I bumped into a coworker on the walk in from the parking lot this morning and fortunately for me he mentioned that an Apple Product Manager would be at the lab today to give a sales pitch tech talk about Leopard. I was somehow oblivious to this, having not seen any of the posters around the lab nor seen the big advertisement on the intranet homepage. But I went down anyways just to see what the excitement was about.

The presenter basically walked through the major features of the 300+ new features in Leopard, and provided demos of the Wow factor UI features. Although I had installed it last week, I haven’t had time to play around with Leopard much. Actually the real reason is that I have no reason to use my laptop so it’s just sitting there with Leopard installed. So it was nice to see that you can actually use Spaces and Stacks, and that people do use RSS feeds in Mail.app even though they didn’t design scalability into that feature.

What strikes me as funny with the whole Leopard thing is that Apple still tries so hard to poke fun at Microsoft. You’ve probably seen the usual stuff with Apple only selling one “Ultimate” version of Leopard, or the Windows blue screen as the representation of a Windows box on the network. But there’s also a lot of subtle low-blows too. Vista embellished their UI elements so that they take up more screen room, while Leopard has really slimmed down their windows to maximize screen space. The best one is how Vista ships with beautiful wallpaper from, well, vistas around the world. Well Leopard’s bigger and better and blew that away by using a space motif.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: apple, geeky, microsoft, working