Apple today previewed Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard, the sixth major version of Mac OS X, to its third party developers. Leopard, scheduled to ship in spring 2007, extends Apple’s leadership in software innovation with groundbreaking new features, including Time Machine, a revolutionary new way to automatically back up and restore everything on your Mac, and Spaces, an entirely new way to instantly switch between groups of applications required for various tasks. Leopard also includes industry-first advancements in Mail and iChat, including Stationery, Notes and To Dos in Mail; and Photo Booth-style effects, the ability to “place” yourself in any photo or video as the backdrop for your chat, and live presentations of iPhoto slideshows, Keynote presentations and videos in iChat.
“Breakthrough features like Time Machine and Spaces are good examples of how Mac OS X leads the industry in operating system innovation,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, in the press release. “While Microsoft tries to copy the version of OS X we shipped a few years ago, we’re leaping ahead again with Leopard.”
With its unique ability to let users travel back in time to find deleted files, applications, photos or other digital media, Time Machine is a revolutionary way to protect a consumer’s digital life. Time Machine automatically backs up everything on the Mac to an external hard drive or Mac OS X Server. In the event a file is lost, users can search back through time using an intuitive time-based visual display to find and then instantly restore the file. With one click, Time Machine can restore anything from a single file or photo to everything on a Mac.
Spaces is an intuitive new way to group applications required for a given task into a “space,” then instantly switch between different spaces to bring up the specific applications required for that given task. Users can get a bird’s eye view of all their Spaces and choose where they want to go next with just one keystroke or click of a mouse.
With Leopard’s iChat, Apple takes communicating with friends, family and colleagues to an entirely new level. iChat now makes video chats more fun with the ability to use Photo Booth effects and put images and videos in the background. iChat Screen Sharing enables users to share their desktops with others to work together in real time on an activity, such as editing an iPhoto book, or helping a buddy get the most out of their Mac. With iChat Theater, users can share an iPhoto slide show, a QuickTime movie or a Keynote presentation within an iChat window.
Leopard’s Mail includes breakthrough new features that have never been seen before in a Mail application. Mail Stationery includes more than 30 customizable stationery designs to create email messages enriched with beautiful photos and graphics. Templates include photo collections, invitations, birthday cards and other greetings that look great when received on either a Mac or a PC. With Mail Notes, users can quickly jot down thoughts and ideas, add graphics and attachments and use the familiar Mail application to manage them like an email message. In addition, To Dos can be created from any email message or note and viewed in iCal or sent to friends and colleagues. RSS news feeds now appear in Mail, allowing users to receive news in their inboxes, receive notifications when new stories appear and use Smart Mailboxes to organize news about the same topic in one place.
Additional features in Leopard include:
• full native 64-bit support that allows applications to take complete advantage of 64-bit processing while maintaining full performance and compatibility for existing 32-bit Mac OS X applications and drivers
• enhancements to Boot Camp, Apple’s innovative technology that was previewed as a public beta in April 2006, making it possible to run Windows natively on Intel-based Macs
• Front Row: now available with all new Macs to play back digital content, including video Podcasts using the simple Apple remote
• Photo Booth: Apple’s fun-to-use application that lets users take quick snapshots with an iSight video camera, add entertaining visual effects with the touch of a button, and share them via email
• iCal 3 with group calendaring capabilities, event drop box, and standards-based CalDAV support
• improved Spotlight searching that’s even faster, provides richer previews, and lets users search across network mounted folders on other machines
• a new Movies Dashboard widget for movie times and Web Clip for clipping any part of a web page as a live widget
• new parental controls including curfews, time limits and remote administration
• Core Animation, a new graphics technology that makes it easy to create stunning visual effects and animations
• major enhancements in Universal Access, including improvements in VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in screen reader
• security enhancements including anti-phishing protection in Mail and Safari, and an automatic firewall that limits network resources available to an application
• new development tools, including Xcode 3 with full 64-bit support, DashCode, an easy way to create new Dashboard widgets without writing a line of code, and Xray, for optimizing application performance.
More info about Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard here.
Related articles:
Apple previews Mac OS X Server Leopard; to ship in spring 2007 – August 07, 2006
Apple introduces Xserve with Quad 64-bit Intel Xeon Processors – August 07, 2006
Apple unveils new ‘Mac Pro’ featuring quad 64-bit Intel Xeon processors – August 07, 2006
MacDailyNews presents live Steve Jobs’ WWDC Keynote coverage – August 07, 2006
I wonder if Roz Ho was invited to demo the next version of Mac:Office?
Or did they ban ‘er?
HEY, The future is bright! Gottta wear my shades!
Yea, damn! Market share is going to rise some more……
I think wall street was expecting more. Screw them
Well that was certainly a bust. By Apple standards at least. And Jobs created the very situation of standards. A demo of the next OS. Seems like that ranks for a day 2 show. Not the Keynote.
No new displays.
No talk of the just released chips for laptops.
No software updates
No iPods
No Spreadsheet talk
Just a yawn. As the stock is down as of now, $1.54
Time Machine seems way too good to be true. Bye bye Retrospect (if Time Machine can back up volumes across a network and has options for entire volumes or selected folders on those remote volumes).
