Test Center Tracker: A developer’s eye view of Leopard

Feature-spotting on Leopard: InfoWorld Chief Technologist and Mac enthusiast Tom Yager has his hands full of Apple-y deliciousness tthis week as he attends WWDC 2007. Not only did he deliver a “real-time” account of Steve Jobs’s keynote; he’s also shared his take on some of the innovative goodies in Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) that will make developers very, very happy. “Leopard’s new features will be taken up extremely rapidly by developers, extending the transformation of the Mac platform from the OS all the way up end-user applications,” he predicts.

VMware releases Fusion Beta 4: IDG News Service reports taht VMware has made available the beta 4 version of Fusion, the company’s rival to Parallels . Both are geared toward Mac users who want to run Windows as well. One of Fusion’s key features is Unity, “whch allows for seamless transition from Mac to Windows applications. Icons for Windows applications will be displayed along with those of Mac applications in the dock at the bottom of the computer screen,” Robert Mullins reports. Watch for a Test Center review of Fusion in the near future.

TCO showdown: Mac vs. PC: Rounding out this Apple-filled Test Center Tracker, Scott Finnie at Computerworld has written a very thoughtful piece analyzing the costs of PCs vs. the costs of Macs. His results are surprising, though not conclusive, given all the factors one can take into account: “What I have found in my research is that neither side has a lock on good value. If you start with Apple’s relatively short list of SKUs … and then look for comparable Windows machines, you’ll find that Apple bests the competition in some ways and not in others, but the pricing, overall, is surprisingly on par.”