Saturday, June 21, 2003 |
11:59 - Sew up that damn cat bag!
http://www.deskmod.com/panther/
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Paul sends me this set of images (and related Slashdot thread) purportedly of some new features of OS X.3, "Panther", which we'll be seeing for real on Monday.
I'm, uh, skeptical. Some of these pictures look rather unpolished, somehow, and "un-Apple" in style, though that can be attributed to two things: 1) These are early, in-development snapshots; and 2) Apple's "style" is changing quite dramatically for 10.3, which doesn't really surprise me. No more pin-stripes in the title bars, and they're much less pronounced elsewhere. (So long, in other words, to the stylistic nod to OS 9 and earlier, which is what the pin-stripes were.) But a little more odd, to me, is the decidedly Windows XP-like tone to a lot of stuff. The new "Video" button in the iChat screenshot, for instance, is green and bulgy, just like in XP. The disk-inspector thingy ("Xdrive") looks garbled and confusing in layout (what's it supposed to be, anyway?), and what's up with the "About Finder" window with its tagline of The Macintosh Desktop Experience? What, Mac OS XP? Is that it?
But aside from that, the new features look cool. Labels are back-- whoopeeee! Just in time, too-- I'm about to need labels a whole lot now. Folder actions! A "Security" system preference! Neato revamped Activity Monitor. But the big thing seems to be this "Exposé" feature; I can't quite figure out what it does (GIR: Whatsit doooo? Whatsit doooooo?) "Exposé allows you to temporarily see all of your open windows at once, so you can easily click on any window to bring it to the front." Um... yay! I think! From the look of it, it takes all your overlapping open windows and Quartz-shrinks them all so they can tile onto your desktop; they're all a perfect scaled-down image of their former selves, and you can then grab one with a click. Rather neat. I'm sure it'll make great eye-candy in the demo, too.
Who knows what else lurks in those other subtly redesigned and reorganized System Preferences... I guess we'll find out on Monday. If this is a hoax, it's a pretty ballsy one to pull two days before the truth comes out.
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