Episode BritishMac050
NEWS
Headines
New OS X Features

The Ten New Features in Leopard
 
1: An all new Desktop featuring a revised Dock, which places icons on a translucent platform in 3D style perspective. Looks great and sets the Dock away from the background, even if its a busy photo.
 
Stacks are smart folders in the Dock. When selected, they display their contents by fanning out icons or presenting a grid of items.
 
Apple includes one stack by default: downloads. Everything that gets downloaded is popped into a folder for easy discovery, rather than thrown on a messy desktop. The menu bar also looks translucent, but it was hard to see up close. Jobs made a comment that the desktop adapts to the wallpaper background a user chooses.
 
2: the new Finder, which looks like iTunes, much as I anticipated in [How to Fix the Finder 3: Prettier]
Search for recent items.
File shares are discovered via Bonjour just like iTunes’ shared playlists.
Coverflow files and folders as a Finder view, which look great!

 
3: QuickLook Preview files without opening applications, even from the Coverflow view in the new Finder. Click on an icon and you get the appropriate controls: forward and back for a presentation, movie controls for a video, etc. The view can also be enlarged, or even brought full screen against a black background.
 

 
4: 64-bit top to bottom, from Unix to Cocoa. Jobs says Apple will bring 64 bit mainstream first in the PC world. Uses a "Route 64" freeway logo. There will be no 32-bit version of Leopard, as there is with Windows. Developers are guaranteed that 64-bit apps will run on every Mac running Leopard, unlike Windows, which delivers a catch-22 problem of scant 64-apps and a separate 64-bit OS.
 
Jobs points out that 64-bit apps apply to not just scientific markets, but also graphic arts and animation. He previews an extremely-high resolution photo being color corrected in real time, in both a 32 and 64 bit app. The 32 bit version struggles to keep up, as it must read to disk repeatedly. The 64-bit version can hold the entire image in memory at once.
 
5 Core Animation - Apple brings in hardware acceleration and makes it easy to set up complex visualzations of layers of items. Demos a searchable grid of playing videos, similar to the Apple TV intro video. Types in search terms and tagged videos pop out of the grid and into a Dock/Coverflow selection for viewing.
 

 
6: Boot Camp. Over 2.5 million downloads of the existing beta. Will be built-in on Leopard of course, including the Windows drivers, and won't require burning a separate CD. Runs both XP and Vista. Jobs says to use Boot Camp for "complete compatibility,” and describes it as a complementary product to Parallels and VMWare, which Apple is happy to support as “3 great ways to run Windows apps on a Mac.”
 
7: Spaces virtual desktops, demos the same as those presented earlier.
 
8: Dashboard now has over 3000 widgets. A new Movie times widget will appear in Leopard to search by movie or theater, just like the old Sherlock. It also lets users buy fandango tickets and watch previews. Webclip demoed; grabs a div section of a web page in Safari and makes a portion of a web page into a live, updating widget. Mentions the Dashcode tool for developing widgets.
 
 
9: iChat. Jobs says so many people use video conferencing in “heartwarming ways.” Leopard will introduce better audio quality from the new AAC low delay codec, as well as Photo Booth effects, backdrops, tabbed chats, and iChat Theater, which allows users to interactively share any documents that support QuickLook viewing.
 
Phil Schiller demoed a variety of new effects, which not only allow the user to put video behind them in a green screen fashion, but also allow the user to apply affects to their own image. The coolest was a hologram effect, which makes the person appear a glitching, translucent blue image over the background just like Obi Wan in R2D2’s message to Princess Lea Star Wars.
 
Another effect was putting the users mouth over an alpha hole in another’s picture, creating a talking mouth on a static image in the manner used by Conan O’Brien. Schiller demonstrated talking through the face of George Washington and then Steve Ballmer. Jobs joked that it was the only way they could get Ballmer into a keynote.
 
 
10: Time Machine. Jobs says few people automatically back anything up, and that Apple is working to “solve backups in such a simple way that people actually use it.” Time MAchine, of course, automatically backs up everything to a local USB or Firewire HD, or to a network server such as a shared disk on Airport Extreme. Search back in time using Spotlight, preview using QuickLook. Restore one click, or even restore an entire Mac.
WWDC: Analysts mixed optimism at Apple futures
Target prices stay steady as analyst predict bumper Apple year
Jonny Evans

Initial analyst reactions to Apple CEO Steve Jobs' WWDC 2007 keynote speech are rolling in, and while some articulate disappointment in the short term, their Apple target prices remain strong.
Strategy call: Safari for Windows

Perhaps most disappointed is American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu, who called the keynote "somewhat underwhelming,". Wu waxed cautious warning, "at the same time I believe Jobs made key announcements in advancing Apple's platforms."
Despite his disappointment, Wu chose to maintain his buy rating on the stock, citing a $145 target price. He praised certain keynote announcements, including the unified user interface and introduction of Cover Flow navigation, though he called Apple's move to permit web-based iPhone app development, "a compromise".
 
