Wired Almost-Sorta Reviews the Leopard WWDC Beta: Most Impressive

The WWDC build of Leopard still hasn’t leaked onto the Internet (aside from, perhaps, some super-private BitTorrent trackers), but Wired has a mini-review of the beta. Keeping in mind that Leopard isn’t scheduled to come out until October, Wired basically gave it the Thumbs Up. The brightest spot seems to be the new Finder, which makes browsing around your file system easier. The iTunes-derived Cover Flow view, believe it or not, makes browsing around your files fun. To me, this is fun, but whatever…

So the Finder’s great. Big deal. It certainly couldn’t get any worse, that’s for sure. But what in the Leopard beta fell flat?

Spaces, Apple’s virtual desktop implementation (calm down, Linux users), is just OK, says Wired. You can’t drag elements from one window to another, and, well, virtual desktop isn’t exactly a new concept.

Time Machine is exactly a home run, either. It only works with external hard drives and took more than 30 minutes to set up initially.

That the beta didn’t run flawlessly on several types of hardware can hardly be called news. It’s a beta, after all.

I think I’ll go test drive a half-finished car now.

Pretty Kitty: Leopard Adds Polish and Productivity to Mac OS X [Wired]