There seems to be a general lull of Apple hype after Steve Jobs failed to pull a magic rabbit out of his hat during his WWDC keynote. There was no amazing new technology, no amazing new hardware, no unbelievable, whiz-bang ass-scratcher or shoe-horn with built-in Airport and a touch-screen or anything like that.

What there was, was a plethora of smaller features that I for one will find immensely useful in my day-to-day computing. Virtually every one of the new features mentioned (sans iChat perhaps... I'm not using iChat until they support MSN and Gtalk natively without using Jabber or 3rd party stuff) is actually something that I'm willing to pay for. With the exceptions of a few pieces of window dressing - think transparent menu bar and 3d dock - all of the new features are just plain useful.

My girlfriend, who would normally baulk at watching a WWDC keynote happened to see some of the new finder features, and she was seriously impressed. She got really excited, because a lot of these features will be really useful to her too. She wants to come with me on the day that Leopard is released to pick it up from an Apple store - before seeing the demos of the new finder and quicklook, she didn't really know what Leopard was.

Most of these features don't make good headlines, or generate ad revenue for hack-journalists, but what they will do is make computing on a mac easier and more enjoyable.

hardly suprised theres no mention of hardware because its the developer's conference

I agree with forgie. I was underwhelmed at first, but the more I thought about the features the more enthusiastic I got. The best of it might have already been shown last year, but the "top secret" features are definitely worthy additions.

Apple have empowered developers to come up with the whiz-bang stuff instead.
(xcode3, coreanimation).

We will see it start to emerge shortly

I am already drooling over all the UNIMAGINABLY cool stuff that WILL blow my socks off that will be in mac OSX 10.6 Cheetah...

... been and gone mate - we're on 10.4.9 now!

Although I think you mean OS X 10.6/Cheetah - if that's what they decide to call it.

Who knows, that's a long way off yet - sometime in '09 me finx...

wasnt 10.0 cheetah?

from wikipedia

Prior to its release, version 10.0 was code named "Cheetah" internally at Apple, and version 10.1 was code named internally as "Puma". After the immense buzz surrounding version 10.2, codenamed "Jaguar", Apple's product marketing began openly using the code name to promote the operating system. 10.3 was similarly marketed as "Panther". Version 10.4 is marketed as "Tiger". "Leopard" has been announced as the name for the next release of the operating system, version 10.5. While "Panther", "Tiger" and "Leopard" are registered as trademarks of Apple, "Cheetah", "Puma" and "Jaguar" have never been registered. Apple has also registered "Lynx" and "Cougar" as trademarks.

Was surprised at how good Leopard was, didn't really care about the games or anything else. I guess you could say I was a little disappointed but only brought out from all the rumors that pop up before every single keynote. Even after Macworld I was slightly disappointed/A lot of people were disappointed, despite such a big annoucement (iPhone)

There is some seriously cool stuff in Leopard for developers. But since it ain't in the keynote, it ain't being typed out

/goes back to wasting time before flight home from San Francisco.