Wu calls the introduction of Safari for Windows, "a strategic and smart move to give Windows users a closer taste of the Mac experience, that should ultimately attract more switchers."
Mac to become games platform
Finally, the analyst noted a push for the development of the Mac as a games platform with an announced link-up with Electronic Arts and id Software. "We find this development significant as the world's largest game developer is once again committing to the Mac platform. We believe other game developers could follow," he said.
UBS Investment analyst, Ben Reitzes also noted this, saying: "Apple currently is far behind Windows in terms of gaming capabilities. Now that Apple is using Intel processors and gaining share, it seems that this gap is set to narrow a little bit."
Leopard to sell faster than Tiger
On strength of WWDC, Mac sales seem set to take a boost, according to Reitzes. He upped his Apple stock target price to a generous $160 per share, predicting that Leopard's launch would generate over 50 per cent growth in the company's software segment, year-on-year. He anticipates Leopard adoption will proceed at a faster rate than that of Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger'.
Also on the Mac, Morningstar analyst Rod Bare forecast that Apple's Mac sales would average 20 per cent growth per year for the next five years.
In a short note to clients, Jonathan Hoopes at ThinkEquity Partners chose to maintain his $130 target price on Apple stock, but downgraded his rating to "Accumulate".
He also noted the Safari connection: "With Safari available on Windows PCs, the rest of the world has opportunity to experience more Apple goodness," he said. "This move should sustain, if not accelerate (albeit longer term), Apple's Mac share gains which has been the primary premise for our positive investment thesis for Apple shares," he added.
iPhone in focuse
On iPhone, he observed: "Apple's opening the iPhone Safari browser platform to third-party developers should further energize the Mac developer ecosystem and should boost iPhone's competitiveness."
Reitzes also predicts new iPods this autumn, and stressed the importance of the release of Safari for Windows.
Analysts at Morningstar, Caris & Co. and Piper Jaffray also anticipate Apple will sell in excess of 15 million (and perhaps as many as 26 million) iPhones next year.
Analysts at Caris & Company raised their Apple target price from $115 to $140 on strength of their analysis, whiile the analysts at JMP Securities raised their Apple target price from $112 to $125.
No leaking from the top
Blackfriars Communications analyst Carl Howe thinks Apple may be playing with public perception. He believes that the news Apple didn't share at WWDC is perhaps equally important to what it did.
Howe anticipates that Apple will confirm new and hitherto undisclosed features in OS X 10.5 before it ships in October, speculating that announcements regarding such features are being held back until closer to the actual shipping date. This could explain why developers continue to be tied to a strict non-disclosure agreement (NDA) as they pick up their copies of the OS at WWDC.
Leopard features:

Finder
iTunes style navigation.
Coverflow view
.mac VPN encrypted tunnel
QuickLook - look inside document with multipage documents

Desktop
Semi-transparent menu bar
Mirrored floor to 3D style Dock
Stacks - fan out or grid view
    Wiki Definition: Stack (data structure), a temporary data structure based on Last in, First out (LIFO)
    Download Stack
    Can contain Documents or Applications

Spaces
eg    Work
    Play Move
Windows from one Space to Another

Time Machine
Automatic second copy of all your files
Search for files via timeline
Use Quick look to make sure you've got the right file

Mail
Stationary - HTML templates for Email
Intergrated -
Address or/& Phone Numbers: Create new contact or add to Contact
Dates: Create new iCal event
Notes in Mail
Create Todo from mail or notes

iCal
    iCal sports a new look that takes a few cues from Leopard itself: clean, uncluttered, and functional. Select your calendars from the iTunes-style sidebar.

