Also in the comments of that post I noticed a link to a site called QLPlugins, which lists some of the Quick Look plug-ins released so far. That could turn into a very handy site.

Update: I also found found about another site, Quick Look Plugins List, which has some not on QLPlugins.

Back when Tiger was released, Apple had a section on their downloads pages for Spotlight generators, which is still there. I’m surprised they haven’t created one for Quick Look yet, as it works on exactly the same principle.

The other big change is that Feeder now requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. This has been the case anyway with the outstanding issue of compatability introduced by QuickTime 7.2, which Apple doesn’t seem in a hurry to fix. In order to make Feeder fully Leopard compatible, Panther had to go.

This was something I was planning to do anyway in the next major version as Panther support is holding Feeder back and my testing burden just doubled with the launch of Leopard. Panther usage is minimal these days, anyway.

So we need a fresh experience. What’s the criteria?

There are tens of millions of existing Mac users all over the world, and millions of new ones waiting in the wings. They need to an experience that is both brand new, and yet familiar. Stop short, and it will not spark the user’s interest. Go too far, and you may alienate your user base. So the task is finding the balance.

This is additionally complicated by the fact that Leopard must look like it belongs in the same universe as the iPhone, iPod, the Apple Store, and a wide range of Mac applications. It’s difficult (impossible?) to come up with something which satisfies all tastes, so compromises have to be made.

I think it’s a mistake, though, to assume that the shipping designs are ever reached via apathy for a particular audience. Finding the perfect balance is hard, but some version ultimately must ship to keep things moving forward. The goal, I think, is maximum user satisfaction for the target audience. This may mean making changes that some audiences would disagree with (because not everyone experiences things in the same way), but I really doubt it’s apathy.

However, rather than the subjective views to which he alludes throughout the post, much of the criticism about Leopard, voiced very consistently by developers and users alike, is that many of the changes actually degrade usability, making the user experience less satisfying.

Some examples:

• The new folder design makes it more difficult to recognise folders at a glance.
• The new Dock’s “lights” do a worse job at showing an app’s running status than the triangles in the previous versions of the Dock, by offering less contrast.
• Stack icons in the Dock make it more difficult to see which folder is represented.
• Stacks can only access a limited number of items in a folder before falling back to the Finder; the pop-up menu listing all items is gone.
• The menu bar is harder to read with some backgrounds.

You’ve read such a list a thousand times by now, I’m sure.

None of these things are so terrible that your Mac becomes unusable and overall Leopard looks good, but people expect better from Apple. The impression is that Leopard’s UI designers were unable to fuse form and function as well as we have come to expect. It’s both disappointment and frustration fuelling the complaints.

On the plus side, I would say Spaces, the unified window style, new Finder (undoubtedly my favourite change) and Spotlight results window are generally regarded as worthwhile improvements.

Taken as a whole, it appears more was lost than won with Leopard’s UI changes.

Scott ends with this:

If history can be used as a benchmark, the UI discussion cycle we’re currently in with Leopard is a natural part of the process. Any sort of change will bring disagreement from some users, but eventually it all settles down as people get used to it and various tweaks are made. That’s been my experience, anyway.

I would agree that some changes require an adjustment period and various issues will be addressed in time. Normally, this would happen in the next major version of the OS, but maybe we will see some changes sooner thanks to all the discussions going on.

Just about every review I’ve read says that Leopard is more evolution than revolution and is focused on the gloss, but Leopard must be the biggest release for developers that I can remember. Even apart from the headline features like Core Animation, Apple has added plenty that makes putting the basics of an application together so much easier and have addressed a slew of issues and unimplemented features that have been outstanding for years. This is great news for consistency and will help beginner and established developers alike.

I see Leopard as straddling two phases in the life of Mac OS X, marking the end of the first chapter and the start of a new one. When 10.0 was released, it wasn’t truly finished. 10.1 maybe achieved that but it wasn’t until 10.2 Jaguar that Mac OS X was truly usable. Panther was the first to really add more substance and Tiger was an obvious continuation of that.

