Mac Leopard: Not enough to make PC users switch

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, took developers on a fly-by tour at the 50,000-foot level of Leopard, the next version of OS X. Leopard will ship in October.

For more details on Leopard and the keynote, go here.

Of the claimed 300 new features in Leopard, Jobs highlighted what I presume to be the top 10.

In addition, Jobs unveiled a version of Safari for the PC, running on Windows XP and Vista.

Jobs also announced a development environment for creating widgets on the iPhone, but that is the subject of a different blog.

Throughout the one-and-a-half-hour presentation, I fluctuated between thoughts that I was going to dump my junky, old PC and get a Mac because of all these cool new features and thoughts that said it is cool, it is fun, but is it necessary?

Well, it is a little bit of both.

Most of the improvements in the top 10 selected by Job and staff are really about making the interface easier to use.

The new desktop allows users to put up their own background with a simple click. A feature dubbed Stacks gives users a quicker way to view content inside their folders.

A dedicated folder for downloads cleans up the desktop environment, and you can launch an application from the download folder.

Finder has also been improved by allowing users to search for files and folders across their network. As long as you are a .Mac subscriber, the IP addresses of all your systems are known, and you can get into your work folders in case you’re on the road and forgot an important file.

Again, the interface was improved with a List view, an icon view, and a new cover view that displays the software cover, sort of like iTunes CD covers.

From this view, you can also look inside to see what’s stored there.

In typical Jobs style, he said, “It is an amazing way to find things. It turns out be super-useful.”

Quick Looks is yet another UI improvement that allows users to instantly preview files without opening them, even in a full-screen mode.

Leopard is now a 64-bit OS top to bottom. Jobs demonstrated an application running on a system in 64-bit and 32-bit mode. Can you guess which was faster?

The main point being there was no need to have a separate 32-bit OS. I would have reversed that and said there is no need to have a separate 64-bit OS.

In the 64-bit version, the system did not have to go back and forth to the disk to retrieve data, which made it much faster.

Core Animation was another of the top 10, but I’m not sure I understood it well enough to explain. What I took away from it is that you can tag video and pictures to make searching easier.

OK, one step beyond an improved UI.

Boot Camp now runs Windows XP and Vista in VMware or Parallel.

Spaces, the UI one more time. It allows you to group files and folders together under an uber-Space. Big deal.

Dashboard was one of the more interesting new features. Jobs never said how it worked, more of that 50,000-foot level, or maybe he was even flying up to 75,000 feet with this one. But what it does is allow you to take any piece off any Web site and turn it into a widget on your desktop.

It seems to me this in a sense replaces an RSS feed. If I can click on a blog I like to read every day and drag it to my desktop and have it updated whenever the blog is updated, that sounds like an RSS feed to me.

Jobs took a piece of the Web site Rotten Tomatoes that reviews movies and turned it into a widget. Why couldn’t you do the same thing with a blog?

The improved iChat Theater was also very nice. Now you can put anything inside an iChat window and use it for collaboration, for displaying a presentation or a spreadsheet, or for showing off a new video.

Finally, Time Machine automatically backs up everything on your system and allows you to search by going back in time. It is very nice and much needed.

The other announcement Jobs made was that Safari is now available for the PC running XP or Vista. In his demonstration, it ran benchmarks twice as fast as IE and about 50 percent faster than Firefox.

That was it. Am I going to dump my PC in favor of a new Mac with Leopard?

The truth is, I still miss the simplicity of DOS and the fact that I knew how to fix things in it and change the config.sys file and the EXE file. Leopard is beautiful to look at, but I spend about 80 percent of my time writing on my PC. Do I need all of these new capabilities?

So far, I think not. They still only qualify as nice-to-haves and not must-haves.

As long as I can get my work done somewhat efficiently, I think I’ll pass. At this point, I’m still waiting for that killer Mac capability that will make me switch.