Friday, August 04, 2006

Leopard Feature Set Leaked


O'Grady's PowerPage - Your Mobile Technology Destination

n advance of Monday's keynote address by Steve Jobs at WWDC The PowerPage has received a alleged copy of the features (and some screenies) from Apple's next generation operating system - Mac OS 10.5 ("Leopard"). The details are unconfirmed and are being posted for informational purposes only.

Mac OS 10.5 will see updates to most of the included applications, among the major updates are:

• Spotlight 2.0
• Dashboard 2.0
• Safari 3.0
• iChat 4.0
• Automator 2.0
• QuickTime 7.2
• Mail 3.0
• iCal 3.0
• Address Book 5.0

The updates are as follows:

Spotlight 2.0:

- Spotlight's icon changes to suit the new apple menu logo
- Instead of words down the side i.e. applications, system preferences... there are icons of each at a user defined size (80 x 80 default). So for applications there is the global application icon, and next to the hits and so on.
- The icons of the hits will be larger and for documents, events, mail, images, PDF's movies, fonts and presentations. there will be little live icons. For documents, the icon of the app (word or pages), events; the iCal icon with the date of the event and the time on it.
- Image previews will be larger but there will also be a little text of the type of image i.e. jpg in a contrasting color in the bottom right of the preview. PDF's will just be larger, movies will have a little preview at about 8x the speed (or less fast depending on the length) that will be cached in the finder.
- Fonts will be in the font type.
- Presentations will preview just like movies.
- If any of the items are in an open window, on the desktop, or in an app (bookmarks in safari, or a library item in itunes etc.) and the app is open, the rest of the app will fade and the specific items will light up, and if more than one, in the examples given, the app will just give a standard search and safari will open the bookmark browser.

- There will be the standard presumed better metadata searching. So if the majority of results are images, the show all pane at the right will also allow to organize by camera, date taken, file type and app used. The most used app and file type at the top of its respective lists.
- Spotlight will also search widgets
- The slideshow feature will be enhanced for most filetypes. Documents can be previewed in a similar way to images are now and so on and so forth.
- Also spotlight will actually be almost instantanteous or as instant as they can hope.
- A new spotlight widget.

Dashboard 2.0:

- Dashboard will get a system preferences icon.
- Dashboard will appear in the application switcher.
- Widgets can now be placed on the desktop. If one drags an icon to the board and waits two seconds in one place the board will fade out and you can place it on the desktop. The icon will appear in the dock and will be treated as an app.
- You can also keep widgets in the dock, either by dragging them there from dashboard or keeping them there when they appear on the desktop.
- In the dock will be the x icon for closing the widget on top of the widget icon, not on the widget itself.
- There will be also a selection of different animations.
- You can isolate dashboard in a similar way to front row, you can push the desktop as an expose item to the side and isolate dashboard that way.
- You can isolate dashboard also via a cube effect. Also you can open dashboard in a similar way to f11, the widgets will hide at the side and come forward for use, in this one, the dashboard will not be isolated. Hot corners and f numbers can be configured to use one of them each. so you can have a different function key for each affect.
- In the isolated dashboard, the background will be black, but it will act as a pool of water, in a similar way as to now, so when you drag an widget around, you can create ripples.

- Also you can choose from water, air, space and metal as your chosen set of widget animations. Air and metal animations are not elaborated on, but space acts a bit like a black hole when you remove a widget and the widgets 'zoom' on.


Safari 3.0:

- Phishing filter
- Tighter RSS
- Integrated FTP
- Integrated mailto function, a mail plugin that lets you send emails without opening Mail.
- Isolation box. When this is activated, Safari grows a little black shield around it and everything to do with Safari takes place instead in an encrypted disk image of a special filesystem that nulls unix permissions, anything that is written goes there and can't execute out of the image. The image is deleted after the session.
- Tabs can now operate on more than one line, and be saved.
- A safari Exposé is available, allowing Web pages in tabs to be treated as separate windows for the time of the Exposé .
- Web pages can be "Widgetized." You can make a new separate widget of a Web page, there is also a mini Safari widget that just has back and forward buttons and a small address bar.
- Tighter integration with Web formats.

iChat 4.0:

- 7 way video conversations available.
- A new window with gives iSight feedback and also letting you optimize your video stream how you want to.
- Better Voice over IP integration.
- Folders for contacts.
- Different layout, quite hard to explain, but better.
- MSN and Yahoo integration
- Dedicated iChat widget

Automator 2.0:

- Loads faster
- Different layout
- AppleScript is updated and is more english, allowing automator to incorporate it without people feeling squeamish.
- More actions
- GUI scripting
- Dedicated widget

QuickTime 7.2:

- Full screen and audio recording available in non-Pro version
- New CODECs, including loose RealPlayer and DiVX.
- Movie slideshow feature
- Some other minor inclusions
- Dedicated widget

Mail 3.2:

- New server protocols
- Widescreen version
- Different views, drop down
- Gmail-like thread system
- Ability to send proper HTML email
- Able to import pages documents as email
- iChat integration and new collaboration integration
- iCal calendar integration

iCal 3.0:

- Brilliant new UI
- 25 different organization techniques
- 100's more options for each log
- Integration with more formats

Address Book 5.0:

- New UI
- Wider range of import abilities
- Collaborative abilities
- Tighter iChat and iCal integration.

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Thursday, August 03, 2006

Games on a MAC without porting

Gamer Scan has an article about "Cider," a portability engine just released by TransGaming. The software promises to relieve developers of the delay usually associated with porting Windows games to the Mac. Where such ports normally require total code conversion, Cider should eliminate that by using a shell that wraps around an existing Windows code base. It operates by first loading the app into memory (on an Intel-based Mac), and from there connecting to an optimized set of Win32 APIs. No further work is necessary. TransGaming says it expects titles using Cider to ship within the next few months.

MacNN | Windows games coming to Intel Macs

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Google Picasa Now for Mac

Google released a web uploader for the Mac tonight. This is not a Mac version of Picasa desktop software, which is still only available only for Windows and Linux machines, but it does allow Web users to upload photos from either iPhoto or from the Desktop to Picasa Web Albums.

For most Mac users this will still not be enough to switch from Flickr or one of the other online photo options, but it is a sign that Google is taking the Mac more seriously and will hopefully release a full version of Picasa for the platform soon.

This was created as a side project by an engineer on the search team named Ted Bonkenburg, with assistance from Greg Robbins and Mike Morton on the Picasa team.


Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Google Picasa Now for Mac, Almost

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Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Tongus theme for Wordpress

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Flock Usability

Flock on the the MAC, is as easy as IE on Windows.

FoxNews video - worked right away - no fuss no mo muss.

CNN video worked right away - no fuss no mo muss.

Nicelodeon worked right away - no fuss no mo muss.

This is the FIRST time since moving to the MAC, I can say that.

I would usually have to tweak one plug in or aother, but no with FLOCK.

A solid two thumbs up!