Apple yesterday seeded a new version of Leopard (build 9A326) to internal Apple employees. Apple continues to gloss over the interface, refining it even more and there is an overly presence of black gloss. Among the new features, Safari 3 has the ability to view videocasts and listen to podcasts in browser while TextEdit can now export and open new Word 2007 documents.
Apple Seeds Leopard 9A326 Internally
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Where are they? I wanna see the black gloss.
See [through] the black gloss: http://www.londonbeachstore.co.uk/store/image.php?productid=16727
Seriously, no one has the guts to post something like this, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to demand them.
wow! they darkened the WHOLE interface!!
IMO not much of a story if they talk about the interface yet we cant see it. I could say the latest build of GRML has glass morphing effects of rainbow colors but then again I could just be making it up.
imageshack exists to share stuff that should not be shared, someone shows us please!
Edited 2006-12-10 20:10
Has this been confirmed? I read that the import/export rumor was from a photoshopped screenshot.
Can anyone with a seed confirm this?
It’s not difficult to believe that it will have Word 2007 compatibility. WordPerfect for Windows is also supposed to have it integrated.
It seems as though Microsoft doesn’t want any complaints about what can’t be done. Both of the groups working on Office 2007 will have converters so that older versions of Office can read the documents.
It’d be nice to see whatever interface is coming along in Leopard. I’d be surprised if it turns out that most everything is based on black. We’ve already seen translucent black dialog boxes in various applications which were updated in 2006. It might be a bit much to do glossy black everywhere.
TextEdit to open .docx! LOL. That is actually, great. Could you imaging the same of Notepad/Wordpad? See here, the difference between an OS that aims to help the user, and one that hinders instead.
This is a great feature if it’s true.
As I recall, TextEdit also had OpenDocument support added in a previous build?
Reading Office 2007 documents requires an enormous amount of programming: http://blogs.adobe.com/shebanation/2006/12/open_xml_one-way.html
The probability that Apple snuck this feature into Leopard is near zero.
According to http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/12/8702/
TextEdit supports both ODF and OpenXML (as well as RTF, HTML, and Word 2003 XML).
And Adobe is spreading FUD regarding OpenXML. Apple and Novell were on the ECMA OpenXML from the beginning and have working code already.
Obviously, TextEdit doesn’t support everything that ODF and OpenXML supports, so Apple didn’t have to implement those parts (beyond just stripping info they don’t understand (hopefully warning the user first), or keeping it around for roundtripping (dangerous, since it can lead to inconsistent documents)). But this is no different than TextEdit’s already existing support of RTF, HTML, etc.
Edited 2006-12-10 02:59
[…] a team of 5 developers will implement 25 handlers a week, which means that we’d have all the XML handlers written in 44 weeks. […]
This means there are 1100 XML handlers that have to be implemented to read this format. If this isn’t a piece of software suffering from featuritis, I don’t know what is.
And people wonder why it took them so long to get Vista out the door. Eventually, Microsoft’s big projects are going to collapse under this “more code is better” mentality. No matter how many programmers Microsoft throws at the problem, they still can’t overcome the fundamental rules of programming complexity.
Edited 2006-12-10 03:58
This is about entry barriers, which is what it has always been about, and it is great for Apple and for Microsoft.
We have really two levels of fortification one inside the other. The very high inner one is the full Office functionality with Exchange and Access. You have to have this for the business environment, and guess what, only Windows will provide the full end to end integrated experience. So this inner fortification runs around Windows, and while it keeps out everyone, its main purpose is to keep out Apple in particular, because Apple is the only one allowed over the outer fence.
The outer fence is very high, as you can see from the 1100 handlers. It is called OpenXML and it tries to keep out everyone except Apple, who has entered a cosy relationship with MS and is allowed to play in the area between the fences. Apple is allowed in here but no further by being given a business-disabled version of Office, and in this area we have limited and token competition for Windows.
The function of the so called ‘standard’ of OpenXML is simply to make sure anyone trying to get over this outer fence has prohibitive costs for any but the largest company, and even then, if they can afford the financial costs, probably cannot do the work in the timescales required to compete.
The stroke of genius on the part of Apple and MS is to get this situation accepted by regulators everywhere as effective competition – the one thing that it is not – and to get the entry barriers ratified as a standard.
Confronted with this, anyone with his eyes open will move his company’s and his personal data away from MS standards as fast as he reasonably can. We are actually at the point where the threat to your information autonomy is not so much Windows, as it is Office. We are also at a point where from the point of view of information autonomy, the difference between MacOS and Windows is negligible.
So in order of importance, the first thing to do is get away from OpenXML and onto ODF. Think about the OS later. As people have said on other threads, if you don’t, you’ll end up paying. The more anti-piracy measures we have, the more effective and intrusive WGA and similar stuff becomes, the more Trusted Computing pervades, the more you will pay. And what you will pay for, is to get permission to access your own data. Or what you thought was your own data.
This means there are 1100 XML handlers that have to be implemented to read this format. If this isn’t a piece of software suffering from featuritis, I don’t know what is.
The reason for that is that they’ve simply taken their binary Office formats and dumped it all into some incomprehensible XML schema in a hurry, in order to try and get ahead of ODF and get it seen as a standard. Good luck finding out what all that XML means, and just how much compatibility you will have when Windows specific Office components or older Office binary information is embedded in for backwards compatibility. And surely backwards compatibility is something that MS Office should worry about, and not the open format?
The poster alcibiades is right. It’s a way of Microsoft saying “OK, you can have this much compatibility, but not all of it, and you’re going to need a massive team of people to even get that”.
And people wonder why it took them so long to get Vista out the door. Eventually, Microsoft’s big projects are going to collapse under this “more code is better” mentality.
