So, my question for the day is, how long can Apple keep usurping technologies from smaller vendors before it is no longer seen as the good guy? I guess the answer is – how long can Microsoft stay evil? After looking more at the Leopard preview from yesterday, it appears that “spaces” is really just Desktop Manager (http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/) built into OSX. Remember Konfabulator (aka Dashboard) that was recently bought by Yahoo? Anyway, its interesting to me that a seemingly substantial part of Apple’s public market value as a company continues to rest on the fact that they are not Microsoft. Now, I prefer Macs, don’t get me wrong…
In regards to Spaces, I was hoping that the combination of Spaces with Time Machine was going to herald a technological situation where a) spaces would actually be playing multiple “terminals” on the machine and that b) it would support multiple OS’s as well…{sigh}. The BeOS had work spaces back in 1996 which actually supported multiple resolutions and color depths, which was great for testing. Time Machine seems to indicate that you will be able to have what amounts essentially to OS undo states, a concept which is very familiar to those of us with experience dealing with virtual machines.
For developers, it would be great to have Spaces support multiple instances of OSX, Linux, and Windows at the same time and be able to switch between them as one does in Parallels or when hot swapping between logged in users. Perhaps on the horizon Parallels will be swallowed up as well? 😉