Mac OS X Leopard released…

A new major update to Mac OS X, Leopard, which has just been released, contains 300 new features, according to Apple. Leopard is Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger’s succesor, with lots of Vista-killer features. Leopard has also made a major alteration to the Mac interface with a serious attempt to improve Mac OS security.

With this new operating system, Apple has introduced into Leopard a significantly revised desktop, with a redesigned Dock, Stacks, a semitransparent menu bar, and an updated Finder that integrates the Cover Flow interface seen in iTunes. There are also other features, such as support for writing 64-bit graphical user interface applications, an automated backup utility called Time Machine, support for Spotlight searches across multiple machines, and the inclusion of Front Row and Photo Booth.

After years of experimenting with different looks for windows, sidebars, and other interface elements, Apple has seemed to settle on a consistent desktop interface. The color scheme is much like Tiger’s shades of gray with slight gradients. However, Apple has improved the contrast between the frontmost window and the rest. The Leopard Finder’s new sidebar is also better organized and more usable than its Tiger counterpart.

As with any operating system out there, including Windows Vista, some of the changes in Leopard were not as successful as expected. Leopard’s menu bar, which resides at the top of the screen, has been made semi-transparent which causes it to be visually striking when the desktop background is set to display an image with both light and dark areas. As a result, the areas behind the menu bar can severely decrease the readability of menu items. Apple should have took a leaf from Microsoft, which has used semi-transparency on its taskbar, but with a slight blur so it wouldn’t affect the readability of items and wording.

Apple has also modified the Dock, so that the Dock icons appear to sit on a reflective glass tray when the Dock is positioned on the bottom of the screen. A pleasant glowing light appears next to the icons of currently-running programs, although the light is a bit too subtle when the Dock is positioned at the bottom of the screen.

The Dock also introduces a new Stacks feature, which replaces the need to stash folders in the Dock, with a snazzy look. It genarally features a less useful pop-up window featuring a stack or grid of icons. There was also a feature which gave users the ability to drag an arbitrary collection of items into the dock to make a temporary stack in earlier builds of Leopard. These feature, however, did not make it into the final version of Mac OS X Leopard.

The most important new feature added in Leopard, is not the redesigned dock or finder, but Time Machine. It is Apple’s attempt to encourage the vast majority of Mac users who do not routinely back up their data to change their ways by automatically backing up a Mac’s files to a separate hard drive or a network volume being shared by another Mac running Leopard.

Another added feature in Leopard was Boot Camp, Apple’s method of allowing Intel-based Macs to boot into Windows. Boot Camp provides basic Windows compatibility and the ability to run Windows programs at native speeds. However, people who want to run Windows software on their Macs will usually opt for tools such as VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop, which allow Windows and Mac OS X to operate simultaneously.

Spaces, another new concept, has been integrated smartly into OS X’s existing Expose feature, another tool for organizing a large number of windows. The concept of Spaces allows the Mac’s interface to transform into a series of workspaces, located adjacent to one another on a grid. To drag a window out of a cluttered workspace and into a pristine one, you just drag the window to the edge of the screen and the existing space will disappear and the window will appear by itself.

There’s also Quick Look, a Vista-killer feature which appears throughout Leopard, is a technology that lets users preview the contents of documents without opening the program that was used to create them. Click on a Microsoft Word file in the Finder and press space, and the entire file will appear before you, ready to be read. Select a movie and press space, and the movie will expand and begin to play without the need to open up QuickTime. It also allows Finder views to display live previews of documents.

In addition to the new features introduced in Leopard, this operating system release includes major updates to numerous existing programs that are included with Mac OS X, including iCal, Spotlight, iChat, Apple Mail, Safari, Dictionary, iTunes, QuickTime, Automator and numerous other utilities.

In addition, Leopard has shown much of a improvement when it comes to handling networking issues. Leopard has also better security with the fact that several Leopard applications are “sandboxed” with restricted access privileges that make them less likely to be used as tools in a hacker attack, much like Windows Vista.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard might have shown quite a lot of improvement compared to it’s predecessor, Tiger, and might have included many Vista-killer applications, utilities and features. However, there are still some kinks that can be ironed out. For example, the new redesigned dock and its newly introduced Stacks. There’s also the problem of the semi-transparent finder. If not for all these, Leopard would have been a real Vista-killer.

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