TOGETHER WITH NEW OSX SERVER

    With the event drop box, you can add documents, pictures, video — anything you want other meeting attendees to see — by dragging them into an event.
    Auto Pick feature to find the best time for everyone

Quick improvements:
Total 64bit
Bootcamp
iChat
    Leopard iChat with iChat Theater, letting users present photos, presentations, videos and files in a video conference; Photo Booth effects, enabling users to transform their iChat video in real time with fun distortion and color effects; and video backdrops that allow users to choose any photo or video that makes them appear to be anywhere in the world, or out of it;
Parental Controls
Photo Booth for all of us
Dashboard
    Web Clip, bringing anything that a user wants from a web page to Dashboard as a live widget
Leopard Server Features

iCal Server (see above)
Wiki Server
Collaborate and communicate through their own wiki-powered intranet website complete with group calendar, blog, and mailing list.
Directory
The Directory application provides access to shared information about people, groups, locations, and resources within your organization. You can share contacts, set up group services, find shared equipment, and more.
Spotlight Server
Spotlight Server is the fastest way ever to search for and find content on servers in your network. Designed for workgroups with shared documents, projects, and files, it delivers lightning-fast search results for content stored on mounted network volumes.
Podcast Producer
Podcast Producer is a complete, end-to-end solution for encoding, publishing, and distributing high-quality podcasts. Ideal for employee training, university lectures — or whatever audio or video podcasts your organization requires — Podcast Producer simplifies the process of recording content, encoding, and publishing podcasts for playback in iTunes and on iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV.

Start and stop.
Leopard includes the new Podcast Capture application for capturing and uploading content to Podcast Producer. Podcast Capture makes it easy to capture high-quality audio and video from local and remote cameras, record screen captures, and upload existing content into Podcast Producer for encoding and redistribution.

Recording a podcast is a snap. Simply launch Podcast Capture, log in to Podcast Producer, and select the type of podcast you’d like to record — audio only, video with audio, screen capture with audio — then click Start. When finished recording, click Stop. Or publish an existing QuickTime media file. That's it.

Podcast Capture records audio and video from a wide range of devices, including digital video cameras connected via FireWire, USB microphones, and iSight cameras.

It’s automatic.
As soon as recording is completed, the file is automatically uploaded to Podcast Producer for processing. Podcast Producer utilizes the power of Xgrid to encode content into multiple formats such as H.264 and MPEG-4 for playback on a Mac, PC, iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV.

Podcast Producer includes a dozen built-in workflows to automate publishing of podcasts to blogs, iTunes, iTunes U, or even multimedia-enabled cell phones over high-speed wireless networks using QuickTime Streaming Server. Workflows include the ability to archive recordings, applying custom Quartz Composer compositions with titles and watermarks, add opening and closing videos, notify the iTunes Podcast Directory of the new episode, and send out an announcement email.

Podcast Producer uses Xgrid distributed processing technology for large-scale podcast productions — encoding tasks are automatically distributed to other servers. All that is required is another server running Podcast Producer and a shared file system such as Xsan or NFS.
Safari On Windows
Jobs then introduced a new port of Safari 3.0 for Windows XP and Vista. Apple is now offering Safari 3.0 with draggable tabs and twice the speed of IE 7, in a beta version for both Tiger and Windows. It will be offered in Leopard, XP, and Vista versions.
Safari for Windows hit by bugs
Security researchers have found as many as 18 bugs in Safari 3.0, just one day after its release.
Robert McMillan

Security researchers have jumped on Apple's Safari browser beta, digging up as many as 18 bugs in the software within one day of its release.
Researchers Aviv Raff, David Maynor and Thor Larholm all reported flaws in the browser, shortly after it was made available on Monday. Maynor alone said he'd discovered six bugs, including two that could be used to run unauthorized software on a victim's PC.

Safari 3.0 is getting more attention because Apple has made a Windows version of the software available for the first time. Now the software can be downloaded by a much larger group of testers.
Another researcher, Tom Ferris, said his vulnerability testing "fuzzer" software turned up ten flaws in the browser in just five minutes.
He had harsh words for Apple's security team. "That's horrible, and just goes to show that they took no initiative to fuzz their own software," he said Tuesday in an email interview.
Apple itself had little to say about all of the bug-finding. "We take security very seriously and we're investigating these reports," an Apple spokesman told IDG News Service before declining to comment further.
Although Safari 3.0 is beta code, and expected to include bugs, Ferris said that Apple's team should have tested it more carefully before making it available to such a large group of testers. "In order to have a useful beta test of a browser people need to use it in the real world, which is ultimately exposing them to malware," he said.
Ferris and other researchers were also eager to deflate Apple's claim that, "Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one," a statement that Raff called "pathetic".
The Safari vulnerabilities were widely reported Tuesday, but according to Matthew Baker, too much was made of the issue. "Reporting as news that a beta program has bugs seems like reporting that there's rain in Seattle," he wrote via email.
"The beta version is being held to the standard that a Gold Master copy should," said Baker, a Mac user who works as a customer service representative with First Utah Bank in Salt Lake City Utah. "It just seems to me that some people feel some sort of pleasure in reporting issues with Apple's software."
Firefox-developer Mozilla leaders aren't happy at some of the statements made by Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week when he announced Safari for Windows.
An angry rebuke on the blog of Mozilla chief operating officer, John Lilly, castigates Jobs for back-dated thinking, and for the Apple co-founder's seeming determination to transform the browser market into one that's dominated by just two companies - Microsoft and Apple.

