Macworld: OS X Leopard Preview

Here's a trivia question:  As Mac people are aware, all major iterations of Mac OS X are named after big cats. The names most people remember are Jaguar (2002), Panther (2003), and Tiger (2005). Prior to Jaguar, however, in 2001, there were two other cats - can you name them?  (Answer at the end at the end of this post.)

Leopard (OS X 10.5) is the latest "cat" to be developed for the Mac, and will be shipping in the spring. I sat down with the Apple folks Wednesday, on the Macworld show floor, and took a quick tour.

Most of the eye candy you've come to know from Tiger is unchanged. What will make Leopard different from its predecessors are some new features, a few developments under the hood, and updates to some key applications.

Time Machine: Pithy comments by Windows Vista presenters notwithstanding, this new tool allows users to go back as many backup cycles as they've ever saved, search out a single lost file, a la carte, and restore it to the current drive setup. Conversely, users can restore their entire boot drives to a previous state, if need be, very quickly. I found, however, that if one scrolls too quickly through the screens, it can be a bit dizzying. But there is more than one way to scroll or search. You can mouse-drag through the screens, scroll along a sidebar, or drill down manually using Spotlight search technology. For Time Machine to work, however, you'll need some sort of external or secondary internal hard drive. As an added touch, and in keeping with the other wireless products introduced Tuesday, the external HD can also be hooked up to an Airport base station for wireless, automated backups in your home office.

Spaces:  This is a spin-off of the "fast user switching" capability first seen in Panther. You can set up as many as four separate desktops for different functions, allowing a user, for example, to be working on a page layout on one workspace, web surf on another, edit a DVD project on a third, and listen to iTunes on a fourth. A single click or keystroke allows you to tab between them. A separate click will tile all four on your screen, and if you have multiple windows open in each one, you can use the Expose utility to tile those windows within each workspace, again with only a single keystroke. For people who get navigation-challenged when there are too many windows and apps open, this will be a huge plus.

VoiceOver: Apple prides itself on making its products useful by the differently-abled. In particular, VoiceOver is their new improved edition of integrated text-to-speech. It reads text very fast, with no noticeable pause, in a voice that, compared to the voices available in Tiger, sounded the closest yet to natural human speech. I was impressed.

Dashboard: First introduced in Tiger, Dashboard enabled small application "widgets" to pop up on a screen with a keystroke, offering things such as local weather, news headlines, sports scores, a calculator, or an English/Spanish translator. Since it was first introduced in 2005, over 15,000 widgets have been written by both Apple and third parties. Well, the latest version takes things a big step further: you can now roll your own widgets, even if you've never programmed in your life. Integrated within Leopard's updated Safari web browser is a new button called "Webclip". For any web page presenting continually updated content, you can click this button, set the view window that pops up to include the area you want to capture, and click on it or hit Enter. It then makes a widget containing that dynamic content that you can access anytime within Dashboard. For fun we captured the latest cartoon from the Dilbert site, an ongoing eBay auction, and a live EarthCam view of Times Square. These custom widgets can also be skinned with built-in styles, to make them look even more attractive, as well as informative and entertaining.

Mail 3.0:  Apple's flagship e-mail app got an overdue facelift, with built-in RSS, a custom notepad that allows drag-and-drop attachment, a to-do list generator integrated with both the notepad and iCal, and custom design templates (in standard HTML), which can make your e-mails look more like works of art.

iChat: Over time, Apple's chat client has evolved from instant messaging with eye candy to a robust AV client allowing for 3-way video conferencing. With Leopard, they take it still further by delivering new collaborative tools for either the creative class or business users. Tabbed chatting allows the user to engage in multiple IM conversations from one clean window. "Screen sharing" allows users to share each other's desktop view. Users can also add custom backdrops to their webcam images, either still pics or videos. But in addition Apple introduced a really slick new feature they call "iChat theatre." This takes your own live webcam image and moves it to a box in the lower left corner of a much larger workspace. The larger space can then be taken up by a photo slide show, a Keynote presentation, a Quicktime video clip, or any combination. This allows the user to remotely deliver a professional business presentation, either across town or across the country.

Another Mac software announcement regarded the move to Universal Binary code for Intel processors. To date, 5000 applications are now Intel-native for OS X.

There was virtually nothing in regard to comparisons with Microsoft's soon-to-be-released Windows Vista, probably due to the fact that many of Vista's new features have been part and parcel of Mac OS X for some time, so no drama there, folks.

And, oh yes, the answer to the trivia question:  the first two iterations of Mac OS X were code-named Cheetah and Puma, in that order. 

(SIDE NOTE:  Later today, I'll be taking a sneak peak at the upcoming Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, scoping out some of the more interesting third-party gadgets, and getting a very unscientific take from the Mac faithful on Cisco's recent announcement of a trademark infringement lawsuit against Apple over the iPhone name.)

— Thomas A. Olson

Thomas Olson, the Publishing Systems Administrator for Consumer Reports' Editorial, Design, Production and Pre-Press groups, has been a Mac enthusiast since 1984.