“Apple seeded developers last month with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard build 9A343, which remains the most recent and offered a number of improvements over its predecessor, build 9A321,” Think Secret reports.
Think Secret reports, “Thanks to Leopard’s many under-the-hood improvements, users can expect to see signficant gains in performance and responsiveness under Mac OS X 10.5, especially on recent Macs. Window resizing relative to different System Preference Panes, for example, is now instantaneous and completely smooth, without that half-second delay found in previous Mac OS X releases.”
“Sources continue to peg Leopard’s release around the end of March, a date other publications and analysts have also suggested,” Think Secret reports.
Full article and link to screenshot gallery here.
Seems to be a problem with the link,
Looks like March is going to be an expensive month with the delay in Apple TV…oh well
Where’s teh “Top Secret”??
Use this link.
3 million people trying to get a glimpse of Leopard. Slowed the site to a crawl. Wait ’til its released. WOW-WOW-WOW. Take that MS>
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3 million people at Microsoft trying to get a glimpse of Leopard. Slowed site to a crawl. OW-OW-OW
When are they going to change the Aqua interface? OSXI?
The one thing that impresses me most about each new release of OS X is code efficiency and speed. The fact that you can milk even more performance out of older machines, well you really can’t beat that can you Microslop? Granted, I’m looking forward to some of the features they previewed, and those they kept under wraps and we’ll hopefully see quite soon. But really, in a world where we have seemingly shorter and shorter attention spans (and in some people, fuses), anything that makes things faster on what we have is a big deal. Sorry Microsoft *sarcasm* but it seems this time you really fucked up with Vista. Performance hits, need for new computers, confusing pricing schemes. The only fuckup it seems you haven’t made is selling Vista using your stupid Microsoft point system.
Ballmer singing *mental scream of agony from me imagining the horror*: If I “only” had a brain.
This site is fond of stating how a “two year old OS” (Tiger) beats Vista, and just wait for Leopard. And I agree. But the unstated implication is that “Leopard” will have two year’s worth of impressive technical advances to allow it to leap ahead once more. We already know a lot of what is in Leopard, and these are clearly nice improvements, but definitely in the “evolutionary” rather than “revolutionary” category – and nothing that shouts out as a revolutionary change after two years of amazing development. Meanwhile the Leopard builds are getting closer and closer to release. Are there still some amazing features to stun us on launch day? Or is this our lot? At what point must the top-secret earth-shattering new features enter the beta tests?
Answers on a postcard please.
I’ve seen these screenshots and am wary of the Terminal and X11 icons. They look like placeholders or first attempts. Definitely not the style that you would Apple to use. The ‘matrix’ effect in the Terminal app icon looks fishy to me.
think secret has been “MDN-dotted”
@amyhre: You stated “The one thing that impresses me most about each new release of OS X is code efficiency and speed. The fact that you can milk even more performance out of older machines, well you really can’t beat that can you Microslop?”. This actually is a reflection of how Apple are prepared to ship non-optimised code in the initial releases. Anyone who’s used Windows and MacOS on similarly spec’d machines will notice how the MacOS UI, whilst prettier, can be noticeably slower to respond. Particularly with the earlier versions of MacOS X. What stuns me is how Apple are still finding code to optimise in an OS that is now 6 years old…
” . . . we have seemingly shorter and shorter attention spans . . . “
Sure, maybe for some people, but for me I don’t that appl <submit>
<submit><submit><submit>(dammit)<SUBMIT>
Too many people in Redmond connecting…s.l…o……w………….y………………………………………..
Wistfully gazing at what might have been if only…. Loaded!
Ah, forgot to turn on images!
Looks like Tiger to me. What’s supposed to be so revolutionary? OSX needs a dramatic shift in UI. The tired aqua and eye candy is tired. If Apple is going to shake up Windows, it’s got to be much more than a few new feature sets. To the untrained eye, this looks like a miss by Apple, but I’m sure I’ll be pleasantly surprised (I hope).
@Reality Check:
ZFS in its self is a quantum leap and can only be decribed as a wet dream for Microsoft. Do you know what ZFS is? Leopard is pretty earth-shattering.
New products of any kind should get better with each iteration. New versions of OS X have gotten consistently faster on my old 700 MHz iBook. How is this a negative thing? (beta versions are for developers and not meant to run fast, I would imagine there are debugging processes running and so on…to compare beta software to a final release, in terms of speed, is just ignorant.)
I’m not sure where you are coming from with your weird comments.
Where with MS, you must consistently upgrade hardware to run new public release OSes.
Mo,
ZFS is not the file system in Leopard – it still uses HFS+. MAYBE 10.6.
Am I gonna be able to run Leopard on my Dual G4? Anybody know?
“Am I gonna be able to run Leopard on my Dual G4? Anybody know?”
You bet you should be able to…I plan on running it on my 800MHZ iMac G4, and my 1.2GHZ iBook G$. It will probably run similarly as tiger does now if not better on performance. That’s just my thoughts/hopes though.
@Mo: Yes thanks, fully aware of what ZFS is. It’s someone’s file system with fancy roll-back capabilities. Very nice and definitely useful. But it’s not earth shattering for the average Apple user, or the potential switcher. It’s more likely to excite administrators of server systems. And like others have pointed out, it’s not even the default file system for MacOS – it doesn’t supporting booting. Leopard needs something more exciting than ZFS to justify the hype.
I find it odd that you think it is a “weird comment” to wonder why it takes Apple six years or more to properly optimise their OS code base for performance. It doesn’t have to be that way. The speed increases in MacOS X are only relative to MacOS – in terms of speed versus Linux or Windows, it’s still catching up. MacOS has many, many nice features. But stellar responsiveness is not one of them.
To Reality Check:
As a programmer I can assure you that any application or website can be optimised, almost, ad-infinitum. It’s like optimising a company, or cleaning a house. And as usage changes or features are added, new potential for optimisation springs up.
It takes a dedication and believe in fine and steady craftsmanship to find the energy (both within yourself, and maybe more, within an organisation) to work on optimising the existing. I love Apple for this.
The great new feature will not be a new UI. The UI is great as it is.
It will be new versions of some of the applications, therefore they don’t need to make developer seeds for this. My bet for the big hoopla is on a new finder that integrates Spotlight, Quicklook, Preview and access to iTunes, iPhoto libraries.
Apple has no reason to get into an Eye-Candy GUI-Off with Microsoft. The consistency of the GUI is a win, not a loss, as the poor users of Vista are currently finding out for themselves.
Once you turn off all the GUI-Goop of Aero, all that’s change in the underlying OS is more control panels, more confusion, more options that aren’t options, more annoying messages from an already annoying interface.
OS Xs stability, security and the constantly increasing apps available for it are what matters. Microsoft spent billions of dollars and 5 years to make the most inefficient OS ever, then slapping nothing more than a theme over top of it, chasing the chimera that style sold Apple products.
Well guess what? Apple has achieved it’s status because they sell consumer devices that are simple to use, perform very, very well and look gorgeous.
No one who uses Apple products thinks they are cool because Steve and his marketing firm said so.
If you believe that, you will never, ever understand why every Apple product generates such hype.
go leopard go…kill vista
And what would you tugboats have done if this was Vista being released within a month of a review like that?
“While stability remains questionable, with many applications experiencing unexplained hangs or crashes, other areas related to fit and finish have improved at a quick clip”