There’s not long to wait now until his ‘Steveness’ does his keynote at the Apple WWDC for 2006. Mac OS 10.5 will be launched at the event and no doubt Steve will cover off the cool new features. O’Grady’s Powerpage has a supposed leaked feature set of what’s included in 10.5 ‘Leopard’.
If it’s accurate this is welcome news to have an updated version of Safari that hopefully now has better capabilities. For instance, I always post using Camino on my Mac as Safari cannot render the formatting toolbar for posts in Wordpress. Grrr.. Safari also doesn’t cope very well with huge web pages, especially those that are long lists of text like newsgroups and large forums. The introduction of Gmail style threading to Mail App will also make management of mail much easier. I’ve come to really like that feature of Gmail, it’s about time other email software vendors caught up.
There’s rumour that Steve will also announce further products in the home entertainment PC space. Further enhancement to Frontrow (something that I don’t actually use myself) would be welcome and might cause me to put my hand in my pocket and buy myself a Mac-mini.
Are larger capacity iPods on the horizon? Well if movie rentals through iTunes is something else that Steve launches then we’re all going to need more space on our devices. Toshiba have previous announced a 250 GB 2.5″ drive (larger than the one that’s in an iPod both in capacity and physical size) which does start to indicate what is possible from smaller drives. Such a drive would fit inside an Archos device but not an iPod unless Apple produce a new form factor iPod which would have a larger screen. But I doubt that.
Larger capacity Nano’s are also probable as Toshiba also have a 8GB flash drive too. Both of these press releases from Toshiba elude to the first products to contain them being announced in August 2006. Perhaps the WWDC will be one of those announcements.
And one more thing… no, leave that to Steve to announce. We await expectantly.