Monday, June 11, 2007

OS X Leopard: All is forgiven

Ok, so an out-of-cycle release of Safari is impressive, and a Windows version is astounding. Integrated GGears-style iPhone development -- perfect and wonderful. New Finder - at last, long needed. 64 bit - fine. A viewer architecture -- very good if it lets us finally view PowerPoint files [1] on OS X. Spotlight with Boolean operators? Duh, yes. Remote file access and/or synchronization via .mac - nice.

All more than sufficient to make me very happy to fork over $130 to Apple and some larger amount for family .Mac services. Heck, one or two of 'em would suffice. I wasn't expecting Jobs to address my longstanding whine anyway. I shed a few tears and turned to my work.

Then Andrew burst into my office and ripped the keyboard from my hands. His eagle eyes had spotted a small button in the Finder demo that nobody had commented on, a button that led him to this fragment on Apple's new Leopard page:

Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Features - Finder

... With shared computers automatically displayed in the sidebar, it’s far easier to find or access files on any computer in your house, whether Mac or PC. All it takes is a click. But here’s where things get really interesting. By clicking on a connected Mac, you can see and control that computer (if authorized, of course) as if you were sitting in front of it. You can even search all the computers in the house to find what you're looking for...

So the very biggest "one more thing" is so big it didn't even merit a mention. This is what will allow Apple to sell the next, much more ambitious, version of Apple TV.

I'm a happy man today.

[1] Listening to the video there's no PPT support - just word and excel. Shame. Maybe later.

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