I just read through Engaget’s live blog from the WWDC07 Keynote by Jobs. Some may be disappointed to not see a few things they were hoping for (*COUGH* 12″ MBP *COUGH*), but I think it was a good kick-off to the conference. Nothing intensely new, but a few more features for Leopard make it that much more appealing…
1. Stacks and the new Desktop
Stacks are simply folders in the dock that allow you rapid access to the dock that come out as a fan or as a grid. The instant way to get contents of your folder.
2. Remote Access on .Mac via the new Finder
And if you’re a subscriber to .Mac, we have a cool feature called Back to my Mac that allows you to browse your other computers and share files over the internet and across differences. With Back to My Mac and a .Mac account, you can connect to any of your Macs at home from any Mac on the Internet. Your home computers will appear in the shared section of the sidebar just as they do when you’re in the living room.
Now if only Steve’s ‘one more thing…’ had been Leopard is available today.
And let’s not forget that there is now Safari on Windows. Suhweet. So all you windows folk go ditch Internet Explorer (and Firefox too, now).
Michael said:
Safari won’t be taking place of Firefox for me anytime soon.
Posted on June 11, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Jacquie said:
As a programmer for Windows based software, while hearing all the praise for Macs, I am torn in my decision-making process as I desire to get a laptop in the near future. I have always been a PC user, but am considering making the leap to Mac. My main issues are - will I be able to still use Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and will I still be able to connect remotely to my work’s network via VPN? Do you know anything about this? My preference would be to be able to do these things using Parallels so that I can take advantage of the Mac OS & software at the same time (as opposed to having to using BootCamp) but I’ll take what I can get. Any thoughts? Or know anybody else who has tried this?
Posted on June 11, 2007 at 8:02 pm
Simon said:
ditch Firefox for Safari? This may get me in a lot of trouble here but Safari is a piece of junk. I still has regularly has trouble displaying well known pages. FF and opera all the way. Even IE7 for that matter.
Posted on June 11, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Johnny said:
Hey Jacquie,
I am also a Windows developer and I struggled with the same questions. I finally bit the bullet and bought an iMac last month, and I couldn’t be happier (or more productive).
I am using Parallels for the “absolutely” Windows tasks (such as VS.NET and SQL server), and OS X for everything else. My Windows machine only takes up 20GB of HDD space.
A few of things you might want to do:
- Get 2GB of memory. It makes things a lot smoother.
- Anything that runs in Windows will “run” in Parallels (except advanced DX9+ 3D stuff). But, the goal is to run as much in OS X as possible. Try to find alternatives to your current work flow. I’ve found most things are as good or better in OS X.
- Get a big monitor. Parallels doesn’t support Windows native multi-monitors yet … it simply ties them into one giant monitor (similar to “monitor spanning” in Windows vs. “Extend my desktop”) I use dual monitors (the external one rotated portrait style for easy code viewing) and it works fine.
If you have any questions about stuff, feel free to e-mail me … I spent a lot of time migrating over, and I figured out a lot of interesting problems (such as migrating Thunderbird / Firefox to OS X versions, migrating Skype settings / conversations, Hamachi VPN connections, etc)
I think that you’ll be stoked, however, when you see just how much extra work you can get done while running in OS X!
johnny
Posted on June 11, 2007 at 9:27 pm
{Shawn} said:
Safari is still in Beta and there are many folks having mixed encounters. If you want to give it a try go for it, if not then no worries.
@ Jacquie: I don’t know too much about the differences between Parallels and BootCamp. Obviously, Leopard’s integration with BootCamp will be much better than Tiger’s. I thought I heard something about it on Steve’s keynote today about not having to power down or restart to use Windows. You can see what Apple has to say about it here.
Posted on June 11, 2007 at 9:40 pm
Jenn S. (a.k.a. Ducky) said:
Give up Firefox? Heck no! I’ve found it has a more centralized library of extensions, themes, etc. than Safari, although I do like Safari’s look. I’m eagerly anticipating Firefox 3 … it should run even better with the Mac OS.
Posted on June 12, 2007 at 1:19 am