Vista is quite obviously Tiger’s competition. The surprise comes when you realize that Leopard is coming out at the same time as Vista will be. Vista simply doesn’t stand a chance.

There was a lot of noise over Time Machine when it came out, and it deserves it if it behaves even half as well as demo seemed to indicate it would. Backup is a sore spot for Apple and it’s good to see that Apple’s coming out with something a little more than .Mac Backup or similar. The functionality, at first glace, seems to be on par with the ZFS rumors earlier this year, but the need for an additional hard drive or other storage medium would seem to put that to rest. No, it looks like they’re using kernel events and tracking filesystem changes and just copying the new file into the backup in the proper place. Still, it’s a very good use of the technology and I’m very happy that they’ve done it. The great part about it, really, is that they’ve made it accessible. Give the user the option of saying that this is the backup drive and then just leave them along with it and take over. That’s how to handle a Mac user, really. Sadly.

I have to say, for the sake of all developers, that Core Animation is some measure of genius. Now, the system already has an NSAnimation class that does a lot of that, but the really great thing appears to be that the interface is more global and a dozen times more powerful. It really should open up a ton of things in the future for the UI and makes a lot of things possible. I’m rather hoping that someone makes a free competing program to NewsFire with it just to show off. It seems to me that the gooey GUI is the only wining feature for it…

More later. Fun, fun place.