Mac OS X Leopard at WWDC: What's a Web Worker to Love?

It’s Stevenote time again, and that means that the Mac faithful gather round their liveblogging screens to happily swim in the fruity Kool Aid. This time it’s the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, CA.

The big news was a deeper preview of Leopard (Mac OS X) than we have seen before. The slides boast 300 new features. But he’s probably counting the reflective “floor” of the dock as a feature. Not going to do a whole lot for your billing rate, is it? So what did Steve Jobs say to his flock that will make a difference to those of us who earn our livings based on our digital lifestyles?

Leopard is still shipping in October for $129. What’s more than eye candy and really interesting for web workers:

The new Finder will have a beefed up sidebar for easier cataloging of searches and items. If you have a .Mac account, you can search the contents of other Macs linked to your account. This is helpful, provided you have that .Mac account. Will this be the feature that finally makes the service worth $99 per year? Will .Mac finally get past the performance issues that have made it painful to use? Maybe. In Tiger (OS X 10.4) you could enter keywords to quickly search for files in an iTunes-like window. Leopard incorporates more of the iTunes interface into the Finder by adding Cover Flow, with a visual flip-book of files. This can be handy, provided it’s snappy.

Quick Look lets you preview multi-page documents without launching their respective applications. Interesting. It will remain to be seen what non-Apple, non-Microsoft applications can use this technology. Anything that saves times is good for the web worker.

Spaces is a wonderful web worker feature. When your work life and your personal life happen on the same computer in the same room, Spaces is how you can “leave” the office at the end of the day. Virtual desktops is nothing new, even for Mac OS X. But now the functionality is built in to the operating system.

Mail and iCal are still the biggest web worker disappointments from Apple. So much potential not fully realized. We live and die by our email, and Apple somehow thinks we spend our day designing postcards of our last vacation to send to Grandma? Serious web workers are probably going to stick to Thunderbird or Gmail. The improvements to these productivity apps are so superficial in Leopard, they weren’t even worth mentioning in today’s presentation.

The big news in iChat, for those of us who would get bored of changing silly backdrops after 5 minutes, is the ability to show a file such as a presentation or video in an iChat session. Back when Leopard was first previewed, there was talk of a remote control feature. From the Google cached page:

Share and share alike
Remote control takes on a whole new meaning with iChat in Leopard. Thanks to iChat Screen Sharing, you and your buddy can observe and control a single desktop via iChat, making it a cinch to collaborate with colleagues, browse the Web with a friend, or pick the perfect plane seats with your spouse. Share your own desktop or share your buddy’s – you both have complete control at all times. And when you start a Screen Sharing session, iChat automatically initiates an audio chat so you can talk things through while you’re at it.

This paragraph is completely missing from the current preview page. Too bad. Showing a one-way demo is not nearly as interesting as real-time file collaboration.

Steve Jobs is famous for saving the biggest announcements for a last “one more thing.” Safari sees version 3, available as a beta download now. Inline searching and tabbed browsing aren’t exactly cutting edge nowadays. The news here is that the Apple browser is now available for Windows. It’s all for the sake of the iPhone, which will work on the Windows platform and therefore must “talk” to a browser. You didn’t seriously think it would sync bookmarks with Internet Explorer 7, did you? So Safari for Windows it is. If you’re not planning to buy an iPhone, is there a good reason to ditch Firefox for Safari?

Speak of iPhone, the much anticipated mobile device is not as closed to 3rd party developers as originally thought. Developers can write “Web 2.0″ applications for the iPhone as they would for the browser that appear to run as fully realized applications on the phone. Time will tell just how creative and productivity-minded these 3rd party apps will be.

What do you think…is this an operating system worth waiting another 4 months for?

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