Mary Jo Foley thinks Leopard is a Photocopy of Vista - Film at 11

posted Tue 12 Jun 07

Let's take a look at Mary's points one by one, shall we?

New desktop. I'm not sure why she thinks this looks like Aero... Vista's sidebar doesn't do nearly the amount of stuff that Leopard's dock does. The sidebar is not a place for maintaining current tasks and open documents... in short, Vista's sidebar has NOTHING to do with Leopard's dock - they serve two different purposes.
Coverflow looks identical to Flip3d. Obviously Mary Jo Foley doesn't spend too much time looking at user interfaces. With Flip 3D, I can see one item clearly, and all the rest are obscured. With Cover Flow, I can see one item clearly, and many nearby items clearly, with a hint at what is on the outskirts. One is a really painful UI paradigm (Flip 3d) and one is a really enabling UI paradigm (Cover Flow).
Thumbnail preview capability in Vista is NOT interactive. With Quicklook, you can interact with the preview, including turning on and off media, flipping through pages of PDFs, scrolling through web pages, and much more. A really common thing for people to do is look at the surface, make a snap judgement, and then become closed-minded. Obviously Mary Jo didn't do her homework on these features, otherwise she would have noticed that Quicklook is insanely more powerful. Quicklook is also an enabling feature in iChat theater, which does not exist in Vista in any shape or form.
64-bitness. She totally missed the boat here. The point here is that with Leopard there is a single version for all hardware. This means that a single version of Leopard will work on 32-bit machines and 64-bit machines and run 32-bit apps and 64-bit apps. This is not how Vista works, and the 64-bit experience on Vista has been notoriously bad, everything from unexplainable bugs to lack of driver support.
Core Animation. She thought the developers in attendance didn't seem all that impressed. She's wrong. What Mary Jo might not realize is that 99.99% of the attendees are ADC members, which means they've all been eating, living, and breathing Leopard (including Core Animation) since before January 2007. They all know how powerful it is. Granted, people were looking for more "new" stuff, but like one person said: at least there was enough new stuff to not have to cancel WWDC :) (dig at MS for cancelling PDC)
Boot camp - I'll certainly grant her this point. I'm running Visual Studio 2005 Orcas in my Vista partition on my Mac. Why? Because the Mac monitor actually makes Vista look better than any Dell or IBM laptop I've used.
Spaces. Again, lack of apparent awe from the audience comes from this being not all that new to the attendees. They've all known about it for a long time.
Dashboard widgets are not anything like Vista gadgets. You show me a Vista gadget that has FULL access to the entire power of the OS, and then I'll say this is a valid comparison. Until then, I wave the BS flag.
Vista's meeting space working like iChat theater?? You've GOT to be kidding me. Mary Jo herself claims not to be a Mac user, but I'm beginning to think she's not a Vista user either. I've used Meeting Space multiple times, including several times with cameras, and I've never had the experience of iChat theater. This is another one (like searching) that looks like a photocopy feature but actually provides more value than Vista's equivalent. The keynote could have made it more clear, but the real power behind iChat theater isn't the gee whiz effects (though they do look fun)... the power is in the ability for application programmers to use iChat theater as an enabling technology to broadcast content to buddies, basically its "nearly free collaboration" add-on capability for every Cocoa developer. Meeting Space isn't programmable. Trust me - I can quote lines of the OCS and UC SDK from Microsoft, and there ain't jack about Meeting Space programming.
Time machine - granted. This is a valid point, Vista can automatically back-up, and if you want some really powerful stuff there's the "Windows Home Server" stuff coming out that'll not only do your back-up stuff but it'll work as a central media storehouse as well, and integrates with Xbox 360, etc.

