Apple Mac OS X Leopard Blog

Mac OS X version 10.5 "Leopard" is the name of the upcoming sixth major release of the Mac OS X operating system for Apple's Mac line of personal computers, scheduled to be the successor to Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger". It was shown to developers for the first time at the 2006 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). It is currently available to Apple Developer Connection subscribers for private beta testing. A feature-complete beta version was distributed to developers at the 2007 WWDC. The final release is slated for October 2007.

Leopard contains over 300 changes and enhancements, according to Apple.Some notable features include support for writing 64-bit graphical user interface applications, an automated backup utility called Time Machine, support for Spotlight searches across multiple machines, and large revisions to most core operating system components.

Mac OS X v10.5 has been the subject of multiple delays. When first discussed in June 2005, Apple CEO Steve Jobs had stated that Apple intended to release Leopard at the end of 2006 or early 2007. A year later, this was amended to "Spring 2007", however on April 12, 2007, Apple issued a statement that its release would be delayed until October 2007 because of the development of the iPhone.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.5


http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/recent.rss

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Mac OS X Leopard release to set off wave of hardware upgrades
Posted by David Morgenstern @ 8:49 pm

Categories: General, Hardware, WWDC, Microsoft, Leopard

Tags: Developer, Apple Mac OS, Apple Macintosh, Hardware Upgrade, Performance, Apple Inc., Apple Mac OS X, IBM PowerPC, User, Machine, Leopard, Desktops, Processors, Hardware, Semiconductors, Components, David Morgenstern

Mac OS X Leopard release to set off wave of hardware upgrades by ZDNet's David Morgenstern -- Despite its delay, Apple may gain twice from Leopard: once in software sales and again with a wave of longtime users wanting to upgrade hardware.

The buzz is building over what Mac OS 10.5 Leopard will mean to Mac users and Apple’s bottom line, in advance of the update’s expected release later this month and the company’s quarterly conference call next Monday, respectively.

Unlike the fizzle that PC users showed for the launch of Windows Vista, the Mac faithful will be out in force, standing in line to be the first on the block to run the new software. Some sites expect the release on Friday, Oct. 26, although a Halloween introduction might be more fun. Or perhaps Mac users will combine the events and dress in their costumes over the weekend.

However, will Apple execs during next week’s analyst call note the many PowerPC-based Macs that are sure candidates for Intel replacements over the next year?

At a recent BMUGWest Mac user group meeting I attended in San Francisco, many users there are still running Power Macs and PowerBooks. Some said they are mulling upgrades.

Half the machines that I run in my home office are G4 based. No doubt, I will upgrade some of them this year.

Still, many Mac users will first buy the software update. It’s just a biennial tradition of the Mac community. And Leopard will run just fine on these PowerPC machines. Certainly, developers (as well as Apple shareholders) are pleased that Apple extended Leopard compatibility to so many machines in the installed base.

At the same time, pros working on PowerPC G5 workstations as well as owners of PowerPC G4 machines will find they want a greater level of performance. This isn’t because of some deficit with Leopard. Developers say Apple is giving users who expect top-notch performance — meaning Mac users who author or edit content (or in other words, most Mac users) — new reasons to move up to new equipment.


I spoke recently about this hardware upgrade cycle with a video software developer who declined attribution. He said Apple was pulling back on specific optimizations in its software applications for PowerPC Macs. As an example, he pointed to Final Cut Studio 2, Apple’s professional video editing package.

“Apple spent very little time optimizing the new codecs that came with Final Cut Pro for PowerPC. They said ‘if you want best performance, you’ve got to get a new machine and we’re only going to spend our time optimizing for MacBook Pros and Mac Pros and that’s it.’ People with older machines will lag farther and farther behind.”

In a similar vein, this summer at its WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), Apple sent a power and performance message to developers that Carbon, the still widely-used set of APIs that helped transition classic Mac code to OS X, is coming to the end of its lifecycle.

