Leopard == PLG

is it just me or


Strongly resembles



With the dock and all...

Hey thats pretty nice. Is that what Leopard's dock will look like? I though it would look the same as 10.4.

The leafy background looks familiar.

Semi transparent menu bar as well?

I think it was Apple who was getting their photocopiers out this time..

That is not a fair statement.
...though, by Apple's definition of "copying" they copied every single feature of PLG and don't do anything original.  I mean, look at the similarities!

When I saw Steve talking about the "live" icons / thumbnails, it reminded me of something ....

now where have I seen that (around 2 years ago).

If you look, the "Stacks" is the same thing as "Group similar taskbar items"...just apple took it a little further...

Cybermagellan wrote:

If you look, the "Stacks" is the same thing as "Group similar taskbar items"...just apple took it a little further...

Shocking rip off with the dock  .... but I disagree with your assessment of what Stacks is - group similar taskbar items does not give you a stack view of the contents of a folder.  Let's wait for the video stream, but I bet it is more in line with this.

Rossj wrote:

Shocking rip off with the dock

"shocking rip off"?

Since when did changing the background from a wrap-around square to a perspective trapezium count as a rip-off? It's just another design, sheesh.

But I can imagine more people copying Apple now; I see "icons on top of a perspective trapezium" being the next design craze since vertical reflections and rounded corners. Say hello to Web 2.5

Isn't it OK to borrow those kinds of ideas though?

Honestly, Leopard looks rather disappointing. I mean, it'll be a nice operating system and all, but there weren't really any "Vista killers" that the community had been hoping for. Most of the features are already in Vista, albeit not as polished as Apple's solution (Time Machine being the obvious example). And more of the features that aren't in Vista aren't particularly compelling. Stacks could be nice, but they've been sitting on that for years. I remember reading about them in Bruce Tognazzini's Tog on Software Design (1995)--I guess they still beat Cairo though...

Is there any summary (e.g., bullet points) on the developer features? I'm aware of CoreAnimation and ZFS, but haven't heard much else. It almost seems silly that the big news is yet another way to render HTML on Windows.

You guys bring up a very interesting point.

Apple took Sun's DTrace and ZFS. They may have taken some interface ideas from Project Looking Glass.

BryanF wrote:

I guess they still beat Cairo though...

That's because Cairo's UI was being based on the graphics engine from Duke Nukem Forever.

give it 5-6 years and all the major operating systems will have all the same features ripped off from eachother, just built around a different kernel and structure.
from watching the hightlights of leopard i actually found myself wanting a mac, which is something i never thought i would say.
unfortunately i still live in a windows world, it's what i use everyday at work as an admin. so it's likely to make my life easier if i just stick with it at home.
i can see myself not making a switch, but perhaps moving towards a dual boot scenario.
either way, it does look interesting.

The first thing i thought when i saw the screenie with the grass wallpaper, heard stuff about stacks and whatnot i immediately thought "That looks like some of the early Longhorn builds?!"

Then again, i guess Apple and MS copying/borrowing stuff from each other is inevitable and usually good for the end user.

I don't think Apple is copying PLG here, going 3D-ish is basically the natural next step. Also, it's just showing that Apple really likes to polish it's UI really well. Maybe there weren't any AMAZINGKILLERAPPStm or whatever, but I think if you couple: new Dock + new Finder + QuickView + CoverFlow + Spaces + Stacks + (10.4, 10.3 features) then you've got one killer UI

On a related note, how lame is that dock tray going to look if you keep your dock on the side?

Regardless of who copied who...PLG looks super ugly and the dock implementation in Leopard looks really pretty.

But looks still isn't a good enough reason to buy it.