SAN FRANCISCO—The new Leopard version of Mac OS X with its Time Machine feature, along with the briefly mentioned Xcode 3 application development environment, held attendees' attention Aug. 7 at Apple Computer's keynote speech at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference.
The features and prices of the new Mac Pros and Xserves also impressed many of the Apple aficionados at the annual conference.
William Hatch, a developer at Cornell University's Macaulay Library,
the world's largest archive of animal sounds and video, said he was "very pleased, very impressed" with what he saw at the keynote.
Speaking of Leopard's automatic backup and versioning feature, Hatch said that "Time Machine is a better implementation of the restore feature in Windows—it's more usable to the average person, and that's great."
He added that he was looking forward to seeing more information about core technologies that would be discussed in developer-only, NDA-protected conference sessions.
Click here to read more about the new Mac Pro desktop computer.
"We rely on Macs," Hatch said of the Macaulay Library. He said they use a full range of Apple technology in both production and archiving, from QuickTime and Final Cut Pro to Web Objects and Xserves to maintain over 40TB of data.
He said some of the features of the new model of Xserve would help with that server's market penetration.
"The dual power supply will take care of one of the most common objection to putting Apple servers in data centers," he said.
Hatch added that he thought the prices for the newly announced Xserve and Mac Pro—$2999 and $2499 for base configurations— were "spectacular."
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Leopard Spotting Piques Developers' Interest
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