didn't test it out that much but from what I did test, it definitely seemed faster. They've used an indexing system on the help menus too now so when you click help on an application, you get a spotlight search field and results from that are instant - not Tiger's idea of instant but proper instant but I would expect that for the help stuff. That feature seems to be broken in the current release though.
I'll test Spotlight out some more and get back to you. I'll see how well it works with coverflow etc too.
I'll test Spotlight out some more and get back to you. I'll see how well it works with coverflow etc too.
It definitely feels a bit faster but there are still delays here and there. The menu doesn't seem to get tied up while you type, which is nice but the Finder search field does - probably as it defaults to using coverflow mode.
The Spotlight menu is still not that great though. My main issue with Spotlight is that the menu is very limited. It only shows a very small amount of items so I almost always have to end up opening the Finder window. I don't know why they couldn't just make a scrollbar the height of the screen with all the results in there listed alphabetically with an option to list by type too. Still no right-clicking Spotlight menu items either and you still have to hover in just the right way to see the path. I wanted right-click so I could do an 'open with' or a 'get info' or 'reveal in Finder'.
Also there's no Quick Look on the menu as far as I can see which would have been great for previewing. Imagine if it did have a scrollbar then you could just hit the down arrow previewing all the documents that were returned in the search.
The Finder search is nice with coverflow but as I say you still get the delay while you type.
Comments
I remember being excited about Tiger coming out because it had Spotlight, and it's a feature I use all the time now. There's not a single thing in Leopard that really gets me excited about the OS. Sure, I'll drop the cash on it just to stay current, but the features presented aren't all that impressive in my opinion.
I thought Tiger was quite barren in features. Spotlight was cool but a bit clunky. Automator is something I'd use but it was a bit immature.
I view Leopard as a far more significant upgrade to Tiger than Tiger was to Leopard.
Leopard is just a nice and even upgrade to Mac OS X. There's really not much they could have blown me away with. I'd have liked to see Voice Recoginition get more attention but it didn't.
There are a lot of Finder nuts out there but really how much can Apple add to the Finder before it bloats up? Pathfinder is for people that want a overdose of Finder like functionality.
In the end it's the small unheralded features that make your computing life blissfull. It's the improvements to Bonjour and Spotlight and how they work together. It's the ability in Leopard to use Ruby and Python with Scripting Bridge to bolster scripting in applications.
I think the reality is that the odds of Mac users being blown away with gargantuan new features is diminishing. Computing to me is finding files...manipulating them...storing them and sharing them if I desire.
Hell I'd say that adding a built in Dictionary in Tiger has changed my life and I certainly miss it when I'm on my crappy XP notebook. Leopard improves here with built in Wiki.
64-bit support is important as memory is now affordable enough to put over 4GB in a computer.
Leopard may not seem that significant but it's going to offer no less of an impact than Tiger did.
Have you guys tried the new "Alex" Voiceover voice? I'm curious if it's as good as the demos - if so, I might not mind having voiceover read my news to me rather than reading it after a day of staring at a computer screen.
That might be nice if they implement it correctly. Perhaps they could move the speak text from Services to a button and have the computer be smart enough to read the article and auto advance to the next page if the article is on multiple pages. While we're dreaming we might even suggest voice cues because many of us have microphones in our computers or attached to them. While it's reading, if we aren't interested in the article, we ought to be able to say "next" and have Safari automatically go to the next article on the website and begin reading it to us.
I doubt Apple would do something like that, but there's always radio news.
Leopard may not seem that significant but it's going to offer no less of an impact than Tiger did.
I agree that there are some interesting features in Leopard. I'll be using the Coverflow option, as an example. I just miss the days of being impressed by releases. I'm not sure how Leopard can make that much of an impact though. I'll certainly buy it to remain current, but seriously, there's not a whole lot there, and we'll not even get into the fact that iLife and iWork have fallen off the face of the planet.
Take for instance this new Safari. The only thing in it that impresses me is that it spellchecks now. Everything else doesn't matter to me. The whole tab rearranging thing makes no sense to me. I'll never use that feature as far as I can tell. I have multiple tabs open all the time, but I don't need to arrange them.
