Leopard looks nice, but the Apple website looks great

Just finished watching/reading the announcements made by Steve Jobs at this year’s WWDC keynote and I think I speak for many when I say that I was significantly underwhelmed. (“You can be overwhelmed, you can be underwhelmed… but can you ever just be whelmed?”)

There were a few mildly exciting points, so I’ll start with those:

The new Finder was great news. It is cleverly based off of the iTunes interface, even allowing one to browse through files in CoverFlow mode. This could be extremely useful when browsing through folders filled with photographs, but maybe not so much for browsing document folders.

Also announced (finally) was the departure of the Brushed Metal interface in place of a consistent, system-wide look. This is good news, but far from exciting seeing as it has been known for months, even years, that this needed to (and likely would) happen.

The other big announcement for Leopard was a new desktop, complete with a refurbished dock and Stacks, a way to “stack” programs, folders, and files in the dock, henceforth cleaning up your workspace. This is pretty cool, and was likely saved until now to stop Vista interface designers from borrowing any ideas. The 3D dock should be pretty, but again, not what I would consider very exciting news.

Most of the other details revealed about Leopard were repeats from last year’s WWDC. Backgrounds for video chat in iChat? Yawn. Time Machine? Awesome, but already knew about it. Spaces? Will be great, but yawn. QuickLook? Will be very useful, but again, just doesn’t strike me as particularly revolutionary.

Games on the Mac? Yawn! No new hardware? Boo! And to top it all off, the “One more thing…” was Safari for Windows? Most definitely the least climactic “One more thing…” that I can remember.

To be honest, I think the most exciting thing delivered from Apple today was the new website design, complete with a very good-looking revamp of the navigation bar that, until now, had been stuck in the year 2000. (How strange that stuff from 2000 is already so out of date.) Their entire site finally looks cohesive, not to mention fantastic. Check out the new scrollbar at the top of the new Mac page.

Of course, it is still too early to form any lasting impressions of Mac OS X Leopard, but for now, I am still waiting for that “Eureka!” moment to be delivered from Apple. I do not doubt that they will deliver.

Also, it must be noted that this week’s conference is all about the developers, therefore maybe the announcement of Safari for Windows is a bigger deal than I even realize. Time (and developers) will tell.