The Hickensian

∞ pauldwaite said 1312 days ago:

Time Machine could be pretty cool, but the hard drive space implications terrify me, considering the issues I’ve had with my 80 GB PowerBook hard drive. The fact that Apple controls the operating system and the hardware, and makes its money primarily from the latter, does seem to result in them writing software that demands new hardware.

I’m not entirely clear on how Mail’s to-dos differ from the ones iCal has at the moment. I’m hoping iCal loses brushed metal before Leopard goes on sale.

∞ Jon Hicks said 1312 days ago:

“Time Machine could be pretty cool, but the hard drive space implications terrify me”

Exactly. My Powerbook has a ‘sleep image’ thats 2gb, I wonder how they’re going to get around the space issue?

“When I look at that interface, some cheesy sci-fi music plays in my head. :)”

Yes! Especially some Star Wars ripoff done on an old Casio keyboard!

∞ Si said 1312 days ago:

It’s a shame that they were so limited by having to keep so much secret (damn you, Redmond!) Without those worries I think we’d have been able to see Safari and a lot more. I’m willing to bet that there’s a LOT of fancy stuff coming, we just saw the things MS can’t copy/already have copied.

Needless to say my Power Mac is feeling a little bit envious of the Mac Pro.

∞ Jason Rutherford said 1312 days ago:

I wouldn’t be surprised if iCal gets a unified makeover before it’s all said and done. There’s still a long time before this thing ships and it seems like Apple is staying away from showing too much too early.

∞ Bobby Andersen said 1312 days ago:

I couldn’t agree more about the Time Machine interface. It’s futuristic, according the the 1980’s idea of futuristic computing interfaces…

I do like the the way the windows are layed out, though. It’s just the vortext that gets me.

∞ paul haine said 1312 days ago:

I remember using virtual desktops back in 1999 on my Windows system thanks to Litestep. Ah, those were the days…

I’m quite excited about Leopard as it’s my first OSX upgrade since I bought my mac. So, woo.

∞ Jon Hicks said 1312 days ago:

Note to Chris: What Browser/platform are you on?

∞ pauldwaite said 1312 days ago:

@ YoungHusband

Time Machine only backs up what changes, all the while maintaining a comprehensive layout of your system.

I wouldn’t say that avoids it. Even if they’re ultra clever and literally only store only the data that’s no longer there (as opposed to a copy of the file), that’s still going to increase every time you save a text file. Or edit a photo. And how about files you delete? Can I easily purge 2 GB EyeTV recordings once I’m done with them and their Time Machine back-ups?

∞ Arjan Terol said 1312 days ago:

My 2 cents: Leopard will ship with new iLife and iWork versions, and a new and improved Finder (I hope, because I think thats why there is no movieclip on Spotlight).

∞ Bob said 1312 days ago:

Time Machine: cheesy, yes. But you know something, your grand mother would understand how to use it. I think that gets lost a lot when designers talk GUI and such. Apple has to make something that that rocket geek at NASA can use, but your 87 year old grand dad can work, too.

∞ Han said 1312 days ago:

not being very mac savvy (yet – just working out when I should buy the power book, dont want it exploding on me!) I can’t really comment much, but that time machine feature would be perfect for me.

And the spaces! OC heaven!

∞ Ben Ward said 1312 days ago:

Can’t say I was blown away by the announcements. Everything looked nice (although I fear those new Templates in Mail.app are going to open a world of iWeb pain to email) and as far as another evolutionary update to OSX goes, it’s good work.

The secret stuff is interesting though. The choice to keep it secret too. I really do hope that a proper visual refresh (or rather, unification) is coming but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they save that til nearly launch, to have the wow factor translate into sales too. You only have to look at how bored people are with the Vista look to appreciate that people get accustomed to window dressing very quickly these days. Of course, they could reveal the visual updates nearer the time of Vistas release, if they’re feeling especially confident.

One thing that didn’t get mentioned but is noticeable in the new Mail.app screenshots is RSS. Now, one thing that Vista (or rather, the IE7 platform) does have right is the unified feeds service. Leopard is having a unified tasks system (Mail.app and iCal integrate), but will they sort out the impending doom of Feed reading? iTunes reads feeds, iPhoto reads feeds, Safari and now Mail read feeds, plus an external feed reader of choice. Would be much better to have a central feed location that iTunes/Photo could then query for appropriate items (containing enclosures of particular media types), rather than subscribing to different feeds using 3 different clients.

