Posts Tagged: leopard

Opinions — No Comments
14
Jan 09

Windows 7 = Snow Vista?

Now that the Windows 7 public beta is out, I’ve fired it up and taken it for a spin.

It strikes me that 7 is basically Microsoft’s answer to both Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads and a similar effort to Snow Leopard – the successor to 10.5 that Apple has announced.

Snow Leopard will purportedly contain no new features, instead focusing on improving the foundation of the OS and making under-the-hood performance improvements.

7 seems to be a similar effort: There are a few visual changes to the taskbar and start menu, but overall there is very much a “Vista 2.0″ feeling to it. However: unlike Snow Leopard – which has so far received mostly positive buzz, despite the lack of new features, I don’t expect Microsoft to attempt to market 7 as a “no features” release. Coming on the back of the poor Vista publicity it would be seen as admitting defeat.

Nonetheless, with 7 expected for a late 2009 / early 2010 release and Snow Leopard expected sometime within the same timeframe, it’ll be interesting to see the two “tidy-up” releases go head-to-head.

Mac — No Comments
4
Oct 08

OS X Curiosity: Clippings

Leopard is the 6th major OS X upgrade, and as such feels very refined and polished. Nearly every nook and cranny has been through a number of iterations and most features feel very well thought out.

Sometimes though, you’ll come across features or behaviours that leave you scratching your head. Today we’ll take a look at one OS feature that feels as though it was added with 10.0 and forgotten about ever since: Clippings.

Text Clippings

If you’ve ever selected a bit of text in Safari and dragged it to your Desktop, OS X will save it in a “Text Clipping” file. Double-clicking this file will open a small window displaying your text. That’s all you can actually do in that window though: You can’t select, drag or edit the text in any way.

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Mac / Opinions — No Comments
7
Jun 08

Waiting games: Automator

 Automator – which was introduced in 2005 as one of Tiger’s major new features – is a great concept, but unfortunately one that I think is let down by one minor flaw: speed (or more to the point: the lack of it).

For those of you who have never used it, the short explanation is that Automator is a tool to automate repetitive tasks. You don’t need any programming knowledge and instead create “Workflows” by visually arranging “actions” (e.g. you could create a workflow to convert, rename and upload a folder of photos).

Sounds like a brilliant idea, right? The basic premise actually works very well: Apple includes a lot of actions for common tasks and some 3rd party developers also include their own actions that allow you to integrate  their apps into your workflows

But there’s one caveat: On both of the Macbooks I regularly use, workflows can sometimes take as much as 10 – 15 seconds to launch. Continue reading →