Indeed. I was amazed at that blog entry of a former employee about how it took a year to get about nine ways of shutting down your computer into Vista. The thing I was confused about was how the kernel, shell and user interface seemed to have circular dependencies from what he was saying. In the Linux world the kernel would provide the hardware support needed, the userspace stuff like HAL would present that to the desktop and the desktop would present the options to the user in the way it deemed best. I was amazed that the kernel people could come back to the userspace people and say “We can’t do it like that so you have to change your interface and your options”.
The picture of their development model does not inspire confidence. Say what you like, but Apple and others do seem to be more organised in how they add new features, although Apple does a far worse job of backwards compatibility.
Edited 2006-12-10 17:09
And Adobe is spreading FUD regarding OpenXML.
If you think it’s FUD then you’re going to have to itemise it and point out why. The effort required to implement OpenXML is a genuine point, and not even the Mac version of Office will have OpenXML implemented until some time well into next year.
Apple and Novell were on the ECMA OpenXML from the beginning and have working code already.
Well, the question is just how much of the actual format itself that they have working and how easy it is in practice to exchange a variety of documents with MS Office. Working code tells us absolutely nothing.
‘overly presence’ ? what? that doesnt make sense.
this time i am gonna have to get an apple setup. I really think this version of OS X has some rather nifty features in it that have not been revealed yet.
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So apple copied super-fetch. Nice. Hey where are the people who whine all the time that Microsoft copies from Apple?
Another Microsoft fanboys.
If Microsoft is trying to certify the OpenXML as an ISO international standard, it is because they WANT to be copied dude.
they want to be compatible…
you MS-fanboy should be happy, that happens not too often…
Where do you see Apple copying super-fetch? I think you’re mixing up super-fetch and the flash-as-memory thing.
Btw, super-fetch sounds like a stunningly bad idea. The VM algorithms take into account the day of the week? That’s just a recipe for disaster…
… rather than a full OS release. A tweaked display (which sounds as if its going towards the dark Vista look), a backup routine that should have been in the OS from day one (hell, any kind of backup should have been in the OS from day one) and now superfetch, quietly lifted from Vista ….
… rather than a full OS release. A tweaked display (which sounds as if its going towards the dark Vista look), a backup routine that should have been in the OS from day one (hell, any kind of backup should have been in the OS from day one) and now superfetch, quietly lifted from Vista ….
Yeah, just those. Oh, and MYRIADS of backend improvements in the OS and the internal frameworks that result in a FASTER OS, more feature rich applications and all.
People that have no grasp of OSs think it’s all about the userland.
People that have no grasp of OSs think it’s all about the userland.
Yep, and those same people are the folk who like to write Vista off as a fixpack.
I’ve read the Apple bumpf and I’m pretty unimpressed, but I’m waiting to see if they really are keeping the best til last, or they are hoping that the Mac community will cover for them when OSX is released.
in every version of Mac OS X apple tweaked the display. I don’t remember when it started but Mac OS X has iSync and Backup.app for backup solutions since a long time… the new time machine is more than that.
there are people saying that vista is nothin but xp-sp3 but I think we all should wait both release before labeling something a fixpack…
and I’ll not even get started on the new frameworks that empower the new system which clearly states that this is no fixpack.
in every version of Mac OS X apple tweaked the display.
Hardly a massive change though really.
I don’t remember when it started but Mac OS X has iSync and Backup.app for backup solutions since a long time… the new time machine is more than that.
Backup and full synch is only included if you are willing to fork out $99 per year for Apple’s .Mac service. It doesn’t come with the OS, which I find a little bit odd. And time machine is pretty much the same as the versioned backups that are already part of Vista; the only differences being:
1/. Microsoft doesn’t have the flash frontend, which I’m really pleased about. When I screw up something so badly that I need to recover a previous version, I don’t need a Sci-Fi epic to go with it.
2/. Microsoft’s implementation doesn’t need an extra drive to work.
there are people saying that vista is nothin but xp-sp3 but I think we all should wait both release before labeling something a fixpack…
and I’ll not even get started on the new frameworks that empower the new system which clearly states that this is no fixpack.
… and yet around here are happy to write off Vista as a fixpack, even though the changes it includes far outstrip anything Apple has done with OSX since they introduced.
Edited 2006-12-11 15:19
And time machine is pretty much the same as the versioned backups that are already part of Vista; the only differences being:
1/. Microsoft doesn’t have the flash frontend, which I’m really pleased about. When I screw up something so badly that I need to recover a previous version, I don’t need a Sci-Fi epic to go with it.
So 99% of users will never use it. Wonderfully useful feature, eh?
2/. Microsoft’s implementation doesn’t need an extra drive to work.
What happens if the only drive dies? Not very useful for backups, Is it?
The whole point of time machine is backup and easy restore. A nice easy to use interface that can make a novice back and restore files. A feature many many customers can use, easily.
… and yet around here are happy to write off Vista as a fixpack, even though the changes it includes far outstrip anything Apple has done with OSX since they introduced.
Now if you love vista so much buy it and run it. This article is about leopard. I would go on a feature by feature OS X vs Vista comparison with but it would be pointless.
You started this whole off topic “Looking more and more like a fixpack …” to troll this discussion. I suggest you stop or I’ll start moderating your off topic posts down.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more like the dark iTunes 7 look (which really looks more like an evolution of Platinum than anything like Vista).
NTFS read and write would be one feature alone worth having Leopard for…
Agreed. That is one feature that should have existed a long time ago.
We all know who to blame for that one :X
Yes, I am sure they said “Oh hey, we are almost at the end of our release cycle, but maybe we could squeeze this feature of a just released Windows OS into our own? We have what? A couple weeks? NO PROBLEM.”