Things that made me sit up:
* Core Animation. I can’t wait to play with this.
* iChat. With tabs, sending images and video and all the cool photobooth effects built-in. Looks nifty.
* Time Machine. Superb idea. Didn’t they have something like this in WinME? I vaguely remember… Looks like it’s time to buy lots and lots of really big hard drives. I hope Apple includes an option to use a 2nd disk, just in case of hard drive drive failure and not just “oops I didn’t mean to delete that”. Of course, I still belong to the school of “save every 5 seconds” so I’m not sure how much I have to change my style to work with this.
* To do lists and notes. This may convince me to jump to Mail from Eudora. Or not. I’ve got to test ride it first.
* Dashcode & Web clip. Smart moves in the right direction.
Things that made me go meh:
* Spaces. Didn’t they have this back in X-Windows? TWM or whatever, with virtual desktops? Anyway, it’s nice to have it there, but I’d like to make sure that you can run the same application in multiple spaces without messing up preferences and stuff. Yeah, I’ll still end up using though.
* Built-in Bootcamp. It’s a good move, but I still want to emulate.
RE: Time Machine
A welcome addition but I was really hoping for a versioning file system. Overall, I'm completely underwhelmed.
I don't think you have to change your "save every 5 seconds" attitude. From what I've learned from Apples website description of the Time Machine, it will do one Backup per day, every day at midnight (you can change the time in the prefs). So it doesn't matter how often you save a file during your work, Time Machine will backup just the current one for each day.
I wonder how this works with portables...
How do we know it isn't a versioning filesystem? All we've seen is the user interface (which rather sucks IMHO), with no discussion of the implementation.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a combination of things, all corralled under the "Time Machine" banner.
First, every file save operation get stored in some sort of journalling scheme. (It probably isn's a full versioning filesystem, but it very well might be.)
For extra security, there is a separate process which automatically keeps a similar day-by-day log to an external backup drive somewhere, and is accessible through a similar mechanism.
That's virtualize, not emulate ;-)
Windows ME does not have this. ME and XP allow you to revert to previous versions of the registry, nothing else.