Leopard doesn’t exactly launch us into the future, but we can get a glimpse. I think it’s the most refined release to date. Although I wish they had done better in some areas, they have at least put plenty of work into the substance of OS X and this is going to pay off handsomely in the long-term. Expect to see many great new apps and new versions of apps for Leopard.

Leopard will also represent the biggest time gap between versions of Mac OS X, and has already been delayed twice so far this year. To justify that gap, and the delays, Leopard will have to be ready for primetime use from the day it ships. That’s more than can be said for many of Apple’s recent software releases, which seem to have been updated on an almost daily basis. That won’t do for Leopard. It’s Apple’s flagship Mac software for the next two years and needs to be free from serious bugs from the very first time that it’s started up.

It seems most people read my last post as:

I’m mad at Apple because [YOUR GRIPE HERE]

So let’s be clear! I wrote my post as a Mac developer who, for months now, has been concerned that Apple isn’t putting 100% into Leopard, which represents the future of the Mac. I obviously have a stake there because that’s what I do and I don’t want to change jobs anytime soon. My second concern was that, having found continued success with a profitable business model that offered a good deal to its customers, recent events show that attitudes may be changing at Apple.

And why? Because Apple currently has no equal, whether it’s the Mac, the iPod or the iPhone. Unchecked, this can only lead to trouble.

Everyone has their viewpoint and this is mine: as a Mac developer, what’s good for Apple is good for me, except when it’s only good for Apple, then it becomes good for nobody.

As I said, there’s plenty being written about Apple right now, but I haven’t seen much on the state of the Mac. However, I know a number of other developers feel just as strongly about the situation. Our advance exposure to and reliance on future versions of Mac OS X probably places us ahead of the curve.

I’m not saying Leopard sucks, there is plenty of good stuff in there, but there are many concerns about the design decisions made. We also know its development was delayed by the iPhone. We will not know of any further impact until Leopard is released. No Mac user will appreciate a substandard update to Mac OS X and to delay it again for the same reason wouldn’t go down well (although better that than release something that is not ready).

Did the best talent go to the iPhone? We all know the answer to that one.

These next few months should be interesting. Debates around the iPhone will probably burn out soon and if Apple releases Leopard as planned, and it’s sound, it will avoid another, perhaps more damaging backlash. Next month the iPhone will make its European debut and things should stabilise a bit. By the time we get to Macworld in January – the first anniversary of the iPhone’s announcement – the whole landscape will have changed thanks to what must have been the biggest PR whirlwind in Apple’s history. Let’s hope the balance is restored.

Since the iPhone’s announcement in January that dominated Macworld, it was clear that Apple’s focus was shifting. Up until then, things like the iPod and iTunes were accessories to the Mac and, for Windows users, represented the Apple experience, but in a single stroke the Mac was sidelined.

Further confirmation arrived with Leopard’s announced delay earlier this year. I think various posts on the web confirmed at the time that developers saw the 10.5 release not only as not ready, but as having stalled. Things only picked up after WWDC, although many people have been disappointed and even mystified by some of Apple’s design decisions demonstrated publicly back then.

Apple was quite honest in explaining the delay to Leopard: the iPhone had stolen all the talent. Sensibly, it appears Apple didn’t hire scores of new developers to work on the iPhone to address the delay (that stuff never works out) and as a result Leopard got behind. When Adobe made that strange announcement about not having enough time to test its apps on Leopard the other day, I took it to mean that, with Leopard having been so unfinished for so long, Apple is already cutting it too fine for them.

At WWDC the phone was everywhere. You could barely attend a session without someone picking one up and rotating it so the video went widescreen to audible groans from the attendees, as this would often be accompanied by the message that we should “develop web applications” for the iPhone. The irony being that you couldn’t do many of the fancy tricks Apple was so keen on demonstrating in a web browser. We were there to learn about Leopard and we weren’t learning much that was new at all.

