The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

Two days late, two dollars short, but oh well. I still would be remiss if I didn’t finish my reactions to last Monday’s WWDC keynote, this time looking at the announcements made in the Mac realm.

MacBooks Refresh
Man, even six days later, I’m still trying to reconcile the name “MacBook Pro” with the 13″ label. Nevertheless, I’d say that Apple’s decision to make the 13″ aluminum MacBook a MacBook Pro is smart, and makes a lot more sense. Plus, it gives them an excuse to bring back FireWire (yay), make the backlit keyboard standard (yay), and really unify the whole lineup. And finally, the white MacBook can be the only “MacBook” again, rather than being listed on Apple’s site as the “MacBook White,” thus providing some more significant distinction between the “MacBook” and “MacBook Pro.” Not to mention that the latest refresh of the white MacBook actually made it faster than the aluminum MacBook at a cheaper price. And then Apple brought the prices of all of their laptops down, while bumping specs–again a smart move. So overall, can’t complain. Not that it matters to me, my 2 GHz white MacBook from April 2007 is still doing plenty well and I’ll stick with this thing until it drops. And unless I start doing more intensive tasks on here, that won’t be anytime soon.

Snow Leopard
Now the announcement of Snow Leopard was also quite nice to hear. Finally, Apple taking a break from new features and instead focusing on taming the oversized cat that is Mac OS X. I mean, for Pete’s sake, OS X takes up quite a bit of space on one’s hard drive! I would never have thought that I’d be fighting to keep enough free space on my MacBook’s 80 GB hard drive (my iBook had only 20 GB and with a little added elbow grease could run Tiger), but that’s what I’ve been doing this past week: trying to clear up drive space. Did you know that System 7 was the first Mac OS to require a hard drive for installation? And now look at where we are! So I dare say, the fact that upgrading will give you back 6 GB of hard drive space should be awesome enough right there to qualify for paying $29. Speaking of which, kudos to Apple for making this a $29 upgrade; I’m so looking forward to it. But as usual for Mac OS X releases, the features that I’m most excited for are the features buried in the “other new features” section, not the premiere features. (Spotlight? Dashboard? Time Machine? Stacks in the Dock? I hardly use ‘em.) So here’s my personal list of top features I’m looking forward to in Snow Leopard.

• More Reliable Disk Eject. A new Finder feature, Apple claims that Snow Leopard will be more reliable in stopping background processes that prevent you from ejecting external drives, and if it can’t eject, will let you know what program is hogging it up. Sounds great to me as someone who frequently can’t eject stuff for unknown reasons.
• More functional Stacks. Stacks were a big selling point to Leopard, but they really were a dumb way to get to only a limited number of items in a folder, compared to the scrollable lists you got pre-Leopard from right-clicking a folder in the Dock. Now the ability to scroll a stack and navigate through folders in an iPhone-like interface offers a much more convenient and rather pretty/stylized way to drill through folders to quickly launch the file I want.
• New Services Menu. Thanks to hearing from Macworld what Services are, they seem quite useful, but trying to navigate the Services menu is a messy proposition. I look forward to Snow Leopard filtering out the services that actually are useful, and making them more accessible via the contextual menus, I look forward to taking advantage of them. Oh, and Automator can write services as well, which sounds even cooler.
• AirPort menu signal strength. Now the signal strength will be displayed next to each network in the AirPort menu, which will make my difficulties in trying to find some good free wifi when I’m on the move much easier. Or at least help me not to waste as much time trying to fulfill that idea.
• QuickTime X. Not only is it free, have a cool interface, and incorporates a “lite” iMovie in its editing/trimming/sharing capabilities, but it also has its own screen recorder, which I’m sure will be easier to figure out than any of the other screen recording apps out there. I use iShowU (with a little difficulty), and have never figured out how to use Snapz Pro X, so I’m looking forward to what QuickTime X delivers. Now if only the new logo didn’t look so weird.
• Google/Yahoo! Support in iCal. Who needs BusySync or Spanning Sync? iCal promises to let you just enter your password to Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar, and it will take care of the rest!
• “Multi-touch gestures in older Mac models.” I don’t know if this means that all Macs with scrolling trackpads will get gestures (like my MacBook), or just the newer ones with “multi-touch trackpads,” the language here is confusing. Still, if my MacBook gets to have gestures, that will be very cool.
• Core Location. Like the iPod touch, OS X will use Skyhook Wireless to figure out where you are, and it can reset your timezone automatically using that. As someone preparing to do lots of traveling between the Pacific and Eastern timezones, that sounds good to me! And I’m sure that it could open the door to some future Core Location-based Mac applications. After all, why should the iPhone get all of the fun?

It’s too bad we have to wait another three months until Snow Leopard is out, but I’m very excited for the update! Let the countdown begin…