OSX Leopard when 2195
I wouldn't be surprised if some of those 'rumors' turned out to be true, but they look more like educated guessing than actual information to me.
I suspect Apple will be extremely tempted to ship Leopard slightly before Vista. Preferably a week or two before, just to upstage Microsoft a bit. In...
it's retail, so don't expect a lot... 6-10 per hour (with better than average benefits) depending on position is my...
There was a thread here a while back about an invoicing application for the mac. I can't find my...
A major Finder overhaul seems inevitable. We've seen Apple's developing model for metadata-based data management with apps like iTunes and Aperture, and Spotlight lays the framework to do something similar on a system-wide basis. The Tiger Finder takes a few hesitant steps down this road, but I expect with Leopard Apple will get serious about it.
(Now, if Apple would just overhaul the Final Cut Pro UI with some of that metadata-based goodness, I'd be really happy. As things stand now, FCP lets you add tons of metadata to clips... and then doesn't really let you do much with it. "Smart Bins" in FCP would be a neat start.)
As far as the full-screen UI concept discussed in one of the Loop Rumors articles, yes, we are starting to see that with the iApps, and I expect we'll see more of it. In some ways, I think maybe we've pbutted through interface consistency (well, Windows never quite got there, but whatever) and come out on the other side. Instead of making every app look at work as similarly as possible, we're increasingly seeing vendors on the cutting edge of UI instead create interfaces that, while they have some basic characteristics in common (e.g. how a text field works), shed the baggage of the windowed GUI (which dumps responsibility for efficient control layout largely on the user), and deliver interfaces that are highly optimized for specific tasks.
Personally I think this is an interesting approach, and the first plausible answer to the "What's next?" question that people have been asking since the Mac established the current UI paradigm 22 years ago.
Apple has been headed in this direction for a very long time, actually:
And actually, this all ties in with what I was saying above about a Finder overhaul. The Finder, as it exists today, doesn't really fit in with this new model for how computers should work. It's too low level, in the sense that it looks at all of the stuff on your hard drive (including stuff that's already managed better by e.g. iTunes) as generic bits of data to be managed in the same way. Leveraging rich metadata extensively could allow Apple to move beyond this traditional low level model of the file system.
-- "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." -- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005