Leopard (10.5), iWork, iLife…

Here’s the scoop on the new software, it’s on the way, and will be announced shortly, along with the hardware updates that were mysteriously missing from Macworld SF this year. Want more specifics? Well, here you go:

iLife ’07 – As has been widely reported, we’re going to see updated versions of iPhoto and iWeb (which definitely is going to have huge changes to it, new templates, all kinds of fun new support for blogging and so forth…can you say “Blogger Integration!”? We can, what with Apple and Google getting so cozy these days?)…and there will be location-awareness built into all this stuff, since we’ll start seeing GPS options in Macs by the end of the year…but the big news, and the reason this puppy is taking so long, is we’re going to see an iTunes update, too. How else are we going to get our contacts and appointments on our iPhones? Sure, on the Mac maybe via the Address Book and iCal…but what about on the PC? How will we get addresses and calendar items on our iPhones from the PC? iTunes is gonna have to handle addresses, phone numbers, appointments, etc. unless Apple is going to integrate with Outlook (fat chance), they will have to build it in to iTunes on the PC, so you can bet it’s coming to the Mac, too! Expect it to take cues from some of the concepts introduced with the iPhone, new ways to navigate and sort your music, and laying the groundwork for the forthcoming widescreen iPod (and we’re not talking about the phone, but the one everyone really is craving, the one with the 100GB HD and the screen from the iPhone (or maybe even a slightly bigger screen than on iPhone!). No one else is reporting this, because they’re all still riding their iPhone highs…

iWork ’07 – Yep, spreadsheet, it’ll be cool (if you’re into that kind of thing). And updates to Pages and Keynote. Sadly, it won’t be an Apple-built version of Open Office, which we still maintain should be the future for iWork as a true MS Word killer. Imagine if Apple took all the effort they put into building Pages, Keynote and iSpreadsheet (Numbers?) and instead spent that time working on Open Office, making it truly “Mac-like” (like they did when they grabbed Konqueror and turned it into Safari)…life would really be good then!

iLeopard ’07…er…wait – Okay, so let’s see what we got here…Video Voicemail will be big…integration with Google’s IM stuff (both voice and data) will be big…finalized Boot Camp will be big, maybe including Read/Write of your Windows partition (even if you use NTFS!?!)…and beautiful hooks in the OS for GPS (as future Mac Books and Mac Book Pros WILL include GPS as options, as will the iPhone, and even eventually the iPod!! but the big thing that everyone will be talking about is right after the jump…