No Leopard until October

fryke said:
At least they've now jumped from brushed metal to unified look in the latest build. That's _something_, isn't it. ;) I'm happy 'bout that. :) :) :)
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Oooh, that would be good news. I've not liked the trend towards a less consistent look, with regards to windows within the OS and within Apple's own applications. Of all the appearances, the brushed metal is my least favorite. It seems a little lacking in elegance to me.
 
The delay may be in part a marketing ploy to wet people's appetites for what may well be a relatively unimpressive upgrade.
 
I'm still waiting for the new features. We need better applications integration (including AppleTV and iPod management, iWork, and all iApps), faster media encoding (similar to ffmpegx) when transfering from one app to the next, and the unified look is very welcome.
 
rhisiart said:
The delay may be in part a marketing ploy to wet people's appetites for what may well be a relatively unimpressive upgrade.
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I do worry a little that Leopard will not be as impressive as hoped. I agreed with a lot of what mindbend wrote. Time Machine doesn't really impress me at this stage. As for Spaces, I'm quite happy using the "Hide" command or occasionally using Exposé. Improvements to Mail and Safari would be interesting to see.

It would be nice if the secret features turn out to really blow everyone away, but I'm not holding my breath. I'd love to be proven wrong but, at the moment, I expect Leopard to be another incremental improvement, rather than revolutionary.
 
I don't agree with the people who say Tiger is good enough. In many ways, Tiger was like a downgrade from Panther. It really needs polish. As for Leopard's new features, I don't know. After being so disappointed by Tiger, which sounded like a freakin' awesome upgrade before it was released, I can't get excited over things like Spaces or Time Machine. If they're implemented well, they'll be very nice, but it's all in the implementation, and there's no way to know about that until I get to use it (and I don't have faith in Apple to do things right anymore). Again I point to Spotlight; it could've changed the way I use computers, but instead it just gets in my way and makes previously-simple tasks a chore.

fryke said:
At least they've now jumped from brushed metal to unified look in the latest build. That's _something_, isn't it. ;) I'm happy 'bout that. :) :) :)
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Interesting. Visually, I think this is good. They've even unified the two "unified" types. (The fact that that sentence even makes sense is proof that Tiger is a mess. ;)) Now it seems that active windows appear dark (à la iTunes 7), while background windows appear light (à la Mail 2). Contrast is good. A big problem with iTunes 7 and brushed metal is that the windows look almost identical in the two modes. I'm also glad to see the rest of iTunes 7's interface (the custom scroll bar style, for example) has not been adopted, because that's all ugly, IMHO. Ugly like Windows.

On the other hand, I think the dark-unified look is too dark for system-wide use, and generally the ugliest of the bunch. The new look in the screenshots may be visually useful, but it's not visually pleasing. System Preferences, for instance, just looks silly in those screenshots. There's still time for that to be fine-tuned, though. Fingers crossed!

Functionally, I still prefer aqua. I really can't understand why they think being able to drag a window from any empty space is a good thing. I'm always dragging metal/unified windows by mistake because I miss a button by a few pixels. Oh well. (If you really want dragging flexibility, bring back platinum-style window borders! :))

I wish they'd just stick with aqua and forget about all these other types, but as long as it's consistent, I can respect it.

Does anyone know if aqua has been dumped in this latest build? Looks like it might have been, but then again, all the apps shown in those screenshots used unified or brushed metal to begin with.
 
The last inconsitency is that Mail has rounded buttons while Safari has rounded rectangle buttons.
 
By the way, Mac Rumors is carrying an article that mentions the delay to Leopard. They don't really say much new, but do say:

Mac Rumors said:
...

A delay until October was actually predicted in a Page 2 rumor by DigiTimes. While Apple has claimed more broadly that the delay was due to a shift in resources to the iPhone project, DigiTimes said that the delay would be due to Apple's plan to "have its new OS support Windows Vista through an integrated version of Boot Camp."