Leopard had better support HD through the DVD Player and Apple needs to get off the sidelines and get us some HD hardware. I can't even get a Blu-Ray drive for my Octo Mac-Pro from Apple and install it in the second empty drive in order to watch high definition content on my 30" screen, much less burn a Blu-Ray disc with content I shot with my 1080i HD Camcorder.
Or how Sherlock was completely redone to look just like Karelia's Watson. .
Sherlock was a debugger? why was there a dock icon for it at one time?
<ducks>
That might be nice if they implement it correctly. Perhaps they could move the speak text from Services to a button and have the computer be smart enough to read the article and auto advance to the next page if the article is on multiple pages. While we're dreaming we might even suggest voice cues because many of us have microphones in our computers or attached to them. While it's reading, if we aren't interested in the article, we ought to be able to say "next" and have Safari automatically go to the next article on the website and begin reading it to us.
I doubt Apple would do something like that, but there's always radio news.
It's in Services so other Applications by Apple and third parties and leverage that via Services.
If they want to add a "button" and a set of primitives to do the following functions you want you'd be better off submitting such an idea rather than mentioning it off the cuff.
Quick Look was interesting, but what difference does it make to me whether I open an app that takes all of five seconds in order to read something, or click on it in a window? Seems the same to me. Either way, I'm reading the document.
Quick Look is more useful than it looks at first when you start using it. Same with Coverflow in the Finder. Still features you could live without but nice all the same. You don't always have to think about what program it's going to open in when you look at it. The amount of times I just wanted to open an image in Preview and it goes into Photoshop, which I have to force-quit and then right-click open in preview or drag to the dock. Quick Look is a big time saver.
I remember being excited about Tiger coming out because it had Spotlight, and it's a feature I use all the time now. There's not a single thing in Leopard that really gets me excited about the OS. Sure, I'll drop the cash on it just to stay current, but the features presented aren't all that impressive in my opinion.
I was the same with Tiger actually. The difference here is that Leopard has the performance improvement I was hoping for in Tiger. Leopard actually has more for me than Tiger did.
Have you guys tried the new "Alex" Voiceover voice? I'm curious if it's as good as the demos - if so, I might not mind having voiceover read my news to me rather than reading it after a day of staring at a computer screen.
Yeah it's pretty good actually. I was hoping that it was going to be a new speech engine though and not just a new voice. I'm a heterosexual male, I don't want my computer to be another guy, I want a nice hot female voice. Vicki's the best but she sounds a bit handicapped.
It didn't seem to work just reading a selection from a PDF in preview though, it always started from the top.
The whole tab rearranging thing makes no sense to me. I'll never use that feature as far as I can tell.
The most useful part is when you drag a tab off a window into a new one and vice versa. Just drag down and it will open a new window. Pull a tab from one window that only has one tab onto another and it will close the window.
I still wish they'd make the downloads panel into a sidebar or something though, I'm forever losing that thing.
It's in Services so other Applications by Apple and third parties and leverage that via Services.
If they want to add a "button" and a set of primitives to do the following functions you want you'd be better off submitting such an idea rather than mentioning it off the cuff.
If I honestly believed that Apple took suggestions seriously I would write them.
That might be nice if they implement it correctly. Perhaps they could move the speak text from Services to a button and have the computer be smart enough to read the article and auto advance to the next page if the article is on multiple pages. While we're dreaming we might even suggest voice cues because many of us have microphones in our computers or attached to them. While it's reading, if we aren't interested in the article, we ought to be able to say "next" and have Safari automatically go to the next article on the website and begin reading it to us.
Listening to articles wouldn't be too much of a problem since proper spelling and grammar are at least attempted. The problem will be "speaking" the comments people write because of the "smiles" and punctuation used to relay feelings, not to mention the "words" made from letters and numbers or so-called acronyms.
Listening to articles wouldn't be too much of a problem since proper spelling and grammar are at least attempted. The problem will be "speaking" the comments people write because of the "smiles" and punctuation used to relay feelings, not to mention the "words" made from letters and numbers or so-called acronyms.