If you find yourself underwhelmed or disappointed by the new Mac OS, you don’t need to be a genius to work out why.

It’s understandable that Apple couldn’t just release the phone and open it up to third party development simultaneously. Despite being based on OS X, it is obviously a very different beast with more constraints than the desktop OS. Such development would need proper tools, methods of testing, documentation, etc and once open, would place a further burden on Apple to maintain compatibility while evolving the functionality. It’s very early days.

The iPhone launched very successfully and that’s well-deserved, but at the phone’s UK event a number of things became clear. Apple was not going to give iPhone hackers an easy ride, which is one thing (no point in creating extra work to support the unsupported) but nor would it, as was hoped, turn a blind eye to the phone being unlocked.

Like many people, I questioned why Apple needed a single network partner with the phone. It doesn’t seem subsidised and as “the best iPod ever” it could sell just as well under its own steam. In the UK, where phones are usually subsidised to the point of being free with a contract, that is exactly what is happening.

Of course, features like the visual voicemail require changes on the network’s side and the unlimited data plans, while not new or unique, certainly made sense. Look a little deeper though and you can see that activating the phone through iTunes was not so much an advantage of integration as Apple being in control. It suddenly became much clearer that Apple is getting a slice of the subscription pie.

Negotiations are ongoing around the world to ape the AT&T model and it is surely no coincidence that the rumoured and announced network partners for the iPhone so far seem to be all related to the former national phone companies; the ones that really lost out domestically when mobile networks removed the need for cables to be run into homes. Perhaps these are more willing to accept unusual terms, such as Apple sharing subscription income in addition to sales of the device. These exclusive deals, where competition is nullified and there’s some awful company running the network, is hardly great for customers.

Also at the UK event, it seemed implied that, even if Apple does open up the iPhone, it may control what apps get onto it, much like the iPod’s games. That could potentially become a form of censorship as Apple acts as the art police, or even the business police. If they also distribute the apps, which would be likely in that scenario, then they’ll probably be taking a cut there, too.

Hubris, hubris.

Apple’s success to date comes down to the compelling nature of the iPod with iTunes and the breath of fresh air that Mac OS X brings to the personal computing experience. However, in the same way the iPod produced a halo effect for Apple and the Mac itself, the business practices associated with the iPhone could do the opposite, although it may take a while for the effect to set in. Apple probably doesn’t care what is said in the online world, because it is insular and irrelevant to the public at large. I think what disappoints me the most is that Apple isn’t somehow reinventing the business model of the mobile phone market. By association, they risk becoming one of the bad guys.

For hardware, there isn’t much hope of Apple gaining serious competition soon. The MP3 player market is packed with woeful offerings and bad iPod clones. Now, the same seems to be happening in the mobile phone market, which at the high end was already starting to look like a mirror image of the Windows world. Companies run by suits and geeks rarely understand what the rest of us want. And look at history: the reason Sony couldn’t reinvent the Walkman for the digital age was its overbearing emphasis on its own technologies; Microsoft annihilated the competition, not just for its OS, but its applications, first by producing stuff that was actually good and then by playing dirty.

There is some light on the horizon though. Amazon MP3 does what people have always wanted. It’s early days, US-only and yet to be tested, but Amazon of all companies could really make a start at changing the landscape. In an instant, the iTunes Store looks not only restrictive but pricey. For devices, it seems Palm has poached the guy who headed up the iPod division and immediately showed a turnaround of common sense by dropping that Foleo thing, though we’re probably years away from seeing anything remarkable from Palm again.

The computer market hardly matters in this, except that Apple must not allow itself to neglect the Mac. It is the areas in which Apple is dominating that it needs some worthy competition. Until recently, Apple has been pretty good at doing the right thing, but once they signed that deal with AT&T that was no longer true. As much as I hate to say it, I believe we have to think differently about Apple these days.