Filed under: OS, Rumors, Leopard
All the little things: WWDC 2006 roundup part 2
It's a sequel! That's right boys and girls: in our never-ending quest to dig up every detail we can on the recent events surrounding WWDC, Leopard and other random tidbits, we've gathered a few more juicy items for your digestion.
- Apple 'Teams?' Readers sent in various tips, and even The Gruber™ linked it. So it must be real. But what is it? [UPDATE: Looks like Teams is an advertised wiki feature of Leopard Server.]
- Readers are noting that, in the keynote, Bertrand Serlet says "With Spotlight, finally, it's easy to find information on your local disks and information on the web." Could this be a prelude to an even farther-reaching (and slower) Spotlight in Leopard?
MacFixIt has a nice roundup of actual application versions included in Leopard. Of specific interest, they note that Exposé is listed as a 1.0 app, which might also mean that this icon in the dock heralds Spotlight as a full-blown app as well.-
Happy Finder, Sad Finder - neurotic Finder? Sorry for the crummy screenshots, but these were both taken from different times of the keynote (36:28 and 1:01:25, to be exact. Thanks David B.!). Could they have been from different Macs? If so, why the curious change in such a fundamental icon? - This is on iChat's preview page, but it's still worth mentioning in part because no one did on stage: along with the new video and slideshow features, it also has screen sharing so users can get truly collaborative over a chat.
This might be a new type of file preview ability in the Finder, or it could just be an extra feature in Time Machine. Either way, it looks handy. It also seems to be an indication that Apple is moving towards a broader use of palettes like those in iWork and iWeb, including the transparent style found in iPhoto '06.- Some readers are reporting a new icon in Safari's toolbar (which can be seen on the Dashboard preview page), but that's just the Dash Clippings widget tool.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Michael Strck said 7:15AM on 8-10-2006
I seriously don't get why people are constantly (and ingnorantly) bitching about Spotlight's speed. On what planet can Spotlight possibly be considered slow on modern machines? If you are on a 1GHz G4 with 512MB of RAM, it's not exactly Spotlight's fault if queries can take a few seconds. If you are on a reasonably fast machine (G4 or a new Intel Mac), it's already very fast. By the way, it's not supposed to be an app-launcher. If you want split-second activation of your various tools, get Quicksilver.
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andy said 7:24AM on 8-10-2006
maybe the sad finder face was a joke because the guys putting it together knew that if the presentation needed to switch machines, something must have gone wrong ... ?
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Jason Francis said 7:30AM on 8-10-2006
I'm sure everyone else will comment on this too, but Teams is an announced feature of Leopard Server: http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/
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Venom said 7:54AM on 8-10-2006
I thought that Bertrand Serlet said "With Spotlight, finally, it's easy to find information on your local disks AS information on the web."
Meaning Google.
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Corey said 8:07AM on 8-10-2006
The screen sharing feature was in the keynote; they showed a cube-rotation transition from your screen to their screen and talked about how it automatically started an audio conference.
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TimD said 8:20AM on 8-10-2006
The new type of file preview ability is not a part of Time Machine. Apple describes it as part of Spotlight's new features:
(http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/spotlight.html)
"Quick on the draw
Sometimes you just don’t want to wait. That’s why Leopard introduces Quick Look, a new way to preview a document, picture, or slideshow in a single click, without opening an application. Select a search result and Quick Look displays the result — an iPhoto snapshot, a PDF, an Address Book contact — in a graphic overlay. Quick Look even plays your QuickTime movies, right in the preview window."
The truth is, this is a system level capability and an in-depth preview was not given b/c they were saving that to highlight it as a part of the new and improved Finder in Leopard.
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Matt said 8:30AM on 8-10-2006
The Finder icon changes from Happy to Sad when Scott switches machines with the iPhoto freeze.
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Barry G said 8:33AM on 8-10-2006
I dont know if this has been covered but has the interface of iChat changed? iChat seems to have dropped brushed metal?
Barry
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geezer said 8:51AM on 8-10-2006
yes they switched machines when iphoto freezed, but does this explain the change in the "mimic" of the finder icon? maybe just a gag.
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CyBeR said 8:53AM on 8-10-2006
"With Spotlight, finally, it's easy to find information on your local disks and information on the web."
I think he said easier to find information ... than on the web.
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Jamie said 8:56AM on 8-10-2006
Bertrand said "With spotlight, it is now as easy to find information on your hard disk as it is on the web" - ie, spotlight is as good as a google search for your hard drive
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Thomas said 9:00AM on 8-10-2006
On Apple's Leopard Spotlight page it says: "Perform a search and Spotlight automatically delivers your applications as the top hits. And if the top hit is your hit, you don’t even need to select it. Just hit return and it opens." Now currently if you do a Spotlight search from the menu bar pressing return is the show all option which opens a separate window with all the results in. Is this why Spotlight is now an app? Is the menu bar version the app launcher one? Is the one in the dock there so we can access the more detailed search? I assume it's so we can now actually select spotlight windows, it's very easy to lose them currently.
Or will we find that the finder will gradually get less and less prominence?
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SubGenius said 9:41AM on 8-10-2006
Really? You guys can understand what Bertrand Serlet is saying?
I thought he sounded like the adults in Charlie Brown.
Maybe if I play the keynote backwards I'll find the hidden messages.
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Ken R said 10:23AM on 8-10-2006
Cool - the one thing I didn't notice was the unhappy Finder. I hope that's a feature!
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Mgkwho said 10:44AM on 8-10-2006
David,
What the heck is your problem with spotlight's speed? It's not fast enough for you? 2 second delay...omg I have to wait so long...
Plus, and I think this is from Apple, Leopard will improve on spotlight's speed. It won't degrade.
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David Owens said 10:54AM on 8-10-2006
I noticed that Jobs was using a DeskPro with display. Presumably with many gigs of ram to drive the ichat videos?
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macobyte said 11:06AM on 8-10-2006
Also interesting, at one point in the keynote (I'm not sure the time), the dock shows no black triangle under the iCal icon... even though iCal is clearly seen open and running on the screen.
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Steven Fisher said 11:40AM on 8-10-2006
I doubt the sad Finder was a joke. Rather, it was probably intended to be something subtle that nobody would catch on to at the time. Because they wanted something to indicate which machine they were on.
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Simon Kirby said 8:28AM on 10-02-2006
All you guys who think Spotlight is fast must have pretty tidy hard-disks. On my 2Ghz MBPro it is not at all unusual for a spotlight query to take 30 seconds or so. I'm guessing the size of your index will depend on how many files you have that contain spotlightable content. This will include emails, PDF files and so on. I have a lot of these, leaving me with only happy memories of the early days when Spotlight took a second or so to return a result.
It'd be interesting to compare Spotlight's speed with Google's desktop search utility on a PC with a similar number of documents. The fact that Spotlight is so integrated into the OS should make it faster, but I wonder if this is true...
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Ferg said 12:53PM on 8-10-2006
Am I the only one noticing that in the Keynote they have Spotlight in the Dock, but the screens on the Leopard Preview Site (and I’m guessing in the Developer Previews), it’s not there. In fact, they don’t even touch that icon. I’m guessing it’s a program that will let you manage your index and/or build advanced queries.
And I didn’t notice it before, but what’s that icon next to it on the screenshot above.
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