Leopard looks amazing

I have just been watching the leopard movies on the Apple leopard site. Leopard , apples update to its opearting system (OS) looks simply amazing!

I had recently been to an Apple leopard developer preview session. Amongst the things that the Apple folks spent a lot of time talking about, was two powerful APIs inside of tiger and leopard, namely core image and core animation. These allow programs written for the mac to harness stunning 2D graphics and animation to vastly improve the usablitlity experience.

Other than for the obvious benefits of usability concepts like drag and drop , there is no denying that dynamically watching folders re-order themselves etc does help my brain cue in to the functionality of UIs better than if it boringly just happened. Frameworks like core animation allow interfaces in leopard to animate just about everything. I can really see myself getting de-addicted from the shell given these improvements . In short , I think I can summarize leopard to be “core animation” and “core image” in hyperdrive.

I only hope they fixed how long it takes for spotlight to find anything on my almost 90% full 250 GB disk and improved performance of iphoto. Regardless, I never thought I would buy leopard since I was already happy with tiger..but those slick movies have me sold! I cant wait for my pre-ordered copy to arrive. Alternate desktops and time machine ..here i come!

Mediawiki export from Openoffice 2.3

I heard on the Java Possee podcast– that the new release of Open Office , version 2.3 will support output to mediawiki markup. As someone who helps keep the bioscreencastwiki updated this is a godsend to ease user adoption of wikis.

Of course assuming that users first start using the amazingly featured and free openoffice suite first  :-).