Tech Friday: Apple Leopard OS launch nears
Posted By RichC on October 19, 2007
I’m a long time Apple Macintosh computer user and am currently running the Tiger OS 10.4.10 on my desktop, although am running Microsoft Vista on my notebook. It is interesting to see what the creative folks at Apple are bring to the table next … no doubt it will continue to be a blend of “form and function.” The current change coming in about a week is an operating system release called Leopard. For any computer owner, an OS update is often a time to worry; it means learning a new interface and unfortunately the frustrating glitches when working with existing software. My question is whether or not to take the early leap and install Leopard?
Over lunch today I watched Apple’s web-based Leopard presentation and was impressed with a couple of items. The most important addition being something called “Time Machine” which makes backing up your computer easy and restoring something even easier. This feature, in my opinion, would be the number one reason to upgrade. (it uses a large low cost generic external harddrive to archive your entire computer) The second thing that impressed me was the improvements to the impressive video conferencing software packaged with the Apple OS called IChatAV. The improvements that I thought were attractive were in the productivity area; for example when partnering on a document, project or presentation. The ease of being able to talk and share all kinds of documents, videos and presentations immediately and ‘live’ to actually working on a document located on the desktop of your coworkers computer was nice. Its certainly a great feature that would be helpful in finalizing a presentation or document between parties located a distance away. The video chat component also had some cool enhancements … like allowing you to replace the background of your chat window with something other than your surroundings. (a kind of like ‘green screening’ … the demo looked near perfect)
Finally the challenge of ‘doing the upgrade’ looks to have been simplified. According to the presentation, it a few clicks and the walk away; in about and hours your Tiger OS mac will restart in Leopard with all your programs and data. Sounds good … but is it worth the $129?
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