I remember back in 1998, Steve Jobs said to developers at WWDC that “all life forms will be based on Carbon.” No longer. So, without a 32-bit workaround, Leopard won’t support Carbon’s 64-bit user interface elements. Developers of performance-hungry 64-bit professional content and technical applications must move away from Carbon.

The video developer said he had only recently upgraded to a MacBook Pro and hadn’t thought that the change would make a difference on his productivity. But he was surprised to find that it did — the difference was “night-and-day in terms of speed of the machine.”

“Now that you can pack 4GB [of RAM] on a laptop, this means that you can do things that would have been ridiculously slow even on a G5 tower machine,” he said.

He ran down a list of many power-hungry programs that he was now running concurrently. “That would have been ridiculous even on a [PowerPC] G5 machine.”

In addition, he said Intel’s compiler tools for Mac OS X also make a significant difference in speed. He reported a 30 to 40 percent performance gain in some applications “just by recompiling and nothing else. ”

For the Windows world, the Vista installed base has come from new computer sales. Now, Microsoft is having to offer Windows XP to customers again. But for its OS transition, Apple will see a different situation.

Starting soon, most Mac users will upgrade to Leopard; and over the next year, many longtime customers will also decide that it’s time to finally join the Intel generation with a new machine purchase. So, Apple will get double benefit from its upgrade strategy.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=940&tag=nl.e589

Native support by many libraries and frameworks for 64-bit applications, allowing 64-bit Cocoa applications. Existing 32-bit applications using those libraries and frameworks should continue to run without the need for emulation or translation.
Leopard will offer the Objective-C 2.0 runtime, which includes new features such as garbage collection. Xcode 3.0 will support the updated language and was itself rewritten with it.
A new framework, Core Animation, allows a developer to create complex animations while specifying only a "start" and a "goal" space. The main goal of Core Animation is to enable the creation of complex animations with small amounts of program code.
Apple has integrated DTrace from Sun's OpenSolaris and added a graphical interface called Xray. DTrace provides tools that users, administrators and developers can use to tune the performance of the operating system and the applications that run on it.

The new Scripting Bridge allows programmers to use Python and Ruby to interface with the Cocoa frameworks.
Leopard supports resolution independence, the ability to size system graphics in physical units such as centimeters or inches instead of pixels. This feature results in standard size graphics independent of the device on which they are viewed. Preliminary support was added in Mac OS X 10.4 to prepare developers for a "future release of Mac OS X."
Leopard’s OpenGL stack has been updated to version 2.1, and will use LLVM to increase its vertex processing speed.

Apple has been working to get LLVM integrated into GCC; Usage of LLVM in other parts of the OS has not been announced.
Leopard’s security frameworks support Mandatory Access Control, sandboxes and code signing.
The Graphics and Media State of the Union address confirmed many other features possible because of Core Animation, such as live desktops, improvements to Quartz Composer with custom patches, a new PDF Kit for developers, and improvements to QuickTime APIs.
A fairly new patent from Apple refers to a new way of rendering desktop backgrounds or live desktops. The method involves a set of pre-written instructions, or recipe for rendering the desktop image. In this way desktops can now appear on the screen organically and are not stored in the RAM or VRAM leaving it free for other use.[29] This is not a confirmed feature and may not be included in Leopard.
In mid-December 2006 a pre-release version of Leopard appeared to include support for Sun's ZFS.
While Apple has not confirmed or denied speculation that ZFS would be included with Leopard, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President of Sun Microsystems, stated on June 6, 2007 that ZFS has become "the file system" for Leopard.

However, the senior project marketing director for Mac OS X stated on June 11, 2007 that HFS+, not ZFS, will be used in Leopard.

Apple has since clarified that a 'read-only' version of ZFS would be included.

