Mary Jo Foley – ZDNet Blogs – June 11, 2007:
What struck me at the June 11 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) event wasn’t the glitzy demos, the rockstar-like worship of Apple CEO Steve Jobs or the “I’m Steve Jobs” parody video by the “I’m a PC” guy.
Instead, it was the excitement by the 5,000 WWDC attendees about many technologies in the forthcoming Mac OS X “Leopard” release that already exist in Windows Vista.
I’ve sat through countless Microsoft demos of Vista at a variety of consumer and business events. I don’t remember ever hearing thunderous applause when Microsoft showed off Flip 3D or Vista’s ability to preview thumbnails of documents. The “wows” were few and far between. Yet when Jobs put almost identical versions of these features in Leopard through their paces, there were lots of oohs and ahhs.
Here’s what Jobs’ hit list looked like to this Windows user:
1. New Leopard Desktop: Not a whole lot different from Vista’s Aero and Sidebar.
2. New Finder: Many of the same capabilities as the integrated “Instant Search” in Vista (the subsystem that Google is trying to get the Department of Justice to rule as being anti-competitive). The new Leopard Coverflow viewing capability looked almost identical to Vista’s Flip 3D to me.
3. QuickLook: Live file previews — just like the thumbnail preview capability available in Vista.
4. 64-bitness: Leopard is the first 64-bit only version of a desktop client. Vista comes in 32-bit and 64-bit varieties. And most expect Windows Seven will still be available in 32-bit flavors. Until 32-bit machines go away, it seems like a good idea to offer 32-bit operating systems.5. Core animation: Not sure what the Vista comparison is here. The demo reminded me of Microsoft Max photo-sharing application. The WWDC developers attending the Jobs keynote didn’t seem wowed with this functionality.
6. Boot Camp. You can run Vista on your Mac. Apple showed Vista running Solitaire in its WWDC demo. But I bet those downloading the 2.5 million copies of Boot Camp available since last year are running a lot of other Windows business apps and games.
7. Spaces: A feature allowing users to group applications into separate spaces. I haven’t seen anything like in in Vista, but the audience didn’t seem overly impressed by it.
8. Dashboard with widgets. Isn’t this like the Vista Sidebar with gadgets?
9. iChat gets a bunch of fun add-ons (photo-booth effects, backrops, etc.) to make it a more fully-featured videoconferencing product. The “iChat Theater” capability Jobs showed off reminded me of Vista’s Meeting Space and/or the new Microsoft “Shared View” (code-named “Tahiti”) document-sharing/conferencing subsystems.
10. Time Machine automatic backup. Vista has built-in automatic backup (Volume Shadow Copy). It doesn’t look anywhere near as cool as Time Machine. But it seems to provide a lot of the same functionality.
Sixteen years old stuck in time that is, kinda moronic. Sorry for the verbal dispersion.
I am sorry, I answered in a baited way. I heard DOS and remembered a horrible typing class in the 80’s. Please forgive me!
One of the new features that Steve Jobs announced during the keynote: when you download stuff from the internet, it now automatically gets saved into a Download folder, which appears in the dock.
The response from the audience: ooohh, aaaaah, applause.
Ok, I’ve had a download folder on my desktop since 1998. And while it is a good idea that they’ve finally incorporated it into the OS, it’s a painfully obvious idea that is at least 10 years overdue.
Don’t get me wrong – I think Vista sucks big time. I’m now resisting buying a new PC until at least the 1st service pack. And I’m also considering a Macbook.
But come on! Thunderous applause because the screen is shiny?
It’s also idiotic that Microsoft has at least 6 versions of Vista with different pricing schemes – was anyone stupid enough to fork over $579 for Ultimate? On the other hand, as Jobs pointed out, this is the 6th revision to OS X. So some Mac users have paid $129 x 6 to get to this point.
Who cares what is happening on such a small segment of the computer population. Now real good news would be if some of the apps we buy a PC to use were to be made available on Linux, now that would be good news. Open Office is fine, but we don’t buy PCs to play pretending we are doing great office work. Where is the PSP or Ulead apps from Corel. How about a Linux Bryce from DAZ. That would have me dumping the windows idea. We don’t buy computers to use operating systems, we buy them to run applications. That capability is why Microsoft, in spite of Bill Gates, not because of him has reigned supreme in the computer world.
#6: Having been a user of WinXP, and recently OSX Tiger (wife’s got a Mac laptop), I’m mostly underwhelmed by the OSX Dashboard, which does little to enhance the user’s experience on a Mac.
