Remember Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference of 2006, when Steve Jobs showed off a preliminary version of Mac OSX 10.5 - aka "Leopard" - but said he was keeping the demo of some of them back?
Just to remind you - it was about 10.30am, and he said (by Engadget's record): "You know, our friends up north [at Microsoft] spent over $5 billion on R&D, but these days all they seem to be copying is Google and Apple. Shows money doesn't buy everything. Today we want to give you a preview of Leopard. First I want to tell you there are some top secret features that we're keeping close to the chest."
OK, now he's done the show again. But what was he holding back last year? Maybe it's just me, but I can't spot the secret feature. Yeah yeah Safari on Windows, but I don't think that you can call that a "feature" on OSX. Not by any stretch.
What was there today? (Here's Engadget's list. Open in a separate tab. This comes from the Engadget coverage of today.)
- some Mac games from Electronic Arts. Except those will run on any OSX.
- A new Apple desktop including "Stacks" and the Coverflow animation for going through files. (Believe me, no power user is going to use the latter - too slow and no spatial metaphor.)
- Finder reorganised to look more like iTunes. (Confirming John Gruber's prediction: brushed metal is dead.)
- .Mac that can connect to computers wherever they are
- Quick Look - preview files without opening applications
- 64-bit all the way through (not new at all: showed that last year)
- Core Animation - yeah, seen that
- Boot Camp for running Windows - not new at all: "since we put it out a year ago we've had over 2.5m downloads of the beta"
- Spaces - what anyone else would call virtual desktops
- Dashboard Widgets which you can make - um hm, seen that last year..
- iChat with various new backgrounds - nope, not new
- Time Machine - nope, not new. (Though the graphic this year seems to show very many fewer people back up than last year. Oh woe.)
- Safari on Windows, apps for the iPhone developed through Safari... nope, neither of those is
new(d'oh!) on Leopard.
OK, we've been through the whole lot now and we're no wiser. Anyone? Hidden features? Top secret? Anything?
