“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

 I have explained earlier why I believed in Leopard, a truly innovative system despite the apparent lack of “wow” features. In the same post I expressed sarcastically my criticism of Apple copying Microsoft, mainly when it came…to delivering their OS on time !

Now Apple has unveiled a newer version of their latest OS. And apparently a few things have been directly inspired…from Vista !

Here we go :

1) Semi-translucent menu bar. No comment there, this is a pure ”photocopy” of a feature from Vista.

2) 3D & translucent dock. Although the dock was originally developed by Apple, Microsoft has also launched a kind of dock in Vista (and so did Sun by the way, in their breakthrough Looking Glass interface). And, guess what ? The latest dock from Mac OS resembles Vista’s !

 3) QuickLook seems quite familiar to the users of Windows XP or Vista. Now there is an instant preview system in Mac OS. Apparently the system seems slightly superior in Leopard since you are now able to browse directly pages of a document without opening it. Nonetheless, listening a MP3 or viewing a video on the system was a Windows feature  for decades (at least 2001).

Let me tell you a last thing : actually,  I couldn’t care less about all these copycat games. In the end, these interface improvements benefit the end user, right ? So some kind of inspiration/copying is useful, and, dare I say, necessary for the progress of mankind.

Now, Kari, Vincent, and Marc, you can start firing in the comments section

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