I like my user interfaces to be fast. If I get a PC with Vista, I’ll probably replace Vista with XP unless there’s a way to disable all the user interface sugar (fades, dissolves, animated menus etc.) as could be done with WinXP.
#36
Set the desktop theme to classic.
36. Instead of doing all that work, just put an extra gig of ram in it, problem solved, ram is cheap, and its a lot less work. And it flies.
Apple didn’t steal from Vista in all the new features of the Leopard Finder: they stole from… themselves. The Cover Flow motif now used in the Finder isn’t “stolen” from Vista at all, it’s lifted straight out of iTunes! Duh…
If this was in the free local weekly thrown over the fence it would bring a small smile and a giggle about why someone who knows this little was given the article to write.
For ZDNet to publish such awful commentary is truly frightening.
Just to pick out one piece of the awfulness.
(The 64 bit comment beggars belief. Has this person the slightest idea what they are saying? Got to doubt it.)
‘Core Animation’ is something like a photo-sharing app???!!!???
Truly, truly frightening that things have come to the point where people who don’t grasp the fundamentals of the subject are asked to write about them. Was this person unable to type a search into Google and get some idea of the basic concept of what was being said? It’s not like the information is hidden in the bottom of a sunk ship in the middle of the ocean. It’s right there on the web to be read by anyone with an Internet connection (or is ZDNet now working via carrier pigeon or something?).
(http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/technology/coreanimation.html)
But watching the MS vs OS X fanboys slap at one another like demented pre-schoolers trying to have a ‘real’ fight is fairly entertaining (if more than a little pathetic). Do any of you think a single person is converted to your view by screaming in a shrill voice and mouthing empty ‘I was first!’ noises at one another? Grow up just a little.
RE: #34
First we artificially assume all OSes are bought retail (no bundling with new machines which would almost certainly have happened in both scenarios).
OK buying every version of OS X (the ‘Pro/Ultimate’ version) from 10.0 to 10.5 would be 6 x $129 = $774.
Vista is $579 (we must compare top version to top version – and I never suggest buying ‘cheap’ versions of OS to anyone – when you need a missing feature you’d happily pay twice the savings to have it right there when you need it so get it all now).
So if someone paid more than (774-579) $195 for XP Pro when first released (ignoring the time gap between 10.0 and XP (that would require adding in the price of ME and the less thought about ME the better)) they paid more for their XP/Vista experience 2000-2007 than the OS X 10.0 to 10.5 experience cost over the same time.
It’s not really important is it? If there is any difference, it all comes down to a couple of months of ISP connection costs either way over 7 years so it’s meaningless background noise.
I know you weren’t saying anything either way on this but there are those who do and it makes me so very tired to hear arguments about the meaningless. If people want to save money on their OS go get Linux! Otherwise just pay your money and take your choice. It isn’t going to make any *real* difference (in terms of money) either way.
I found the spaces feature especially funny to be presented. One of the things I got used to in Linux and I miss in Windows are virtual desktops, basically the same as Leopard’s spaces. Unix flavoured OSs have those for ages, so should Windows come to have it, it would be presented just as another overdue feature, not as one of the greatest new fancy features. The fact that Steve Jobs spent so much time demoing it (I was thinking ‘yes, I could do that in Linux… that too, that too, that too…’ lol) is a sign of just how little news he had to present.
Foley is right about one thing. For the same set of features, a Windows audience, especially one with experience in Unix, would not do ahs and ohs, but simply think ‘at last’ about some of the features and would simply smile at other really new features.
So what really excites us, Windows developers, at developer conferences (WWDC – stands for World Wide Developer Conference, so I suppose the audience is also developers)? Well, we do get excited about new development tools and features that let us get our work done faster and better. When .Net platform came out the first time, it was incredibly exciting. ‘So, I can create classes with one language and inherit them from another programming language? Nice!!’; ‘So, I have a automatic ephemeral garbage collector that is in fact faster than C’s memory allocater in many situations, unlike what happens with Java?’ – Nice!!; ‘So, now we’ve got generics built into the the .Net runtime, a feature similar to C++’s templates, which allows for even higher levels of code reusability unseen before in a managed execution environment, which C++ wasn’t!’ – Terrific!!; ‘So now with WPF I’ll be able to create rich user interfaces using XML (XAML), separating code from layout, just like if it were web-pages?’ Wonderful!
If Microsoft told us that we could program Windows Mobile using Ajax only, we’de probably throw rotten eggs into the stage!!!! Mind you, we’ve been programming Windows Mobile devices with .Net Windows Forms and rich interfaces for years now!!!