OK. Bottom line here is I'm dissapointed. I've considered Mary Jo's articles to be unbiased and relatively objective in the past. What I'm looking at in her article is basically a piece of imflammatory nonsense. If she had taken the time to do some more digging, she would have found the depth that would have made many of her arguments appear as weak as they truly are. She took the lack of response of the audience to mean that they were unimpressed. I, however, went and talked to a couple people at random and asked them, and they all confirmed my suspicions - they'd seen it all before. It was still just as impressive as last time, but people didn't feel the need to hoot and holler about it. They were waiting for the iPhone announcement (which was arguably dissapointing for many developers... though I'll bet good money that less than a year from the iPhone's release we'll see a real SDK for it). She also compared a couple of features at a really cursory level without doing the homework to figure out how the features work.

Sure, I'll grant you that on the surface a lot of what Steve showed at the keynote might appear like a "me too" set of features. But, as I mentioned in my previous blog, Apple doesn't simply catch up, they do what the competitor is doing, and they try and do it better. For example, in addition to the improved finder providing search for all computers on a local network, it also incorporates dynamic DNS features and allows you to search office PCs, remote PCs, other PCs on the internet - something that you need third party software on Vista to accomplish and even then it won't be integrated with search (at least I have yet to see this in any packages).

I have no problem with the notion that Leopard is adding features that Vista has - I can think of a couple of features that really do look like "catch up" features. There's nothing wrong with Leopard catching up to Vista in some regards. The more competition there is between the Operating Systems, the better. If Leopard can be point-for-point competetive with Vista, then perhaps Vista will improve as a result and Leopard will then improve and so on - that's how free commerce is supposed to work.

There's nothing wrong with pointing that out in a clear, concise, objective manner. But when you use cursory, if nonexistant, research and myopic viewpoints to back up your arguments, you're spin-doctoring, not debating with fact.

tags: wwdc keynote vista leopard

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comments (6)

1. Mizhou left...

Wed 13 Jun 07 12:18 am

>2 Coverflow looks identical to Flip3d. Obviously Mary Jo Foley doesn't spend too much time looking at user interfaces. With Flip 3D, I can see one item clearly, and all the rest are obscured. With Cover Flow, I can see one item clearly, and many nearby items clearly, with a hint at what is on the outskirts. One is a really painful UI paradigm (Flip 3d) and one is a really enabling UI paradigm (Cover Flow).

Not only is Coverflow and QuickView a different paradigm, but the purpose is different as well. While Flip3d is used to get an overlook of OPEN documents, like Expose is on the Mac, the Coverflow in Finder is used to browse through documents that are NOT open. In other word it is for browsing documents like in Windows Explorer. In Explorer you just get an icon view, or list view, with optional preview, a thumbnail of the document. In Finder you can look through every page of a PDF file, without even opening the file in an application.

You use Coverflow to quickly browse a folder of documents, and when you find the document you think you are looking for, then you hit the space bar, and then you can look through the entire document with QuickLook. You do not have to launch any application at all. to do that.

2. Peter of the Norse left...

Fri 15 Jun 07 8:30 am

There was a sense of disappointment about the WWDC. Since there were no new features added, and some things, like resolution independent UI, were expected but not delivered, there are many that are up in arms about it.

3. Kevin Hoffman left...

Fri 15 Jun 07 10:42 am

Resolution indepdentent UI was delivered... Leopard is resolution independent... at least as far as I know.

4. Rich C left...

Sun 17 Jun 07 4:14 am

Great article, but you also missed some important points, namely the fact that many of the features she's quoting have been a part of Mac OS X for years. What's new are evolutionary enhancements and tweaks, which she confusingly thinks mean the features are new themselves. If anyone copied, it's Microsoft -- though granted, some of these features may be obvious extensions from where things are at today.

It appears that she has never even *seen* a copy of Mac OS X before this keynote, or else she'd already know the answer to many of her observations.

