I’ve got great hopes for Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard). I still marvel at some of the simply gorgeous features of Mac OS X. Look and feel of the widgets in Mac OS X blow away their clumsy looking equivalents in Windows Vista Beta 2. The scaling, the animations, the artwork are all better. But does that matter?
Arguably I still do more on a Windows PC. My Mac (the one that I use is a Powerbook G4 12″ - my 15″ TiBook is tucked up in it’s bed these days) is my main way of browsing the Web at home. But I do little else on it. My Windows PC has even become the main place to run iTunes and sync with the Podbeast. I used to play the odd game on my Mac. I seem to remember playing and completing Return to Castle Wolfenstein on my TiBook. But those days are long gone.
Mac OS still is my favourite OS though. 10.4.7 seems to have been delayed a bit. Rumours were that it should have been here by now. Updates to Safari and a few other key apps are overdue. Beachball mania is fine on the golden sands of Cleethorpes but not on my desktop.
A recent press release on Apple’s web site announced that his Steveness is due to present Mac OS 10.5 at the WWDC in August. Whahey. Bring it on. This will be Apple’s answer to Windows Vista in effect so it will be interesting to see what gets shoehorned in. Bootcamp is a given and the release version is due to be part of the base OS. But the answer to Vista is not to be able to run it on a Mac surely.
Despite the wow factor of more recent introductions like Expose, Spotlight and extra bits in the presentation and search capabilities in the OS I’d still like to revisit those classic things like stability and the SBOD. Fortuntately it’s very easy to actually kill misbehaving applications in Mac OS. Most of the problems I have tend to be with Firefox and Camino. I only put Firefox back on to the Mac because it’s the only Mac compatible browser that works with the ‘full’ version of Live.com. Fingers crossed that Safari support makes it into the next release of Live.com. ‘Classic’ view is boring now.
So although 10.5 will no doubt bring a raft of new cool features (and Apple genuinely do have cool features) making sure that the basics are addressed will keep me being a fan.