During the WWDC 2007, Apple announced that Mac OS X Leopard is scheduled to ship Fall (Oct) 2007. Mac OS X Leopard is priced USD$129 for a single user license. The Mac OS X Leopard Family Pack is a single-residence, five-user license that will be available for a suggested retail price of USD$199.
Leopard introduces over 300 new features and 10 top features were demonstrated, including
- A new Desktop
- New re-designed Dock with Stacks, an intuitive new way to organize files;
- An updated Finder featuring Cover Flow and a new way to easily browse and share files between multiple Macs on the local and remote networks (.Mac required for remote networks);
- Quick Look, a new way to rapidly preview most files without opening an application;
- Time Machine, a new way to easily and automatically back up and restore lost files or a complete Mac;
- Spaces, a powerful new feature to create groups of applications and instantly switch between them;
- Enhanced iChat and Mail applications, which easily allow users to communicate even more creatively.
- New dashboard widget movie + Webclip + Dashcode
- Full 64-bit support with both native 32-bit and 64-bit performance
- Built-in Boot Camp with Windows Vista and XP compatibility on Intel-based Macs*
*requires copy of Windows Vista and XP required
Check out Leopards’s other features inside!
Other features in Leopard include:
- Leopard Mail, offering more ways to customize and add personal style to email than ever before, with more than 30 beautiful stationery designs and layouts that look great on a Mac or Windows PC; Notes, making it as easy to take and organize notes as it is to compose and read emails; To Dos, for creating lists viewed directly in Mail and automatically sync them with iCal®; and data detectors that automatically sense phone numbers, addresses and events so they can be easily added to Address Book or iCal;
- Leopard iChat with iChat Theater, letting users present photos, presentations, videos and files in a video conference; Photo Booth effects, enabling users to transform their iChat video in real time with fun distortion and color effects; and video backdrops that allow users to choose any photo or video that makes them appear to be anywhere in the world, or out of it;
- Leopard iCal, introducing powerful group calendaring features based on the open CalDAV standard that make it easy to organize and coordinate schedules with other people;
- New development tools, including Xcode® 3 with a next generation editor; an all new Interface Builder for easier integration of advanced animation effects into an application; simpler debugging; and support for Objective-C 2.0; DashCode, a better way to create new Dashboard widgets without writing a line of code; and Xray, a new application for optimizing application performance.
- New core animation which help developer created animated user experiences as amzing as Leopard’s Space and Time Machine in their own application
- New security management
- Multicore support; Apple has updated several applications in Leopard — including Mail, Address Book, and Font Utility — to be fully multicore ready. Each of these apps breaks up processor-intensive actions into a series of more manageable steps that execute one by one on single-CPU computers and in parallel on newer, multicore systems. Cocoa uses that same technology to speed up Spotlight searches and Dictionary lookups
- Terminal 2; The Terminal application in Leopard takes advantage of the operating system’s native text and graphics capabilities, using Input Manager and CoreText to fully support non-English languages. The updated layout engine provides very fast rendering of ASCII, ISO, and Unicode text, and a new user interface gives users around the world the ability to harness the power of UNIX. A simplified inspector and integrated settings pane make it easy to change the look and feel of Terminal. It can run any POSIX-compliant source code. Help you make the most of multicore systems. Put a new, tabbed-interface Terminal at your fingertips.
- Updated Parental Controls; With Leopard, your Mac logs your kids’ activities to keep them from communicating with people they shouldn’t be. The log keeps track of websites your kids have visited, applications they’ve run, and people they’ve chatted with. It’s the perfect way to make sure your child stays safe online. You can even set up parental controls to monitor your kids’ activity remotely — from any Mac on your home network.
- Updated Front Row interface; When you summon Front Row in Leopard, you’re greeted by an elegant interface much like the one on Apple TV. Finding and enjoying whatever you wish couldn’t be simpler. Just click the Apple Remote (included with most Macs) to step through the options: music, movies, TV shows, and photos. You can even view slideshows of iPhoto albums on other computers in the house.
- Updated DVD Player; DVD Player now features a dramatic full-screen interface that puts every DVD’s features at your fingertips. You have easy access to playback controls, subtitles, and alternative audio tracks, as well as image, color, and audio settings and the new Image Bar.