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Leopard on the hunt

Last updated on July 23, 2020

When Apple held back previewing a few features of Mac OS X at last year’s WWDC, I wondered whether those enhancements were being held back because of their magnitude or impact or because they were most visually compelling. Yesterday’s WWDC keynote leads me to believe they were more the latter. Outside of the glassy and reflective interface elements and Cover Flow, much of the theme of Leopard seems to be around easing access to content and information, just as Dashboard made it easier to get to applications (albeit often content-centric ones).

Stacks, the revamped Sidebar and Back to Mac join Spaces and, to some extent, Time Machine in assisting with this task. Unfortunately, Leopard does not at this time have a tagging mechanism comparable to Vista, nor does it have Visa’s presentation sharing although iChat Theater might be used in a similar way.

Perhaps the biggest head-scratcher was the announcement of Safari for Windows, which surely does not need another Web browser. In fact, Firefox is my preferred browser on the Mac. I’ll have more to say about that development and its relevance to the iPhone soon.