Apple previews Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard; makes a good thing better

Posted August 7, 2006 at 08:16 PM by Adam Berger

Section: Tech News, Apple, Communications, Software / Applications

Steve Jobs just finished Apple’s keynote presentation at the WWDC. The second major announcement (first one is here) was the previously announced preview of Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard, the sixth major version of Mac OS X. Leopard is scheduled to ship in spring 2007.

The newest features are Time Machine, a program that will automatically back up and restore everything on your Mac, and Spaces, an new way to instantly switch between groups of applications required for various tasks. Leopard also includes advancements for Mail and iChat, including Stationery, Notes and To Dos in Mail; and Photo Booth-style effects, the ability to “place” yourself in any photo or video as the backdrop for your chat, and live presentations of iPhoto slideshows, Keynote presentations and videos in iChat.

“Breakthrough features like Time Machine and Spaces are good examples of how Mac OS X leads the industry in operating system innovation,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “While Microsoft tries to copy the version of OS X we shipped a few years ago, we’re leaping ahead again with Leopard.”

Time Machine automatically backs up everything on the Mac to an external hard drive or Mac OS X Server. In the event a file is lost, users can search back through time using an intuitive time-based visual display to find and then instantly restore the file. With one click, Time Machine can restore anything from a single file or photo to everything on a Mac.

Spaces is an new way to group applications required for a given task into a “space,” then instantly switch between different spaces to bring up the specific applications required for that given task. Users can get a bird’s eye view of all their Spaces and choose where they want to go next with just one keystroke or click of a mouse (as seen here).

Additional features in Leopard include:

full native 64-bit support that allows applications to take complete advantage of 64-bit processing while maintaining full performance and compatibility for existing 32-bit Mac OS X applications and drivers enhancements to Boot Camp, making it possible to run Windows natively on Intel-based Macs Front Row now available with all new Macs to play back digital content, including video Podcasts using the Apple remote Photo Booth, Apple’s application that lets users take quick snapshots with an iSight video camera, add visual effects with the touch of a button, and share them via email iCal 3 with group calendaring capabilities, event drop box, and standards-based CalDAV support improved Spotlight searching that’s even faster, provides richer previews, and lets users search across network mounted folders on other machines a new Movies Dashboard widget for movie times and Web Clip for clipping any part of a web page as a live widget new parental controls including curfews, time limits and remote administration Core Animation, a new graphics technology that makes it easy to create stunning visual effects and animations major enhancements in Universal Access, including improvements in VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in screen reader security enhancements including anti-phishing protection in Mail and Safari, and an automatic firewall that limits network resources available to an application new development tools, including Xcode 3 with full 64-bit support, DashCode, an easy way to create new Dashboard widgets without writing a line of code, and Xray, for optimizing application performance.