That's no moon...

Update on the tools and things you can do.

How many versions of pong do you think we will see when this launches?

Dude, it'll be pong with shaders!

Anyways, it's launched! I downloaded it and installed it, but haven't tried any demos yet.

I thought the PC was pretty lame back then. I still can't stand those noisy keyboards.

I played with an early version of this. I do recall that it was a bit sluggish. I'll have to give it another try.

Version 3 is out now. Requires .NET 3.0 which you can get from Windows Update.

Nice! Look forward to hearing how it goes.

By "as it happens" I mean "after it happens and then lunch".

The keynote was excellent, the new Mac Pros are amazingly cool: quad xeon 2.66 GHz for $2500.

OS X Leopard has some really sweet features: time machine and spaces are really cool. Gotta head to another presentation, so more later.

So By quad Xeon, they mean dual dual core right? Also is it true the the mac pro is the same size as the old one?

The Mac Pro looks about the same size, perhaps a little smaller. There were several demo models around and they look sweet. The procs are 2x dual core Xeon. I think I found my next machine.

From the software front, the UI looked exactly like Tiger, but Steve said they weren't going to show everything so that "... Redmond can't start their photocopiers too soon". My guess is that, based on the Core Animation demos (very cool), they've got some UI sweetness coming up but didn't want to tip off the Vista people yet. They did a comparison of Mac vs. Windows Vista UI, showing how similar many of the Vista apps looked to already shipping Mac apps. Much fun was poked at Redmond today.

There are huge banners everywhere with fun slogans:
"Mac OS X Leopard: Redmond has a cat, too... a copycat"
"Mac OS X Leopard: Hasta la vista, Vista"
"Mac OS X Leopard: Vista 2.0"

Photos of the new Mac Pro.

That Mac pro looks industrial strength. It's interesting that their consumer stuff is all light and friendly, and the workstations are the most solid looking PCs I've seen. I'm sure these will do well by Mac users, although the laptops still seem more compelling to me.

It's been a few years (10.3 panther?) since I paid my Apple tax and it looks like it might be time to upgrade again. I'm not too good about periodic backups so a built in automated backup is probably just what I need. And multiple virtual desktops is something I really miss in today's consumer OSes.

Spaces it cool: it's conceptually like the linux virtual desktops, but like the current expose, you can get thumbnail views of all apps running in each "space", and drag the apps from one space to another.

I just can't get into the concept of virtual desktops. I have tried about a dozen over the years. (In fact I bought a utility for Windows 3.1 to do that). It just doesn't fit my use case. Just give me another monitor.

I'm surprised that Apple did this since expose had kinda been their solution to the window management issue. Does anyone know if expose work with spaces? Can you get an 'uber' view of all apps all spaces?

Spaces will probably be cooler than it sounds, but I have to initially agree with John. Expose should really be the solution here. The screenshots of spaces look just like the apps are shrunken by expose, except they are separated by black bars. Why should I conceptually even have "4 virtual screens". It should just be one big virtual space...

Interfaces for window and filesystem management are still too constrained to the physical! The filesystem needs to just be a DB with multiple organizations based on file contents, and open apps/documents should be similarly virtualized better than "it's on screen 3".

Also... the Windows XP powertoy does show a shrunken copy of each of 4 virtual desktops already (although I'm sure not as slick).

Apple releases Intel kernel source.

I use virtual desktops at work and it really helps my focus: I keep my browser (email, web, calendar) on a separate desktop from where I code so I'm not tempted to check it or surf as much. Each desktop is mapped to ALT+F[1-4] so I can move very quickly. I really miss having something simple like this on Mac and Windows. I seem to remember trying out a third party tool for Windows back in the GoAhead days, but it didn't seem to work right.

Some other dev tidbits:

Objective-C is getting garbage collection among other enhancements, so no more resource management (although your app can opt out if you want). This is going to be a really nice productivity boost, and Apple engineers claim no slow down in application behaviour.

A new dev tool: Xray is to debugging, what garageband is to composing. Seriously, you click record, and it automatically records and timelines out disk, memory, network, UI and CPU events (including stack traces) for examination. It is pretty awesome.