[quote author=“Drachen”]I actually find it kind of underwhelming. I’m skeptical of the utility of dashboard, basically it seems like yet another desktop to manage, but one filled with just applets. I love the idea of easy-to-make and easy-to-mod applets, but as you said Konfabulator and Samurize have been doing this for a while. Turning an applet around to configure it is ridiculous. I didn’t like it with Sun’s 3D desktop and I don’t like it here. Spotlight is kind of cool, but it’s the desktop equivalent of dogpile.com, not WinFS. WinFS is an entirely different ball of wax where the the file system itself is a relational database. This just looks like an aggregation of a bunch of different searches.
The only interesting feature of this release to me seems the improved kernel, better UNIX support and ACL support.
True true. The whole turning an applet over to access it’s settings is just cute and more of an eye candy kind of feature. It’s really not great user interface in my mind. It’s just an excuse to use 3D windows.
And you’re right, it’s not even close to the kind technology in WinFS but on the surface, your common person probably won’t understand the difference. Apple will spin it so it looks like the same thing even though WinFS is ultimately far more powerful in theory.
I’m not sold on the dashboard thing. It looks like cute technology again that adds yet another different interface to the operating system.
I like the Core Image technology. Of course, the PC side has been working on this but Apple will get bragging rights to say they’re the first to have it on the desktop. That’s the one benefit of being a relatively closed system…Apple has so much control and doesn’t have to worry about many different types of configurations where they can work on this stuff and only need to test on only hundreds of different configurations (if even that).
The iChat AV stuff is blah. I like that they upgraded the video codec to the latest standard but the interface is gimicky. I don’t want to see distorted versions of people’s faces…I assume there’s an option to see the other webcams not at an angle.
At any rate, it’s nice to see Apple is still refining OS X. Apart from the new eye candy, it looks like it’s continuing to get more solid on the back end. Prior to OS X Panther, I felt OS X was unfinished software. Panther changed my mind in that respect so it’s nice to see progress. Windows users still have a ways to wait but it should be worth the wait…maybe not for everything they have slated but some of the forthcoming changes will be welcome. In the meantime we can customize our desktops to our hearts content. :wink:
