Of the 10 things on Steve’s list, the new Desktop (or rather, Dock and menu bar) and Finder are the only ones that are really new since last year. You might say iPhone apps is new, but people have already been talking about using existing web technologies for that. One person at my lunch table suggested that a big part of the motivation behind Safari for Windows is to encourage people to develop iPhone apps. I’ll continue to use Firefox though, mainly because of the extensions - particularly the ad-blocking ones.

One intriguing note: he said the new menu bar “adapts itself” to your desktop picture, which seems to imply more than simple transparency. Or maybe it doesn’t and he was just trying to make it sound fancier than it is.

I was happy to hear that they’re finally settling on one window style. It will be interesting to see how that plays out, and what will happen to the two styles of controls we have now - metal vs normal. Will the standard controls continue to have two variants, or will they automatically all use the same appearance now?

Early on I was actually okay with the idea of metal windows, as long as they were in fact confined to apps that dealt with or simulated other electronic devices. But then they said “oh, and apps with sidebars too,” and things got silly. Plus they never solved the problem of how to make a metal window look inactive.

As for the new Finder.. it’s just more iTunes-like. Not surprising, I suppose. It has the same sidebar, which I bet was developed in parallel with the iTunes version. I’m not a big fan of Cover Flow. I find it flashy and tedious to navigate.

I think the most glaring non-announcement was iWork ‘07, though it could be argued that WWDC isn’t quite the place for it. Maybe there will be another press event for that in a couple of weeks. Or maybe iWork will skip ‘07 entirely. Maybe the iPhone sucked up those resources in addition to the ones that would have given us Leopard by now.

Unfortunately it may be a little while before I get some good hands-on time with the new Leopard beta. I’m not eager to install it on my aging and slowing PowerBook, but I do hope to replace that soon with one of the new MacBook Pros. I’ve been looking forward to that for a while now.