Polishing up Leopard sounds like we'll be getting a pretty nice OS.

The slimmed down applications could be due to the fact that the Snow Leopard Developer Preview is Intel-only (as opposed to Leopard's Univeral Binaries with their PowerPC support).

I had thought we were getting resolution independence in 10.5 -- I'm really looking forward to the more-pixels-per-inch screen that actually gives me higher resolution, rather than a much-wider screen with teeny tiny features at 72 dots per inch and miniature lettering. Our eyes and brains are so much better than our computers...

"possibly related to cutting out duplicate localization"

duh. obviously it's from going Intel only. No more PPC code = almost halving the sizes of all UB apps.

'Course, that won't explain Mail going from 287 to 91MB, but, my educated guess is that the bulk of that shrinkage will be from getting rid of UBs.

Just look at how poorly Apple's own subsidiary deal with fonts and you will understand that Resolution Independence will never happen without blowing up all the applications out there. We have gone through too many transformations already, but this one is the most important one. However, it requires all vendors of software to cooperate.

As monitor's resolution increases, the need for resolution independence gets greater. However, 90% of the population is perfectly content using 800 x 600 resolution on a 1680 x 1050 monitor—that's right, stretch marks and all. They don't understand why the text is fuzzy, but they don't bother, because a flat panel is "s***" and it's so expensive, so it's got to be better than a CRT.

Blame the dumbass users.

In addition to the 90 percent content with a non native resolution is my biggest pet peeve! I can't stand how many people don't realize how to set up "Wide-Screen" TV's correctly. Too many times.. even in the stores, I see an already wide screened signal.. double widescreened... That's right.. stetched to be thinner and wider than it's supposed to be. You would think people would just leave the tv sets on the auto setting the correctly determines the aspect ratio. If an image is square.. its should display square.. if it's wide.. it should be exactly as wide as it's supposed to be.
They also stretch out signals that were never supposed to stretch out. I just can't stand that.

"Apple is also improving its handling of text, implementing features from Microsoft Word such as auto-correction and smart replacement, for instance by substituting "TM" with the trademark symbol."

Just as long as you can turn it off. I can't stand the automatic features of Word - they totally annoy me.

Less bloat is good!

So it's just a project they are doing, nothing definitive, and highly speculative at this point... Of course they're doing research on other possibilities, but in the end it's probably going to end up being the next Windows again.

Still, it's interesting to read they're researching this. I'm one of many people who thinks that MS should just drop Windows (or have it run alongside) and create something different...