Recently two screen shots appeared of the upcoming Leopard. Everyone is screaming fake, even the author sais so. But a solution like in the first picture would actually make complete sense. I mean, for OS X Apple has basically been making a nice layer that everything interfaces. First up, the reason I switched: X11. X11 integrates quite nicely with OS X and keeps in style with Aqua without loosing the X11 feel. Classic has been running on OS X from day 1 (not sure if it’s still running on those shiny Intel Macs), and after a boot-up the applications integrate nicely with Aqua but retain the Mac OS 9 feel. In comes Mac OS X for Intel, all PPC are done through Rosetta, and voila, it looks like its running native, and is nicely integrated with Aqua. Now would it be so strange to conceive that Windows is booted in the background running in its own environment just like Mac OS 9 does on the PPC and the applications integrating with the lovely window manager Aqua? I don’t think so. What I think is that it’s time to bump up that X11 integration to make it a tan smoother. And I know that I’d prefer FreeBSD booting up in the background and using Aqua for my window manager.

So where is this screenshot? Well, it’ll probably go offline soon, but in the meanwhile: http://www.picturetrace.com/images/leopard_img01.0.png

From the rest of the speculations that followed the fake screenshots: I don’t think I prefer a tabbed Finder. While a cool idea at first, I think I’d be clicking to much between windows. If tabbed, then just not the way proposed in the screenshots. Second, I don’t need Adress Book and Calendar integrated, I need tighter integration between these apps and other apps I use, for instance Google Mail/Google Calendar, Thunderbird, Firefox etc). For the OS X/Windows integration, if Apple isn’t already working on a scheme like this (I’m sure they are) then they should hire this guy and exploit his imagination

Categories: Technology