1. New desktop looks like Aero? There's almost nothing *new* about the new desktop. It looks, 99%, just like the old Mac OS X desktop. Menus have been translucent and the Dock's been glassy since the Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000. They're both just a little more so now. A sidebar's been there since 10.3 in 2003, and the current one borrows directly from what Apple's been doing in iTunes and Mail for years now. If she thinks Aqua looks like Aero, then it's Vista that copied Mac OS X. 2. Coverflow looks identical to Flip3d? Actually, Flip3D's a clone of Exposé, a feature Apple first released with Mac OS X 10.3 back in 2003. Only difference, Flip3D uses 3D animation to accomplish what Exposé does with 2D animation. (To each his own.) Coverflow, on the other hand, is a way of flipping through live previews of *files*, not open windows, and was first debuted last year with iTunes. 3. Thumbnail previews? Also been a part of Mac OS X in one form or another since the beginning. (Remember the big fuss back in 2000 about photographic 128x128-pixel icons?) You're right that QuickLook is *not* about thumbnails. What it is about is live previews of files without leaving the Finder. This feature's also been a part of Mac OS X for years, but never as sexy as this, and never with support for as many file types as this. (Playing QuickTime-compatible multimedia and viewing thumbnail-sized previews of the first page of PDFs have been possible since the beginning.) 4. 64-bitness? Mac OS X has been 64 bit, in part, for years. All that's new is the GUI level is now 64-bit too. Remember, it was Apple to make the first jump to 64-bit as a consumer platform with the PowerMac G5 and, later, the iMac G5. About there just being one version of Mac OS X for 64- and 32-bit programs, you're exactly right. 5. Core Animation? You're exactly right here: developers didn't cheer wildly because they already knew about it, and have working this (very impressive) API in Leopard seeds for quite some time now. 6. Boot Camp? Not exactly a copied feature from Vista. If anything, it's a copied feature from Linux switchbooters -- though in reality it does much more, being that it also emulates BIOS on Apple hardware (which doesn't natively use it). 7. Spaces. This idea's also existed before, in the Linux world. Apple's implementation is more intuitive, as expected. And you're exactly right about developers seeing it last year. 8. Widgets a copy of Gadgets? Riiiight. Widgets have been around since 10.4 was released over two years ago, and a similar (but far less featured) system was available through third-party Mac apps before that even. Plus, they fulfill a similar purpose to an old "Classic" Mac feature that first came out in... wait for it... 1984. All that's new in Leopard are better authoring tools for widgets, a more efficient WebKit engine running them, and a new Apple widget for getting movie times. If they look like Gadgets, then it's Vista that copied Mac OS X. 9. I haven't used Vista's Shared View before, but from reading it, it seems like an evolution of the concept of remote desktop viewing and collaboration that other software programs have been doing for years. Apple's solution, as you've pointed out, is a bit different. 10. Time Machine a copy of Vista backup? Backup systems have been around a tad bit longer than Vista. I'll chalk this one up to two separate companies working on including the one obvious and well-known solution to peoples' data problems. A fully functional Time Machine was first demoed a year ago, so it's not exactly the result of Apple scrambling after seeing Vista.

I wonder, if she were a Pepsi girl and I gave her a Coke, if she'd report that Coke knocked off Pepsi's whole soft drink idea? Hmm.

5. Kevin Hoffman left...

Sun 17 Jun 07 9:39 am

Rich, thanks for the awesome comment. I didn't want to comment about previous versions of OS X since I don't know the timeline, but I was hoping someone who's been using it for a while now would continue to poke further holes in Mary Jo's so-called "objective" analysis.

6. Steve left...

Wed 20 Jun 07 1:56 pm :: http://technicalconclusions.wordpress.co

Kevin, I just came across your blog. Nice post. I think anyone with even the slightest knowledge of modern operating systems read Mary Jo Foley's article with disgust. She claims not to be "pulling a Dvorak", but I have to wonder. For her sake, it would be better if she were. Anyway, I have my own comments about her article on my technology blog: http://technicalconclusions.wordpress.com/2007/06/14/leopard-vista-foley/

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