Anticipating Leopard

Apple has a unique problem, Tiger is too good. How is that a problem you ask?  Simple, how do you climb higher when you are already at the top of the mountain? How do you make the best OS in the world better?

Ask your self this question, “what more do I want in an operating system?”

Hard question isn’t it?

Forget minor bugs, tweaks and glitches I am talking about major upgrades. Expose, SpotLight, Core Image, Dashboard, Automater, RSS, Quicktime 7, etc. After looking at that list one might ask, “what is left?”

Let’s look at what might be in OS X 10.5 shall we?

Quicktime just received a major upgrade so I can’t imagine that much is going on in that department. Expose, Dashboard and the dock already work very well so while they may get some slight updates I also don’t foresee much happening there either. Maybe iCal, iChat, Mail, Font Book and the rest will be updated but to what extent?  I mean, how much better can you make a calendar?  And the list goes on.

Safari is already fast, though I suppose it could get faster. What about iChat? They might add more people to its video conferencing feature. And while that would be nice it won’t be that unexpected. Expect the iLife suite to be updated and upgraded but so what?  It was great before and it will be great after. What else is there?

Here are my predictions as to what definitely will be in Leopard:

Finder: Expect a revamp of the Finder. Cleaner design, updated features, the works.

3D: I expect Apple will go nuts here. Anything that can be 3D will be. Will it improve performance? No. Will it make things easier? No. Will it look cool as hell? Most definitely. But that isn’t the only reason they are going to give Leopard 3D steroids, no no no. They are going to do it because Longhorn will be coming out around that time. And I can guarantee you Jobs is going to have a ball on stage showing off these awesome graphics. This will be directed entirely at showing the world how outdated Longhorn is.

Speed: Expect OS X to take full use of Intel’s new chips. I think 10.5 is going to be light years beyond Tiger speed wise. And I think Jobs will back this up by showing off ultra low render times in Photoshop and Final Cut. This will also be used to invite the major game developers to port their games directly to the Mac and optimize them more. Because if gamers always go to the fastest system and that system happens to be a PowerMac running 10.5 . . .

Spotlight: It’s only going to get more powerful both in precision and scope. I expect Spotlight will be able to pick out parts of a word like “suck” in Microsuck. Also I expect that they will give you the option of using Spotlight like your own personal link to the web. Need to find something?  Don’t use google hit Apple-Space and type it into Spotlight.

64 Bit: This entire OS should be fully 64 bit. Apple made a huge step with Tiger and I refuse to believe they will not follow that up with Leopard.

Here are my hopes as to what might be in Leopard:

Podcasting: I expect podcasting to have hit record proportions by this time. Thus it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple made its own little spin off application dedicated just to using/managing/recording podcast.

Voice Recognition: It has only gotten better as the years have passed. Don’t expect Hal to talk to you just yet but don’t be surprised if it responds in a much more mature voice.

Games: I just want more games for OS X that’s all. And so maybe Apple will surprise us and create its own game division? 

Dual Boot: Wouldn’t it be nice if Apple were to include a nifty little utility that allowed one to easily setup one’s Mac to dual boot into another OS, be it Linux or Windows I think this could be a big selling point for certain people.

Only the future will tell whether I was on target or way off base. Regardless I want to hear your views on the matter. What do you want to see in Leopard?