Snow Leopard screenshots show interface tweaks
appleinsider.com
appleinsider.com
Meh. OS 9 and earlier had "Put Away" which did this and more. It also ejected drives, dismounted network volumes, and allowed the user the temporarily store files pulled out of folders on the desktop. You know, in line with the original metaphor of user at a desk the user manipulated documents and folders on.
(Yes, I'm still grumpy from how Apple screwed up the "spatial" nature of the original Finder.)
I haven't noticed recently because now I use Quicksilver to browse everything, and it's incredibly more efficient. I wish Apple would just make Quicksilver a built-in feature of their OS.
I sure hope so because I see no reason to get it with, basically, only those changes.
The smart move isn't expansion. Apple covers more space than any other company and any other out-of-the-box operating system. Now they're ahead, and they can spend time working on the little details, emphasizing perfectionism. They can slim down and make things faster and more enjoyable. They could add more features, but right now why bother?
When you look at the things Snow Leopard is adding you get a good idea of Apple's plan. They're rumored to be making Quicktime Pro free, which means suddenly it becomes as powerful as Preview (which is an incredible, overlooked application). They're possibly adding support for other video codecs out-of-the-box, which means they're doing the one thing Quicktime ought to have done from the beginning.
Meanwhile, this new Stacks view gives them spatial navigation from the Dock with an Apple twist, which is excellent. I used a stack that used the list view for navigation and gave up on it because it was too ugly and didn't let me drag. Now, you can browse your computer with a single click on your Dock if you want to. That's excellent. It begins to provide an alternative to the Finder, and while it's not solving the real problems, it solves the main one of "let me get to my stuff quickly and attractively".
At the same time, they're refining their applications. iMovie gets the features that 08 lost. iPhoto increases its consumer focus. GarageBand's big new thing isn't the lessons but the refined interface, which has made it one of my favorite OS X applications. Pages gets fullscreen mode, Keynote gets themes, Numbers gets extensibility.
They've got a huge featureset. Now they can focus on making it all elegant and streamlined, even more so than it is now. I'm very excited for this release for that reason. I suspect it'll be a delight to use.
The big one I did know about is Grand Central, software that takes advantage of multi-cores. It is supposed to spread the load across the cores in your processor. That is the feature I am waiting for.
Building that now makes sense to me. I have a dual core processor that barely uses the second core. Plus my dual core will soon be on the low end of cores per processor.