Top 10 Leopard features (in order of importance)

Filed under Apple, Software on October 17th, 2007

With Leopard arriving in a few days, Apple has published a list of 300 new features. It’s a long and impressive list. Still, not all features are created equal. Some are there just to increase the feature-count (a “movie trailer widget in Dashboard“! Color me impressed!).

It’s not only the online feature list that might confuse people into thinking that Leopard is only an eye candy release or a minor update at most. Even some of the celebrated “top secret” features in the Keynote where simple redesigns of existing stuff and ho-hum updates to previous functionality. Make no mistake though: Leopard is a major update that sports some extremely usefull changes and additions. I have compiled a top 10 list of the most important features in my opinion. They might not be the ones you have in mind.

Updated Finder

The plea of Mac people echoed for years: FTFF. Well, Apple seems to have complied. The new finder does not chock on network volumes, sports a new and improved sidebar, adds a usable path bar, makes network sharing a breeze, enables screen sharing to nearby macs and gives you an icon preview of your files. Among other things.

Boot Camp

Finally out of beta, Boot Camp will make life easier for those forced to work with some piece of Windows only software. It will also enable Mac users to play the latest games. Switchers will have a nice cushion in the ability to boot to Windows anytime. Then, when they decide they don’t need them anymore, they can easily delete the Windows partition and automatically reclaim the space being used back to Mac OS X.

Programming Frameworks

Far from being “eye-candy”, the biggest change to Leopard is not even visible to the end user. It’s the total overhaul of the tools and frameworks available to Mac programmers. Objective-C, the programming language behind Cocoa, now comes with garbage collection. Interface Builder, the tool used to design all those pretty user interfaces comes improved. A lot. Xcode is in version 3, with support for refactoring, instant debugging, code snapshots and more. There are new tools to measure the performance and memory footprint of applications. Several indie programmers have already announced that the next version of their apps will be Leopard only (Delicious Library, TextMate, Ecto, etc).

Core Animation

I know, Core Animation is a “Programming Framework”. Still, I believe there should be a separate entry for it. See, as a library that makes complex animated interfaces a (relative) snap, this could be the enabler of a new series of applications. Some will be tacky. Others will be visually wonderful but hollow. A selected few will change the way we interface with our macs. Remember showing the Genie effect to your Windows-using friends with shift-minimize? Remember having them drool over Exposé or Delicious Library? With Core Animation, it’s time to be investing on a drool-proof cover for your mac.

Safari

The new Safari, version 3 shipping with Leopard, brings in a lot of goodies. Tabs can now be reordered or pulled into new windows. We have full text search of our history items. Enhanced searching for specific words in a web page. Changes in the underlying WebKit engine translate to improved compatibility with dynamic web pages, including online WYSIWYG editors. This, along with resizable text fields will make life easier for every user of web mailers and online content management systems. Last but not least, Safari finally warns us before closing a window with multiple tabs.

Mail

While not a major overhaul, the new version of Mail still has it’s treats. Forget about the gimmicky stationary capabilities. We’re talking about the real deal, like improved search, integration with iPhoto and rich formatting. Mail also starts to resemble a full blown GTD (Get Things Done) application, with included support for note taking and TODOs and integration with iCal. Oh, and mailboxes can finally be archived for backup purposes.

New Preview

Preview is one of the most used bundled apps in OS X. In Leopard it gets a gazillion new features: image resize, pdf re-ordering and annotations, background removal, batch image operations and GPS metadata support, among others. Oh, and don’t forget the fancy new user interface.

Spotlight

Spotlight, introduced with Tiger, was met with mixed feelings. Although generally useful it lacked in certain areas. It was slow, it had limited search capabilities and the interface wasn’t that good. Well, Spotlight 2.0 attempts to change all that: it’s faster, it does boolean queries, it peeks into network shares and it can even be used as an application launcher a la Quicksilver. Oh and, by popular demand, it now has the option to constrain the search to just the filename.

Time Machine

Time Machine has been covered to death already, it being one of the few major features introduced at the WWDC ‘06 (the other being …Spaces). Still, with hard disks getting larger and more failure prone and external disks becoming cheaper and cheaper, it’s one of the most useful new features of Leopard, promising to bring automated incremental backup and easy restore to the desktop.

Unix Core

The changes in Leopard’s Unix Core is another major update hidden from the end user (unless the end user is a unix hacker, that is). For those that know the relevance of this, OS X is now a fully certified UNIX, compliant with POSIX 1003.1. People using OS X as a pretty UNIX system (such as system administrators, hard sciences folks, etc) are in for a treat as this translates to easier application porting to and from other unices, better compatibility with UNIX infrastructure and general geeky goodness.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 4:20 pm.
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