When releasing a new operating system, Apple will almost always tout a huge number of new features. With Leopard, that list exceeded 300, although some of the changes were, at best, exceedingly inconsequential in the scheme of things. But they look great as bullet points in Keynote presentations. The exception will apparently be Snow Leopard, […]

If you can believe Microsoft, they frequently put groups of users in little test rooms — or some sort of testing environment — and expose them to the new features in a product. By gauging their reactions, they decide whether those capabilities deserve to go into production. Now if you look at Microsoft’s shipping products, […]

When Apple acquired NeXT in the last century, the original release of the long-promised industrial-strength operating system seemed to take forever. First, there was Rhapsody, and when developers balked at having to recode all or most of their products, Apple went back to the drawing boards and begat Carbon and Aqua. The former made it […]

Without mentioning the names of the usual offenders, I often wonder if some tech pundits exist solely to find bad news, whatever it might be, the better to increase the hit count, and regardless of whether the bad tidings are accurate or not. Take Firefox, the cross-platform browser that’s reinvigorated the tarnished reputation of the […]