When I was in 4th and 5th grade in country town Australia there were these boxes of cards (from some company in the USA, I think it was called “SRA”) we had to go through. There were cards to study and corresponding answer cards. The study cards had about a half page of text on them, and on the flip side were multiple choice questions on the text. You were supposed to read the card and then answer the questions. Flipping back to the text was not considered cheating.
We had to do one card per day. Sometimes we were handed the card, sometimes we could pick. I couldn’t understand why this was considered work; the texts were usually at least mildly interesting, took almost no time to read, and the questions were ridiculously easy. E.g. the text might read “And we’ve provided an API for Time Machine so you can support it in your applications” and the question would be “The new Time Machine product has: (a) a big red knob; (b) an API to help you support it in your application; (c) a big blue knob; (d) none of the above”.
What amazes me is that the blogosphere is ripe with opinions, complaints, suggestions, and speculation about Leopard, thanks to the announcements on Monday, and yet almost none of the participants — despite having graduated from the 5th grade, being of far greater than average intelligence, and more-or-less able to read, write, and spell — appear to have mastered the art of answering this kind of multiple choice question.
So here are the spoilers — note that this isn’t post modernism 201, so we’ll be basing our answers on what was said during the WWDC ’06 keynote, or in press releases on the same day, or on Apple’s Leopard preview page the same day, even though it may not be true:
Does Time Machine have an API? Yes. Listen harder. Or read the website.
Will iCal support third party servers? Yes. Listen harder. Or read the website.
Is the new iChat basically a bit like NetMeeting? No, because NetMeeting doesn’t do screen sharing. Read the website.
Is Leopard just a bunch of fancy sizzle with no steak? I assume if you’re still asking this you consider OS-level integrated seamless backup to be sizzle, so how about: Objective-C 2.0, modern garbage collection, full 64-bit support, XCode project snapshots, and visual performance monitoring tools?
Actually, the Leopard Server page is also worth visiting. Summary: comes out of the box with iCal Server, Wiki Server, PodCast Server, and something called PodCast Producer. And of course pretty much every component technology has been revved.