One would think that with the computing power of todays computers that we'd be able to pull this off without much of a problem. I think it comes down to voices and believability. If you can't have your head turned and believe that you're hearing a person rather than a computer, it won't catch on. Both the male and female voices need to be redone to make them sound real. If they manage that, then they can focus on some of the points I made above, or at least, one would hope.
Ihem.
Leopard had better support HD through the DVD Player and Apple needs to get off the sidelines and get us some HD hardware. I can't even get a Blu-Ray drive for my Octo Mac-Pro from Apple and install it in the second empty drive in order to watch high definition content on my 30" screen, much less burn a Blu-Ray disc with content I shot with my 1080i HD Camcorder.
You cheeky bastard! LOL...no wonder you don't care about Quick look...I forgot that apps fire up in a nanosecond on your Mac Pro...must be nice.
I still wish they'd make the downloads panel into a sidebar or something though, I'm forever losing that thing.
QFT
Marvin...what's your thoughts on Spotlight improvements? I'm finally ready to jettison the OCD like need to put PDF into the "PDF Folder" and over "folderize" my enviromnent. If Spotlight is faster and smoother I'm just going to toss all my files into my Documents folder and attempt to create savvy Smart folders to manage things.
The advantages here to me are if I want to start scripting more of my OS having less folders will make it easier to target the data I want.
You cheeky bastard! LOL...no wonder you don't care about Quick look...I forgot that apps fire up in a nanosecond on your Mac Pro...must be nice.
Yes, it is nice. I have the system I wish everyone had. The OS is night and day different between this Mac Pro with 13GB of RAM and my old MBP that had 4GB of RAM in it. There's literally no delay when it comes to starting up apps. I think the speed boosts provided in Leopard will help a lot of people out who still have those G4's and such. I'm not sure if G3's will even be supported with Leopard. Anyone know?
If Apple would release a drive for the Mac Pro's that is for Blu Ray and setup burning in iDVD, I'd be a lot more happy. I'm hoping Leopard will usher that in, because I can't distribute any of my footage I've shot of the Olympic Peninsula, or even the fireworks from Gasworks, without cluttering up my desk with external drives and having to use Toast to get everything to work. Apple needs to get on the ball here and get us the ability to do this stuff. There's nothing better than having a HD 30" screen and not being able to play HD movies on it!
Marvin...what's your thoughts on Spotlight improvements? I'm finally ready to jettison the OCD like need to put PDF into the "PDF Folder" and over "folderize" my enviromnent. If Spotlight is faster and smoother I'm just going to toss all my files into my Documents folder and attempt to create savvy Smart folders to manage things.
The advantages here to me are if I want to start scripting more of my OS having less folders will make it easier to target the data I want.
I didn't test it out that much but from what I did test, it definitely seemed faster. They've used an indexing system on the help menus too now so when you click help on an application, you get a spotlight search field and results from that are instant - not Tiger's idea of instant but proper instant but I would expect that for the help stuff. That feature seems to be broken in the current release though.
I'll test Spotlight out some more and get back to you. I'll see how well it works with coverflow etc too.
I'll test Spotlight out some more and get back to you. I'll see how well it works with coverflow etc too.
It definitely feels a bit faster but there are still delays here and there. The menu doesn't seem to get tied up while you type, which is nice but the Finder search field does - probably as it defaults to using coverflow mode.
The Spotlight menu is still not that great though. My main issue with Spotlight is that the menu is very limited. It only shows a very small amount of items so I almost always have to end up opening the Finder window. I don't know why they couldn't just make a scrollbar the height of the screen with all the results in there listed alphabetically with an option to list by type too. Still no right-clicking Spotlight menu items either and you still have to hover in just the right way to see the path. I wanted right-click so I could do an 'open with' or a 'get info' or 'reveal in Finder'.
Also there's no Quick Look on the menu as far as I can see which would have been great for previewing. Imagine if it did have a scrollbar then you could just hit the down arrow previewing all the documents that were returned in the search.
The Finder search is nice with coverflow but as I say you still get the delay while you type.