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MW “death” as in Leopard will be the “death” of Vista.
Check the “X” tab @ apple.com for the vids of some of these features. They are really impressive.
SPRING 2007 ?!?!?!?!?!?! WTF?!?!?!? Are they just giving themselves some breathing room now that Vistjunk may be delayed again? I hope we see it at or before MWSF ’07 or else I’ll…… well, I’ll do something, maybe kick a puppy or something.
A bit disappointed myself, BUT ; after all it is a develeoper conference, not the place to launch the new iPods or whatever…
Big disappointment that iChat still isn´t able to talk directly with the other chat/messenger clients… Still hanging on to Adium…
I guess superduper is about to loose it’s business, as well as retrospect. Life moves on. Also, it is good for Apple not to talk about everything at once. Spread things out a bit. Keep everyone interested for the most amount of time as possibe.
The article on Leopard looks good here, but I can’t view the information on the Apple website with the (Windows based) computer I’m forced to use at work. It appears that Internet Exploder crashes every time I try to view any specific information about Leopard. I’ll have to wait until I get home and view it on my Mac.
The stock is down, the stock is down…
I’m getting tired of someone mentioning the stock is down or up.
Check the street. All of Tech is down, from Ratheon 0.25% to other techs as much as 6%. It’s not always about AAPL. Sometimes, it’s market forces.
If you can’t think, see more than just the one stock, don’t talk about the Market…
There’s still a lot more coming that wasn’t ready…. OH WAIT, no they just didn’t want MS to see it. right.
JadisOne –
um . . . Vista is yet to make birth . . . . so . . .
Bust, agreed. And for them to stoke fire with “Hasta La Vista, Vista” posters, you’d expect something more compelling. Unbelievable. The only thing great out of this, at least, is that now the media look like goofs. Haha. No nothing! Hope this really only is a sneak PEEK, as in 30% of the final Leopard PEEK
magicword: window (hmmm)
To those who are disappointed by the Leopard features previewed: don’t be. Notice that much ado was made about this being a “sneak preview” and that other features would remain “under wraps.” Not to mention all the digs at MS for their blatant copying. This is hardball now, and Jobs is playing to win. He’s not about to give MS any chance to use anything they could copy in time for Vista’s release. Like changes to the UI. Like changes to iTunes. Like changes to Finder. Etc. Notice that everything they showed was stuff that MS either wouldn’t or couldn’t copy. Stay tuned.
Dissappointing preview.
Time Machine looks great.
Ichat new features look great, but was really hoping for more compatability.
Spaces looks interesting.
Everything else looks like minor improvements.
How can anyone expect iChat to be compatible with inferior messaging apps and webcams?
I’m sure that until Spring ’07, more details about Leopard will be leaked by those with developer copies.
The new Macs are the bomb. I want one.
Well, last year the only thing we got was announcement that they were moving to Intel processors that at the time seemed like a death certificate for Apple. So getting new Xserves, Mac Pros, and Leopard preview in a same day isn’t all that bad. Problem is that some of you have wild imagination.
As for Leopard, simply underwhelming. Not because of the features shown, but because of this secrecy which is getting annoying. MS is set to release Vista to production facilities in October, I don’t think they have enough time to implement any top secret features Leopard has in two months. I do believe however Finder will be reworked, I am very excited about new version of Front Row and I do believe Apple has still few tricks up their sleeve.
Stock price will continue to go down or fluctuate at least for some time. I think that is good, because these stock option problems aren’t as benign as everybody thinks they are.
The sidebar on the ichat page says:
“Multiple logins in iChat for Leopard mean you can log in as, well, everyone you are. Log on to multiple .Mac, AOL, IM, and Jabber accounts simultaneously. Open one for work, one for play. You can drag and drop your buddy list from one account to another. And, in Leopard, you can change your iChat status to invisible. So the world will think you’re offline. Even when you aren’t. Pretty sneaky, huh?”
What is IM? Does that mean possibly Yahoo IM but we’re not telling your right now?
Also not really highlighted is the ability to share any mac screen and collaborate via ichat!
Spaces is awesome. If you work on your mac it’s going to be a big timesaver just like Expose.
any chance to have an announcement of OSX for PCs (at least some standard configurations) in the future ? Maybe when vista ships ?
if MAC users can boot XP, why can’t PC users boot OSX ?
Not all that minor to me, as far as running my business on my Macs. The new stuff in iCal and the notes at To Dos in Mail are a big deal. If I read correctly, I’ll be able to attach files and other docs to calendar events, something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. This moves us that much closer to usable customer management/support tracking right inside iCal. For business productivity, that one is big.
Also remember that Jobs said up front that what we saw today was only part of it… and even at a Spring 07 release, you have to figure its got pretty good odds to beat Vista out the door.
No new monitors announced, yes, but am I right that the prices on the existing series all just dropped a hundred bucks on the Apple store? If so, I’m grabbing a 23″ tomorrow.
That was incredibly anti-climatic. But, agreed, can’t give M$ everything in one day.
Just read that jobs said he was keeping some features secret and for redmond not start their photo copiers just yet. So that gives me some hope for Leopard.
BTW to ??
ichat needs more compatibilty with other services since most people don’t have ichat, and all the other players suck!!