upon Monday, Steve Jobs addressed t...

upon Monday, Steve Jobs addressed thousands of Macintosh hardware and software developer at Apple's annual Worldwide Developer parley The clear message: the traditional nipping War between Mac OS and Windows is back onward and now it's wearing projections

No kidding. Steve did everything still pound his shoe on the table and insist that his placement of iMacs in Cuba was entirely a case of helping a brother revolutionary uphold itself from industrial imperialism. Vista, the of recent origin overhaul of Microsoft Windows, will (dear Lord, please) finally be released in January, after five years' worth of delays. Steve was vehement on sharing Apple's impartial opinion that Vista is nevertheless a shabby clone of Mac O . . last year's Mac O

And Apple hasn't exactly been sitting upon its hands for the last 15 month

"Well, if you can't innovate . . impersonate," Apple's VP of software engineering chided. And then the talk hall's giant screens were filled with a photo of a fat Elvis.

Ouch

They do have a point. If Microsoft's rife public beta of Vista and Apple's sneak preview of Mac O 105 ("Leopard," promised for spring delivery) are anything to pass by . . . Microsoft is in big, big disarrange

Mail and iCal, the Mac OS' unrestrained built-in e-mail and scheduling apps, have always been powerful, if it be not that personal in nature. The Leopard editions have been given a serious professional boost becoming far more adept at form into groups scheduling and project management. Dare I say that these apps have been Outlooked? (Thankyew. Thankewverrmuch.)

onward top of all of that, the crush To-Do list has received a vast promotion. It's not simply a feature in iCal or Mail: It's a systemwide resource that any app can access and exploit.

IChat's been pinstriped, too. The modern version has no shortage of indifferent and fun features, including a digital greenscreen Give the app a one-time peek at the background, and iChat will be able to digitally replace it with photos or video forward the fly during your chat. if it be not that it's also been goosed into borderline-meetingware class, with of recent origin features for managing multiple chats and the ability to "chat-cast" slideshows and presentations.

The flashiest highlight of the Leopard demo was "Time Machine," Leopard's novel invisible and persistent data backup software. Everyone should back up their files each day. Few do . . until they lose years' worth of documents in a hardware crash.

Time Machine backs up your data automatically. You designate a separate compass (either an external drive or a other partition) as a backup space. Time Machine backs up your entire primary drive and then, from that momentum onward, any change you make to anything in succession that drive is automatically applied to the backup.

staid But Time Machine can do far more than just restore your drive after a disaster. It records each incremental change since that first backup, you can "rewind" anything -- from a specific file all the way up to the whole drive -- back to the way it was at any time since its first backup.

I mean literally. An important file has disappeared from a intend folder? Open the folder window and activate Time Machine. The window warps on the outside of the Finder and into a moving starfield. Arrow guides propel you forward and backward from one side time toward a whirling exus, "Koyaanisqatsi" style: When the folder window unexpectedly contains the missing file . . stop and exit. Hail Jambi: the file has reverted

And Time Machine isn't a simple utility. It's a basic technology that any developer can exploit. You ne to know your sister's antiquated work address, not her present one? No prob: search for her card in Address volume and then temporarily rewind it back to what it was a tie of months ago.

Let's see: Leopard will finally bring virtual desktops to the Mac (organize dozens of windows into compartmentalized workspaces); it can post Windows apps at native speed; parents will gain level greater control over what their kids can do forward the family computer.

And those were just the features that Apple was willing to present to view off. It's unknown how plenteous of the Leopard iceberg is still in subordination to wraps, and a real review will have to wait until the spring.

Still, this hasn't been a great week for Microsoft. Mac users are lying flat to fits of excitement, authentic but Steve Jobs generated more genuine enthusiasm for Leopard in 90 minutes than Microsoft has generated for Vista in the last five years.

Indeed, what Vista has inspired more than anything besides is grumbling. Endless delays. A recent system forcing users to continually "prove" their right to use the software, which scents like trouble. A confusing rollout with multiple distributions. Which Vista should you buy?

Assuming, of course, a Windows XP user steady chooses to buy it in the first place. As a whole, Vista's many delays, massive confusion and a far-from-dazzling public beta have handed a very large opportunity to both Apple and the Linux community, one as well as the other of which stand to poach a certain quantity of serious market share from a once-