(Don't) Believe The Hype

Oct 16, 2007 · 2 minute read

You know, I’m a black turtle-necker sweater away from being an Apple fanatic, and yes, the news today that MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) is coming out in a few weeks is exciting, but I’m starting to think that it’s going to be a bit of a disappointment.

Apple are going out of their way to emphasise the 300 (insert Sparta joke here. Or perhaps not) new features of the operating system, but, eh, most of them aren't all that interesting. Woo! Mail can now use hideous stationary! iCal probably doesn't completely suck! 'Descriptive Error Messages' in AppleScript!

Even some of the new features that I was looking forward to, like Time Machine, now seem a bit limited. Oh sure, I have a large external disk sitting around that I can convert to HFS+ and render it unusable to all other computer systems (except for Linux, of course, but even there, HFS+ support wasn't perfect last time I checked). Also, given that ZFS is looming on the horizon, surely this is going to be a bit of a problem?

Still, it's not all bad. Spaces looks rather useful, and Xcode continues to impress (Ruby and Python are now first-class citizens in Cocoa, so I might have a little dabble!). But it's more of a gradual advance rather than a revolution.

Maybe they've fixed the Finder, though…