You might be seeing a bit more about it in a few days.

Better iWeb, with plugin & limited HTML abilities
iPhoto with facial recognition for tagging

http://www.apple.com/iphone/ads/

New ads posted. Requires 2 year contract (not a surprise). Now if they’d just finish 10.5.

It’s just about spring, isn’t it? Kind of weird how quiet Apple has been about the next OS, including its top secret features. Clearly less than 90 days of developer testing is required for these unannounced features. And that’s if Apple ships on the last day of spring.

Along with Final Cut Pro 4 at NAB, we’re going to see new flat panels that make the mouse obsolete (well, that’s what Steve is going to say, anyway). I’d imagine one could work 10% faster if interacting intelligently with the screen directly. That’s significant.

I think up until now, touch screen interfaces weren’t intuitive or fine-tuned enough. The iPhone screen technology changes that! Motion & After Effects could even have more benefit than FCP. Photoshop too. Word & Excel, not so much.

‘Cause it ain’t gonna be ready until June. And I guess iWork and iLife won’t be either.

I don’t know about you, but I just want to hear about the secret feature to tide me over until I get Leopard, iWork, iLife, and iPhone in one damn expensive month.

http://www.applegazette.com/mac/mac-version-of-direct-x-from-nividia-and-transgaming/

I do believe that an upgraded UI is a key “secret feature” of Leopard. But I also believe that Apple would have promoted the “secret features” by now if it were shipping in March. Apple needs to allow developers to test. And while the fear of being copied is real, a month and change isn’t going to make much of a difference.

I could see April or May…

If you have multiple macs and don’t spend the time to sync files, the network searching could be a nice time saver. The real benefit could be searching for files in a small office, say an ad agency where a client’s assets are distributed over several computers…

Ugly Spreadsheet App–though I think it’s a fake.

http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0701iwork.html

From Apple Insider

Strength not in ‘Numbers’

Meanwhile, if Apple plans to finally introduce a spreadsheet component to its anemic iWork productivity suite during next week’s Macworld Expo, it’s unlikely to do so under the previously rumored “Numbers” moniker.

According to MacNN, the company’s one time trademark application for “Numbers” has been officially withdrawn. “The only hope remaining for an iWork spreadsheet may rest with a rumored ‘Charts’ application, which was reported by some Apple enthusiast websites in July,” the publication wrote.

Currently, iWork is comprised of only a presentation application called ‘Keynote’ and a basic word processing application called ‘Pages.’

As has been reported by AppleInsider, Apple began development of a spreadsheet application at its Pittsburgh, Penn.-based offices in early 2005 — the same location where both Keynote and Pages are rumored to have originated.

As I said previously, nothing “Apple” excites me less than an XLS replacement…As an end user, I’d rather those investment dollars be poured into my iPhoto Face Recognition Tagging hopes…