There’s a Big Cat Around the Corner…

Yep, it is that time. Leopard, also known as OS X 10.5, will be released on 26th October. Just 1 week from now, you can say ‘Hello Tomorrow’ and ‘Add a new Mac to your Mac’.

If you keep up to date with all the Apple news, you’ll have seen all of Leopards key features (If not Apple has conveniently listed them here); but let’s look at it a different way. What will Leopard do for Mac apps?

Well to get us started, there is Core Animation, which is mainly for developers. It makes it much simpler to make animations, and to animate things within a window. These effects are shown with both Spaces and Time Machine (more on them later); but with 3rd Party Mac apps, we’re likely to see lots more ‘delicious generation’ apps (apps that are often largely based on style - and substance).

This could be good for us, as it will take developers less time to create beautiful apps, however, we will have to wait and see how much of Core Animation is actually used. One Leopard-only app, already announced, is Delicious Library 2. As the name suggests it is a ‘delicious’ app, of which version 2 is said to heavily use Core Animation. It has already won Best Leopard app at the 2007 Apple Design Awards.

Next Up, System Wide 64-bit. This isn’t a big one… yet. 64-bit support basically gives the system the ability to access more memory and more resources at the same time. This won’t make a lot of difference yet, as most things still use less than 4GB (The limit for 32-bit), but as apps and files grow, we’ll see how useful this becomes.

Quick Look, coupled with the new Finder could also be interesting. You’re likely to see a slew of updates with a new, high resolution icons come out just after leopard does; as well as 3rd Party file formats changing very slightly. If you look inside a Pages ‘08 document (Right Click, Show Package Contents) you’ll see that Quick Look support is all ready there.

Unfortunately, Leopard is likely to see the end of some apps, due to built-in support. Apps such as Virtue Desktops, Overflow and Super Duper could see the end of their development due to Spaces, Stacks and Time Machine respectively. However the majority are likely to continue to be developed, as in most of the cases, they offer something slightly different, but the people behind Virtue Desktops have all ready announced the end of the product’s life.

It’s also more likely that we will see more widgets, due to the fact that DashCode will be included. DashCode is a simple development environment where you can develop a simple widget without knowing any coding, or where you can create complicated widgets with coding knowledge. It makes life easier for a ‘Pro’ widget developer with instant debugging, and like Xcode, includes code snippets to make it quicker to develop widgets.

Due to an upgrade to Objective-C 2.0 we may also see shorter release cycles and better memory management. The shorter release cycles may come partly due to Xray, which helps analyse apps, and show where they are having problems, or where memory leaking problems are. Better memory management comes on behalf of Xcode 3 and ‘Garbage Collection’ which seeks out parts of the app which are not used, and removes their memory use, to allow other apps to use the memory. This is a very basic description, but it’s fairly well explained here in Wikipedia. Leopard also sports an updated version of OpenGL, the graphics engine in OS X.

On the surface Leopard is a solid update; not amazing, but it brings OS X together, unifies it, and adds a few long requested features. However, dig a little deeper, and in the world of Mac applications, Leopard is an excellent update, which is likely to bring us lots of nice new or updated apps.

You can pre-order Leopard now at your local Apple Store (USA, UK, International), so check back to MacApper for lots of Leopard App reviews as new software is released!