The Latest Tips And Tricks In Mac OS X Leopard.

By Jeffrey Mincey • Wednesday, October 25, 2006 • Home » Tips and Tricks »

Leopard By most accounts, Windows Vista is not quite Mac OS X Tiger.

Shortly after Vista ships, Apple will turn up the hype on the next Mac OS—OS X Leopard.

Here’s the latest tips and tricks we’ve cobbled together for the next and possibly last cat-themed version of Mac OS X.

The source? New Leopard spots emanate from none other than Apple’s own developer connection Technology Overview.

A quick review will bring up some of what you know, some of what you’ve read, some of what you hope for.

In the way of eye candy comparisons, OS X Leopard will not disappoint.

Evolution is the order of the day for Mail, iChat, Dashboard, Spotlight and iCal.

Under the hood are full 64-bit capability and Core Animation to match Core Audio, Core Video, Core Image, and Core Data.

What’s next for core? Core Eye Candy?

That’s what you’ll get with Mac OS X’s Spaces and Time Machine.

Spaces is work space windows in OS X. One for work, one for play, one for utilities, one for Microsoft and Adobe, and so on.

Different screens for this or that, available in an instant. Yes multiple work spaces have been around Unix OS’s for awhile.

Apple will bring it to the masses.

Backup To The Future with Apple’s version of Time Machine.

Think of Time Machine as a device that takes you back to your Mac files, wherever they may have been.

Backup everything, backup a little, go back and get it wherever it went in Time Machine. Only Apple can make utility eye candy look so good.

What else is new and different? Apple promised plenty of under the hood improvements and Leopard delivers.

Delivering more vowels per feature than any major computer manufacturer, Apple’s Leopard changes spots with resolution independence day.

Start with your best Scooby Doo impression. Here it comes, so say goodbye to 72 dots per inch.

“The old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology. Macs now ship with displays that sport displays with native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system, including the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks, will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays.”

Can you say, “security” Mrs Robinson? Mac OS X Leopard takes security seriously with more under the hood goodies that protect us from those banging on the hood.

If Apple is becoming a monopoly, toppling Sony and Microsoft, does that mean Apple is also becoming our Big Brother and watching our every move on the Mac?

Is Apple’s OS X becoming the security daddy we’re told we need by Emperor Steve?

“Leopard brings several new security enhancements to Mac OS X. The first of these is the adoption of the Mandatory Access Control (MAC) framework. This framework, original developed for TrustedBSD, provides a fine-grained security architecture for controlling the execution of processes at the kernel level. This enables sandboxing support in Leopard. By sandboxing an application, using a text profile, you can limit an application to being able to just access only the system features, such as disk or the network, that you permit. Also new in Leopard is code signing. This means that Leopard will be able to identify applications by using digital signatures and then use that identification to base trust decisions on.”

Developers make the applications that make our Macs special, and Apple is paying attention to developer needs; they hunger for eye candy, too.

For example, OS X Leopard will come with Xray Vision. It’s Leopard’s way to track user interface events in real-time to see how they affect I/O activity.

Confused? Don’t be. Developers will understand. We just need to buy Leopard and be happy.

“Xray is a brand-new, timeline-based performance visualization tool that gives you the ability to see how your application works like you’ve never been able to do before. It let’s you watch CPU, disk I/O, memory usage, garbage collection, events, and more in the form of graphs tied to time.”

I’m getting a sense that Apple is slowly undressing Leopard as Microsoft ramps up Windows Vista. By the time the latter ships, we’ll see even more of the former.

The Microsoft Emperor won’t be wearing any clothes, and Leopard will be fully naked, for all the world to see.

Under the hood, Leopard has more changes coming to iChat’s framework, iCal’s framework, QuickTime’s framework, and Open GL improvements said to be staggering.

Leopard’s new Image Kit ties together Core Image and Core Animation for imaging services within developer’s applications.

I don’t know what all that means, but I’m really thirsty for a drink of all this Leopard eye candy cola float.

“It provides functionality for finding, browsing, and viewing images in a collection. You can rearrange images in a group view as well as rotate individual images. Image Kit also provides a gateway for browsing, previewing, and setting Core Image filters on an image.”

See? That makes perfect sense, right?

For the most part, Apple is peeling the onion on what’s underneath Leopard, with the exception of Spaces and Time Machine. Why?

Most Mac users don’t buy what’s under the hood or behind the scenes. We buy what looks cool and makes our experience pleasant.

You won’t be the only one to think of Apple’s continual operating system updates as digital opium for the rest of us.

Apple insists that Leopard will ship in the spring of 2007. Going around the world in 80 days would get us back home in time for Macworld Expo, and more OS X.

Are you impressed or depressed about the features in Leopard? Are you ready to buy, credit card in hand, Leopard’s promise of better living through digital chemistry?

No? You dare say no? What does Tiger have that’s so compelling to keep it around another six months? After all, Tiger is just soooo 2005, you know?

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Classy Mac360 Photo By Jeffrey Mincey | I work as a PC System Administrator (Windows, Macs, Linux) for the state government in Atlanta, Georgia and have used Macs for more than 20 years. Most of it late at night.

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