They’ve given a fair bit to discuss, but I came out hoping that they’re holding off some big things.

∞ Alexis Gallisá said 1312 days ago:

Well in regards to Spaces, I hope that at the very least Apple can take the multiple desktop functionality and really make it work as nice as it looks like in their QT demo. My biggest complaint about Virtue is that even though I download each and every beta and try it again each time(deleting my prefs and cache of course), its never really worked consistently for me. I’ll try and bind applications to desktops but somehow they show up on others, and sometimes clicking on the app in the dock does not switch to the right desktop (especially true with the Finder). The expose feature that Spaces has seems like it might actually add to Expose in a really good way.

∞ Steve Marshall said 1312 days ago:

Time Machine isn’t all that innovative, and doesn’t put Apple as far ahead as they’d like to think, in terms of pure technology… Windows XP and Server 2003 both have ‘Volume Shadow Copy’ which, for those that know how to use it, does everything Time Machine does. Yes, I realise that 95% of users don’t know how to use it, but it is there.

In Vista, however, Microsoft is improving on its ease of use . Ok, so it’s not as shiny and special an interface as that of Time Machine, but it does the same job.

∞ Lard said 1312 days ago:

The first thing I thought when I saw that Time Machine interface was of an 80’s Pop Video or the intro to Top of the Pops in the 70’s.

I’m hoping they make it something you can modify in the prefences.

∞ Nev said 1312 days ago:

pauldwaite – The Time Machine Preview mentions that you can select items that you’d rather not back up, which could include your 2Gb files. No mention of whether you can choose to backup a file while you still need it and then later remove it completely though.

I noticed in the sidebar on that page that you can switch the disk that the backups are stored to. For a minute I was worried that it might be local backups only – not much good if your internal disk dies.

∞ Matt Ramos said 1311 days ago:

Backups like this are not meant to be backed up on your own harddrive, what would be the point? In his keynote it was stated that you can backup on any external drive or server in your workplace. I’m sure you’d also be able to backup over VPN also, but it would be slow.

What’s also good is that if something happens to the computer and you need to get it replaced, you can just hit a button have the harddrive restored to it’s exact state from the last backup. It’s kind of like the volume shadow copy the entire world has been making fun of for the past few months.

∞ Jon Hicks said 1311 days ago:

Accessing that information from an external drive sounds slow to me, but anyway, it was the interface I was laughing at.

∞ matthew said 1311 days ago:

I doubt that will be the final interface for Time Machine, it looks like a quick n dirty mock up to me – but only his Steveness truly knows I guess.

I quite like the look of Spaces as I dont really find any of the current crop of virtual desktop apps particularly useable or useful – despite that I DO enjoy slaping my MacBook Pro from time to time.

∞ Geert Leyseele said 1311 days ago:

Accessing information from an external drive Jon is not slow at all. We do that everyday at the office. All work is stored on HD’s of an Xserve and I open all big PSD files like that and don’t notice any slowdown. Of course if you buy the slowest drive out there results will be slow, but with a 7200RPM disk you shoudn’t notice any difference with your internal HD. Last time I checked Retrospect doing a backup to an external 7200RPM HD it was writing 360MB of data away per minute.

∞ penar said 1311 days ago:

the cursor problem also takes place on ff 1.5.0.6 in a mac environment. just fyi.

∞ luxuryluke said 1310 days ago:

Great simplified writeup from your own personal style of working angle, or something.
A breath of fresh air.

∞ Flo Wagner said 1310 days ago:

I must admit that the more often I look at the Time Machine interface the less terrible it appears to me. Seems just a matter of getting used to it… Or it’s some weird Apple voodoo…

Regarding the technical side of Time Machine: Macworld put an interesting article about it online and I added some thoughts of my own.

∞ mr. buyot said 1306 days ago:

time machine = cvs snapshots goes to space…(star trek theme on the background)

∞ Richard said 1304 days ago:

That wasn’t actually the Leopard interface – that remains top secret. Things like the ‘next revision of Aqua’ won’t be shown to us until later, much later.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed for the death of brushed metal :-D

∞ Mica said 1303 days ago:

if you want a unified gui, look at uno I was a little if-y about installing it at first, but i did it anyway and now there is no more of that terrible brushed metal on my system. iChat looks great, as does safari. :P it’s be nice if they fixed it so uno wasn’t necessary, but oh well. i’m still waiting for growl to become part of os x by default :D

∞ Glenn Wolsey said 1303 days ago:

I personally cant wait to use the new Mail and get myself organized from within one application.