While Apple has long-claimed that Boot Camp will ship with Leopard, and the latest version of the Boot Camp public beta did incorporate Windows Vista support, DigiTimes was careful to refer to an "integrated version" of Boot Camp in their story. This specificity was noted by Arn in a blog posting on the matter, suggesting that "integrated" Boot Camp might be something closer to Parallels virtualization.

None of Leopard's "Top Secret" features have yet to leak from Apple. However, this integrated version of Boot Camp which has yet to be seen in previous developer builds may point to one such feature.

...
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It could be Apple has plans to make Leopard more "Windows compatible," in a sense, and that this has posed one of the bigger problems in development.

In addition, I remember the iPhone on display didn't have all the features working yet. So it could also/instead be that the iPhone was/is behind schedule, and resources have been diverted to it as a priority in order to meet the release date. The iPhone has caught the media's imagination and there are probably more potential iPhone-converts than Mac-converts, so a slippage of the iPhone release date might be more noticeable.
 
Well things happen and I am starting to think about the next few months and this announcement. I would not be surprised if Apple discounts the current retail version of Tiger and announce every computer a Leopard reduced rate rate upgrade after WWDC.
 
The one thing that annoys me, is I was hoping to get it before school started, now I have to wait after.
 
SPeaking of MacRumors, they now have pictures of a Leopard build. From the looks of it, everything is using the Unified theme. Mind you, when you click on the picture they have there on MacRumors, it looks like the Finder window is squared off instead of having rounded corners, but apparently that's from the screen capture in that build. The windows are still rounded.

http://www.macrumors.com/2007/04/12/mac-os-x-theme-change-in-leopard-seed-9a410/
 
Some GUI developer in one of the comments calls it a fake, saying that it does not show resolution independence and can be done using a preinstalled system file.

I'm intensely disappointed if this is the final look of Leopard.
 
I actually like the Unified look. It's very clean compared to the brushed metal which was cool a few years ago when it was introduced but now just looks gaudy to me.

So long as it doesn't looks like iTunes, I'm fine with it.
 
I just want something completely different. I'm sick of working with Finder in any form, especially a form that resembles something I could just skin with ShapeShifter. Ugh.
 
As a Mac OS user from before OS X, I do miss the consistency of the Classic Finder. I even liked the Platinum look and being able to change the colors of the menu highlights. OS X dropped a lot of things that the old Finder did right (especially with the zoom button), but the old Finder could have benefited from some of the new stuff in the new Finder (one window navigation). These are features for me that are lacking and that I need back. I don't mind the look, but let me be able to change something to personalize it some, even if it is just a little bit. I'm happy with a Unified theme. Just a choice of menu highlight colors would suffice.

Yes, there's Shapeshifter but why change something that already looks good (with the exception of the Brushed Metal for me)? I barely used Kaleidoscope in Mac OS 9 and below since the regular Platinum look with the option for different menu highlight colors was good enough for me.
 
And even better was how Rhapsody took that Platinum look and let you change most of the colours. :) Not only six or seven appearance colours, but any hue you wanted. :) Of course it was more relevant back then, because there wasn't enough real productivity software. Now that I'm productive on OS X, I rarely have the time to switch around theme-stuff. ;) Even my desktop pictures often last for more than a month. :) :) :)

(Or to put it more plainly: I don't care much about themability of the OS, as long as I think Apple makes the right choices. Doing away with brushed metal certainly is an important step.)
 
fryke said:
And even better was how Rhapsody took that Platinum look and let you change most of the colours. :) Not only six or seven appearance colours, but any hue you wanted. :) Of course it was more relevant back then, because there wasn't enough real productivity software. Now that I'm productive on OS X, I rarely have the time to switch around theme-stuff. ;) Even my desktop pictures often last for more than a month. :) :) :)

(Or to put it more plainly: I don't care much about themability of the OS, as long as I think Apple makes the right choices. Doing away with brushed metal certainly is an important step.)
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...but Apple has always been about individuality, expression, and originality. I believe that their fundamental product would mirror that, and with brushed metal it really hasn't. I expect a lot of the creative minds at Apple because that's what they've made for themselves, and besides that, my own creativity hungers for a UI change.
 
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