There was a lovely surprise waiting for me after I returned from university this afternoon. In the back of my head and of other Mac geeks out there lingered only one thought – we were patiently waiting to see what Leopard was all about…and here we are!

I gotta say I enjoyed the keynote and really understand why Apple is keeping everything under wraps. Our friends at Redmond seemed to have caught on the ‘photocopying bug’ – as made aware at WWDC ’06 and in this industry it’s all about getting to market first. Props Apple.

Out of the 10 applications demonstrated today there were no major surprises like how Spotlight was when it was released with Tiger (10.4). It’s almost as if I anticipated some of these and knew they were coming. Their addition is nonetheless worth the while.

Take Time Machine for instance. It was only last night I was thinking of upgrading to a new external hard drive to replace my aging Iomega which just can’t handle my gigabytes worth of music and photos, and now here comes Apple with a really easy and may I add resilient way of backing up all those files. And as is always the case with them, they went the extra mile and allowed anything to be backed up e.g. iCal and iPhoto content.

The other cool thing was Spaces. I had been thinking of this for such a long time. It’s a bit like what we could with some Firefox extensions which allowed you to save a set of pages and switch back and forth from them given you had enough RAM. Definitely something worth looking forward to.

The mystical thing (if you will) about Apple is that they can release one small little feature and the rate at which its sucked up by the media is always phenomenal. Let’s take the realist’s perspective, under all the glossy Aqua icons…Photobooth just doesn’t count as innovation material yet Jobs’ show is so good it always turns up being so, so out-of-this-world.