10 new features of Apple’s OS X ‘Leopard’ – WWDC 2007
The WWDC is upon us, and more than 5000 attendees have piled into the auditorium. Apple store is down. Surprise. Steve went into the features of Leopard after guys from Intel, EA Games and id Software took stage.
Feature #1 – New Mac OSX desktop
The Dock is sporting a new 3D look, new semi-transparent menubar, has ‘Stacks’ to clean up the desktop (files pop onto the desktop), also serving as application launchers:
Feature #2 – FTFF? Seriously, a “new” Finder
Sporting a new sidebar with a built-in search bar that can be populated with various searches by a user. Now a Finder can search other Macs and servers and has a CoverFlow built into it. Cover flow can preview PDFs, pictures, videos, etc.:
A new “Back to Mac” feature allows encrypted file sharing between a related set of Macs – when an IP address of one Mac changes, .Mac picks it up and updates it on other computers in the same swarm.
Feature #3 - QuickLook
QuickLook is a live file preview thingie. It is activated by hitting a space bar and shows a preview of a selected document, be it a PDF or Excel spreadsheet. Also previews video in full screen.
Feature #4 – Leopard is a native 64-bit OS
Here is the skinny on 32 vs 64-bit OS. Cocoa is 64-bit; 32-bit and 64-bit applications run side-by-side.
Feature #5 - Core Animation
Adds flashy effects, that is all, really. Just like on that “flipping covers” iTunes commercial.
Feature #6 - Boot Camp
Boot Camp will be out of Beta by then and will be built into Leopard, allowing to run XP and Vista at native speed.
Feature #7 - Spaces
With Spaces, multiple desktop feature comes to Mac OS X, just like it has been there for years in Linux and even Windows. It allows to have 4 virtual desktops with applications that can be grouped in each of them, dragged from one Speace onto the other, with things like audio coming through only when a Space is active.
Feature #8 - Dashboard and WebClip
When Dashboard is a relatively old feature that was introduced in Mac OSX ‘Tiger’, it has been spiced up with WebClips in Leopard. WebClips let you make a widget from pretty much any part of a web page: select a part of a web page, hit the ’scissors’ button – and it iss in the Dashboard, where it updates automatically:
Feature #9 – new iChat
PhotoBooth functionalty is coming to iChat (which we have already known after the Leopard sneak peek) as well as backdrops (an image or a video behind a silhouette), tabbed chats, better audio quality with new AAC Low Delay codec, document sharing via iChat by drag-and-drop and live document previews – Excel spreadsheets, Keynote presentations – anything that works with QuickLook works here:
Feature #10 – Time Machine
Time Machine did make its first appearance during a Leopard sneak peek, but at WWDC 2007 some more features have been shown.
Time Machine lets a user restore lost or deleted files and supports QuickLook (for previewing files about to be restored). It can restore individual files or an entire Mac, as well as back up more than one computer if connected to an Airport Base Station.
That is it. All for $129. No version variants at all - all the features in one box, for the same price.
One more thing #1: Safari is coming to Windows.
One more thing #2: iPhone ships on June 29th at 6 p.m. - they did make it. iPhone does not need a SDK - aplications will be written using web technologies (AJAX, etc.) and run using Safari engine.
Sources: live WWDC coverage on Macrumors and Arstechnica.
