I admit it - I was a little bit disappointed when Apple showed off Panther (the fourth release of Mac OS X) at their world wide developers conference. But over the past few months, the want has been building up.
I'm not going into my disappointments here - I have a longer article in mind for that. But there are a lot of things that are interesting, that of course only really come out when looking at new libraries, widgets, options, etc, that are available to developers. The Cocoa framework has picked up some incredible new features that just blew me away (that I probably can't share). It looks like a lot of work has gone into refining the user interface and making certain widgets more common in their look and feel. Looking at the few developer sessions that are available to me makes me realize how much the little touches add up into an ever more compelling system release and user experience. (A diatribe comparing the damage the mega-release strategy has done to users perception of software is another post for another day).
The feature I'm looking most forward to, however, is the new iDisk support. iDisk is personal storage on Apple's .Mac services. It's nice to be able to easily share documents between my three aging machines, but iDisk is slow to deal with. In Panther, there's basically an automatic/semiautomatic folder synchronization system running behind it. All of your iDisk files are kept locally, so that reads and writes happen at the same speed as all other local access. But the system can then synchronize those changes automatically or manually. This also allows for offline access, and is very tasty for working with personal college notebooks across all my machines.