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Leopard
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Comment on "WWDC 2006: Judging from the Back Row"
by Dale — Aug 11
Somebody complains that the OS doesn't look interesting, more stuff is shown at the sessions, and eventually it's clear there's much more than meets the eye.

It was said about Panther, Tiger, and now again about Leopard. I think this is why Apple chose to not play their full hand on Leopard yet.


Your comparison of the Leopard feature set with Panther's and Tiger's features when they were shown at a keynote doesn't fill me with confidence. In both cases, Panther and Tiger were feature complete, and we got what we saw. While Apple talked up all the extra 150 features in Tiger that we didn't see, they really weren't worth seeing eg the 4 separate features to describe Safari's minimal support for RSS.

I'm hoping there really are significant consumer level features that are yet to be unveiled. If not, Apple will get a lambasting from the media when they release Leopard for making false "Top Secret" claims.

I also find it very hard to swallow the "we're keeping the features secret 'cause Microsoft might copy them". How can you say that Microsoft have been years creating Vista, but that you're worried they'll copy and implement Leopard's features in a matter of months? It's contradictory. Not only that but some of the features must be more evolutionary than revolutionary, and there's no strategic reason to conceal them. For example, improvements in Address Book or Automator.

It seems to me that the 'scared of copying' reason avoided saying the other features just weren't ready. But then you have to wonder what Apple've been doing the last 18 mths. Hundreds of engineers can't have been plugging away making Leopard compatible with Intel's chips (Tiger mostly did this quite a while ago), or making the whole stack 64-bit. While these are significant tasks, could it really have taken 18 months to do that and come up with the 10 features we saw? Maybe there is more to the "Top Secret" claim, much more than the previous years claims about Panther's and Tiger's undisclosed features. We'll just have to wait and see.
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