Lilly writes: "Every so often though, as inspired as he (Jobs) is, he says something that betrays at best a blurry view of the real world, at worst an explicit intent to bring more of the world under direct control from Cupertino, and that happened Monday."
The COO accuses Apple and the CEO of dreaming of transforming the browser market into a two party state, in which the web experience is effectively controlled by the world's two largest software vendors.
He slates this strategy as "not really being how the world is", pointing to the rise of community-based websites and a move away from centrist monopoly, duopoly and cartel dominance across many industries.
As far as Lilly is concerned, such limited corporate dominance is eventually bad for innnovation, self-determination and, ultimately, the consumer experience.
Despite his reservations, Lilly welcomes the debut of Safari on Windows, arguing that a new browser should boost web diversity.
But his final remarks may betray big battle to come: "This world view that Steve (Jobs) gave a glimpse into betrays their thinking: it’s out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-web thinking. And it’s not good for the web. Which is sort of moot, I think, because I don’t think this two-party world will really come to be."
Apple has confirmed it shipped over one million copies of Safari for Windows within 48-hours of releasing the free public beta software.
The inventor of the world wide web has been awarded the Order of Merit, one of the UK's most prestigious honours.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee joins an elite group who have received the honour from the Queen for exceptional contributions in arts, sciences and other areas.
The British academic invented the web's address system and layout in Switzerland in 1991, ultimately revolutionising global communication.
Previously, he was named Greatest Briton at a ceremony in 2004.
Information sharing
Sir Tim was given the honour along with the President of the Royal Society, Lord Rees of Ludlow, and the Rt Rev Lord Eames, ex-Anglican Primate of All Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh.
In 1991, Sir Tim came up with a system to organise, link and browse pages on the net.
He created his hypertext program while he was at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. The code he crafted made it far easier for scientists to share their research and information across a fledgling computer network.
He is now director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where he is based as an academic.
The Order of Merit is in the Queen's personal gift, meaning that ministerial advice is not needed.
It is restricted to 24 living members, who are entitled to use the initials OM after their name.
Past recipients have included Florence Nightingale, Sir Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Sir Edward Elgar, Mother Teresa and Baroness Thatcher.
Quick News
New www.apple.com website

New Search 'spotlight' style
QUick time seems to have disappered
New Mac section covers .Mac, OSX
.Mac sports this new look
And finally
Microsoft to reflect UK dialects

A Microsoft project to create downloadable dictionaries to reflect the UK's rich local dialect heritage is drawing to a close.
Users around the UK have been asked to submit their favourite regional dialect words.
The software giant said it has had thousands of responses so far.
It said that the local dialect dictionaries - which will work with Microsoft Office - will be available for free download in July.
The project was spawned by Microsoft Australia which last year drew up its own dictionary to reflect particular Australian slang.
Microsoft UK was keen to bring the project to Britain, which is home to hundreds of regional dialects and words unique to specific areas.
Pass the stotty cake

"It's the diversity of Britain's dialects that has led us to develop the new dictionaries. So in future, your Microsoft Outlook will be able to recognise e-mails where you ask your 'marra' to get you a 'buttie' instead of inserting red lines beneath all the unfamiliar words," said Microsoft Office 2007 product manager Darren Strange.
"We wanted to give everyone the chance to adapt and personalise their software, and at the same time recognise the diversity of dialects we use here in the UK that makes us completely different to any other country in the world."
Microsoft is now in the process of sifting through the thousands of responses with a view to compiling dictionaries specific to certain areas.
Microsoft is being helped in its task by the British Library.
Jonathan Robinson, curator of English accents and dialects at The British Library said: "Britain has a rich heritage of different accents and dialects and, contrary to popular opinion, there is still a great deal of lexical diversity across the UK - where else would you find the words 'cob', 'batch', 'bun', 'barm cake', 'stotty cake', 'scuffler' and 'bread cake', all meaning bread roll?"
Some areas such as Devon, Yorkshire and Lancashire have been well represented in the project while others, such as Cambridge, have so far elicited few entries, according to Alison Boswell, who is working on the project.
Microsoft has extended its original end-of-May deadline, giving people one extra week to submit words, said Ms Boswell.
Those wishing to contribute should send their entries to dialect@microsoft.com
British Icon Special!