Artryst.com: Design by Gregory Tarnoff

Apple’s Big News from WWDC ‘07

So in case you missed it, Apple held their 2007 WWDC keynote this morning. The big news - no big news. Steve showed off 10 features of Leopard and talked a little about the iPhone. There are some features of Leopard that make me excited to get my hands on it. Of course I am not sure it will be worth it on my 12 inch Powerbook G4 (this looks to be a good time to start thinking about the 15.4 inch MacBook Pro). The iPhone turns out to be a big disappointment to most as they unveiled the way to do 3rd party applications on it. I think people aren’t realizing what the revolution Apple started was, but more on that in a minute.

OSX Leopard

Lifehacker has a really good write up on how most of the os features look like eye candy. As a designer, I like eye candy, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of using the product and doesn’t eat up too many resources.

Here is a quick rundown of the features revealed and my thoughts on them:

1. Desktop: Lifehacker nails it here, most of it is useless, however Stacks will make my life easier. I tend to drop everything on my desktop and get frustrated at how messy it is. If I can drop them into a folder, smart folder or something similar and access them from the dock I will be much happier. Lifehacker does help the unorganized a little with this quick tip on how to mimic stacks in Tiger.
2. Finder: Leopard will get a new Finder finally. This version will act more like iTunes in its search method. It even has Coverflow, the old iTunes plugin that lets you search albums by looking at cover art. This never really worked well for me in iTunes, but I think I will like it when going through design work. Now when viewing files, they will actually appear in the Coverflow. For spreadsheets, word docs and other office file, I don’t like this, but artwork, movies, and photos it will rock. Imagine you are looking for that one photo you have of your family for the holiday card, but you can’t remember which folder it is in or what you called it. Now with Coverflow you can open the folder and view the photos just like scrolling through your real world photo album. I am curious if it will render HTML pages with their related CSS if you look in your development folders or any folder you are using to design a site in.
3. Quick Look: So you need to read that Word doc, but don’t want to open Word or OpenOffice.Org? Quick look will allow you “preview” the file without actually launching the application. This can be a time saver especially for artists and PSD files.
4. Time Machine: Awesome idea, but nothing new.
5. Spaces: I don’t really see the need for this, also shown last year.
6. 64 Bit: this is good news for all of you running the Intel chips. Us PowerPC guys will have to upgrade to care.
7. Core Animation: Same as last year, but looks pretty cool.
8. Boot Camp: This is built in to Leopard now so that we can run Windows on our Macs. I am not really thrilled about this as it means having to reboot every time you want to switch OSes. I think Parallels handles this better.
9. Dashboard: There is a handy new widget that looks up movie show times. Nice, but is it a new feature?
10. iChat: now you will have fun laughing at your friends and colleagues with Photobooth like effects! Is that board meeting or video conference cal boring you? iChat will allow you to turn the other person upside down or into a Obi One Kenobi like hologram, just make sure you mute your microphone before you do it. actually the iChat theater concept of showing a movie or slide show in iChat while having a video conference is kinda cool, but they can drop the Photobooth effects.

Safari on Windows

I know I didn’t mention it above, but Steve announced this as well today. He is gunning for IE7 and Firefox and did so by making available the beta of Safari 3 for Windows. I played with it for a few hours today and here are my impressions.

1. Something I never noticed in Safari on the Mac (I use mostly Firefox) is that it isn’t user friendly. It is missing the basic commands on the menu bar. I wanted to go to my homepage and there was no home button. In addition to that the text on the tabs was dark on a dark grey background. I had a hard time reading. For a company so focused on usability, they missed the boat on that one.
2. Bookmarks leave me lacking. When I click to open up my bookmarks, I don’t necessarily want my current page hidden. I prefer a sidebar, not a whole page.
3. Bugs. I know it is beta, but there are a couple of bugs I discovered within 5 minutes of launching the application that should have been caught. I run two monitors, one laptop and one external in my work setting. I put all my primary apps on my laptop and secondary (Outlook, Firefox, Excel) on my external. When I moved Safari over there and clicked to maximize the browser so I could view the Apple website, the window disappeared. Upon finding it in my taskbar and right clicking to restore, my only option was close. Maximize, minimize, and restore were greyed out. When I relaunched the application (since I had to close it), it popped up on my main monitor maximized. I use my windows machine with the taskbar on auto-hide. In the maximized role the browser now opened in, I couldn’t get to the taskbar. I had to use Alt+Tab to change apps and even then I couldn’t get the taskbar to show up until i reduced the size of Safari. to me these are two huge glaring errors that should have been caught before beta.

iPhone

There isn’t much to say here. Apple’s idea of a SDK for it is to build a Web 2.0 application and run it in Safari. this is lame. However, what most people don’t see is that this could be the push that makes the Web-Desktop finally explode. For years people have talked about a system that had no OS other than a web browser installed. Once launched you go to a website like Goowy . Now this really hasn’t taken off yet, but if you can image having one of these set up so you can access the needed files from your iPhone? all of a sudden that Safari browser will become really useful. Will it interact with the phone’s OS, probably not. This does limit it and mean that the iPhone is not as smart as the competition, but expect a boom in web based desktop solution.

One More Thing….

.Mac, oh how I have wondered why you still exist… Well now I know. The new finder will allow you to view all machines on your network and see all the shared files just like a mapped drive in Windows. They appear as if they are an external hard drive on your machine. this gets even cooler when you incorporate .Mac. You know that proposal you worked on all night, burned to a CD or threw on a thumb drive and took to the office? Well it turns out it was corrupted, or scratched or some other nightmarish situation. Well you have .Mac right? Log on to your work Mac open finder and see your home computer (which you left running). Search the files on that computer until you find the proposal and tada! you are ready to go. It looks like .Mac combined with the new finder is setting up SSH on your systems automatically.

I only see two catches here:

1. How many people use Macs at work? Can this be made to work on Windows? If it can, sign me up.
2. How often do you leave your computer on? Now that we are entering a time where energy is expensive and global warming is apparent, I shut my systems down whenever I can.