By the way, is Steve Jobs a cat person? What's he got against dogs? Can you imagine an OS called Rottweiler or Wolfhound or Poodle? I wonder what marketing genius did the research that resulted in naming software after cats.
I think it's somewhat accidental, and it probably has relatively little to do with Steve Jobs' proclivities. It's common to employ arbitrary names (I'd hesitate to call them "code names") in software development environments to distinguish between projects that don't have sanctioned names. Marketing often hasn't made up its mind in advance what to call products and would prefer that nobody make assumptions, so projects get names that don't mean anything.
Apple began publicly using the internal project names for Mac OS beginning with OS X 10.2 Jaguar (remember the furry box art?). Why? Probably because "OS X 10.2" isn't memorable and is easily confused, and they didn't want to open a new can of worms by introducing a third naming approach.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
We already have Poodle. It is Windows Vista Home Premium. I bought a new machine for my wife and it came with it.
Why poodle? It is kinda pretty but it is a Pain in the neck. (some have a lower opinion)
Hoping SP1 brings some relief.
As for something on topic, I bought Leopard because I am a "student" until the end of next week. On campus it was $85. I hear that 10.5.2 is rumored for release at Mac World next month. I may wait until then to upgrade.
Kevin
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
My laptop was needing a new hard drive; and I just made a good deal on a used G5 for a new editing workstation... So it seemed like a perfect time to wipe both machines clean and do a new install of Leopard. I put the old laptop drive into an external case "just in case". I haven't needed it beyond moving data off of it. Like most of you I normally would have waited longer to put Leopard onto systems critical to my daily business life. I started my Mac life with System 7. This has been the least painful major upgrade to date... very few critical third party updates that I needed to wait for... and the improvements outweigh the minor inconveniences of the few glitches that I've encountered.
Ken...I love the sound of the wise sage at work. You made me laugh out loud on the Windows referrence.
For just that reason I will be switching to full up Mac when the next gen Mac Pro comes down the pipe. I love the look and feel of the Powerbook I bought two years ago...and best of all...it just works. That is all I want out of a computer. After 25 years of being nagged to death by WinDoze I am a Mac convert.
I did the same as you (Friday night here) and got a free T-shirt as one of the first buyers. Doesn't that make you feel loved...
Now a month or two down the track I stumbled across a couple of neat features that aren't in previous versions.
When in Finder, any view mode, select a file and then press the space bar. If it is a font file, a preview window of the font appears which can be enlarged by using one of the modifier keys (Opt, Ctrl etc.) If it is an image file it brings up a good sized preview which with one click of an arrow button can be made into a full screen sized image. Nice touch, Jobbie, but the jury is still out on the value thing. Perhaps when I lose an image I'll put you back on my Christmas Card list for developing Time Machine.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I'm a career software developer and Windows system admin. What this means is that for a long time I've known how to set up Windows so that it is powerful, productive, and stays clean of malware. Once I've done the thousand little tweaks and added the software I need "it just works". I am presently using Windows XP x64 edition on a powerful Dell workstation, and it's good and solid.
This Christmas I bought a MacBook, configured with Leopard and Vista in a VMWare virtual machine. I've not had much to do with Macintosh - other than hearing about it from other people, I've no prior Mac or OSX experience.
I have two comments:
1. OSX Leopard is quite a nice system, right out of the box. It still seems to need some tweaks and added software to be Really Useful. However, for one who knows a thing or two about computers, everything I've wanted to do has been intuitive. Moreover, I haven't seen one single solitary glitch.
2. Vista (Business edition in my case) is SERIOUSLY bloated, right out of the box, and worse, it seems to have lost the ability to be tweaked up and leaned down to be a good working environment. There are at least 3 times as many processes running right out of the box. Worse, I've not been able to find a way to reconfigure Explorer to minimize the junk Microsoft has put all around the edges, so that there will actually be room within to show (gasp) files and folders. There are controls that don't actually seem to work - for example there's a little handle on the left of the menu bar to allow you to move it - but it can't be moved. This kind of thing seems to be true of many of the functions of Windows. All fluff and less function than before!
A year ago if you'd asked me whether I would buy another PC or Mac, I would have said PC, and probably have rattled off the particular Dell workstation model. Today, seeing the direction Mac is taking and that I can run a PC operating system inside a virtual machine on a Mac to help ease the transition, and to provide access to software I can't get on Mac, the decision might just go the other way.
Linear Mode
