Leopard Screenshots? ... Naah!

Michael Beaucourt pointed out to me that AppleInsider has been running a link to a couple of purported Leopard screen shots. I think they're fake. For one thing, I don't think Apple would put a "Windows" line like in the first screen shot into their "About this Mac" screen. Nobody gets that much limelight. Also, in general the Windows stuff is too in-your-face on those screen shots (and CoreWindows? Gimme a break! It's not an SDK, it'd be a framework. Maybe WindowsCore, or Win32Core but never CoreWindows).

Also, he has exactly one Finder window, that he slightly redresses for each screen shot. It's always the same size (even where the tabs are invisible). First thing you'd do for a screen shot would be to try out different sizes. The background is a single color because that way he doesn't have to fix up a real OSX-style shadow in Photoshop (Photoshops fall off to two sides, Mac OS X's to three).

In addition, the IE window wouldn't have an Aqua window title. It'd be hell to make a Windows app work with that, because so many applications (e.g. Office) screw with the window border and title bar in some way. That worked for X11, but only because they have the concept of a replaceable window manager, i.e. almost no app relies on being able to do much with the window title or borders. t didn't even work for Classic, after all, and Classic is way more similar to Aqua.

And I'm not at all sure why Apple would integrate iCal and address book. As much as I'd love to get rid of the horrible UI in address book, they're two completely independent applications with differing functionality. Heck, iCal doesn't even make use of address book much. They'd much rather integrate AB and iChat or Mail.app.

And finally, the screen shot and the effect are both from 11:26 ... I doubt he'd get such a good screen shot of a CoreGraphics transition effect on the first attempt.

That said, it's a pretty good fake made with love for detail. The third screen shot recently posted has a different time in the menu bar, the Finder windows look fairly decent (though that location bar doesn't look very Apple -- even when Apple screw up a design to be revised for the final release, they generally do better work than this). Nice Photoshopping, but I don't believe it.

Of course I also didn't believe the Intel switch, so feel free to believe I'm wrong. But just like then, all the signs tell me it's fake. Simple statistics.

Reader Comments: (RSS Feed)

No comments yet

Or E-Mail Uli privately.