Compatibility
Like Mac OS X 10.4, Leopard will support both PowerPC and Intel Macs. However, Leopard will not be released in separate versions, but instead will comprise one universal release that will run on either processor. While it is known that Leopard will support PowerPC G4 and PowerPC G5 processors, support for the PowerPC G3 is reportedly not present in the pre-release versions which have been made available to developers.When Apple’s Leopard website first appeared online, the 64-bit section stated, "From G3 to Xeon, from MacBook to Xserve, there is just one Leopard." The sentence was removed from the page the following day, leaving open the question of whether Leopard will support Macs with G3 processors.In the past, each new major release of Mac OS X has dropped support for at least some older Macs; 10.3 dropped support for Macs without built-in USB ports, and 10.4 dropped support for computers without FireWire ports.

Documentation contained with the Developer Preview DVD states that a PowerPC G4 or G5, or Intel processor is a minimum requirement. Despite this, some users have managed to install the developer preview version of Leopard on Macs with G3 processors by editing a particular file and then creating a new installation DVD with this edited file. However, even though these installations of Leopard can be installed on G3 Macs, some applications (for example Safari and iChat) will not run.[36] It is not known whether this will be possible with the final shipping version of Leopard.

Leopard is fully UNIX compliant. Certification means that software following the Single UNIX Specification can be compiled and run on Leopard without the need for any code modification.

System requirements
The pre-release documentation states the following system requirements:

A G4 (800 MHz or faster)-, G5- or Intel-based Mac
A DVD drive
At least 512 MB RAM
7 GB of hard disk space – 12 GB if Xcode is also installed
The latest Firmware
FireWire Ports


New features
Apple has published a list of the new features and capabilities planned for Mac OS X v10.5:


End-user features
All of the following features, although posted on the Apple website, are said by Apple to be subject to change.

Time Machine, an automated backup utility which allows the user to restore files that have been deleted or replaced by another version of a file.

Front Row and Photo Booth are currently only available with the purchase of a new Mac, but will be included with Leopard. Front Row has been reworked to closely resemble the interface used by the Apple TV, and Photo Booth includes video recording with real-time filters.

Spaces, an implementation of "virtual desktops" (individually called "spaces"). It allows multiple desktops per user, with certain applications and windows in each desktop.[9] Users can organize certain Spaces for certain applications (e.g., one for work-related tasks and one for entertainment) and switch between them. Exposé will work inside Spaces, allowing the user to see at a glance all desktops on one screen.

Spotlight incorporates additional search capabilities such as Boolean operators, as well as the ability to search other computers (with permissions).

Redesigned Finder with features similar to those seen in iTunes 7.

New Desktop, comprised of a redesigned 3-D dock with a new grouping feature called Stacks.
Quick Look, a framework allowing documents to be viewed without opening them in an external application.
Enhancements in Universal Access: significant improvements to applications including VoiceOver, along with increased support for Braille, closed captioning and a new high‐quality text-to-speech voice.
Enhancements to Mail including the additions of RSS feeds, Stationery, Notes, and to-dos. To-dos use a system-wide service that is available to all applications.
Dashboard enhancements, including Webclip, a feature that allows users to turn a part of any web page into a live Dashboard widget, and Dashcode to help developers code widgets.
iChat enhancements, including multiple logins, animated icons, and tabbed chats, similar to features present in Pidgin, Adium and the iChat plugin Chax; iChat Theater, allowing users to incorporate images from iPhoto, presentations from Keynote, videos from QuickTime, and other Quick Look features into video chats; and Backdrops, which are similar to chroma keys, but use a real-time difference matte technique which does not require a green or blue screen. iChat will also implement desktop sharing, a feature previously available with Apple Remote Desktop.
Parental controls now include the ability to place restrictions on use of the Internet and to set parental controls from anywhere using remote setup.
iCal calendar sharing and group scheduling as well as syncing event invitations from Mail.
Boot Camp will be included. It is a software assistant which has been available as a beta release download for Mac OS X v10.4 from Apple’s website since April 5, 2006.
It assists in the installation of Windows XP or Windows Vista to a separate partition (or separate internal drive) on Intel-based Macs.
New Menu Bar, which is now transparent and it is no longer rounded, which was a design feature since Mac System 1.0.
Safari 3.0.x will be included.
Back to My Mac, a new feature for .Mac users that allows users to access files on their home computer while away from home via the internet.