There's a lot more to Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" than has been shown publicly to date....and we've got the dirt on the features as-yet unseen.
Due to the large volume of reports which have been consolidated to produce the feature list which follows, we are presenting it in a summary-form, bullet-list format. Not all of these have been confirmed with first-hand experience or direct source reports from Cupertino but all have survived at least the basic degree of grapevine vetting that it takes to reach our Publishing Desk, so here goes:
Improved InkWell technology, based largely on an injection of entirely new handwriting recognition code acquired by Apple in one of its several FY2006 small-company buyouts, intended to provide the basis for Apple's Project T-7 and other future iDevices.
Dramatically overhauled DVD Player, with chapter-by-chapter preview screenshots, several new ways to navigate through a disc/movie, and powerful new onscreen image-enhancement software designed to offer better upconversion quality on HDTVs for AppleTV and HD-connected Macs from the standard DVD rez. which is far below even AppleTV's mid-range 720p HD resolution.
Support for Blu-Ray, Apple's favored HD-DVD technology, is evident in several system components but is far from complete at the application level (there is no mention of Blu-Ray in the code or resource "forks" of the current DVD Player.app build for example).
Resolution Independence, one of Leopard's key features (and a very important part of what will make it so adaptable to the full range of computer displays, HDTVs, and iDevices), continues to pervade every level of Leopard's display techologies from QuickTime, QuickLook, and even custom extensions to Apple's OpenGL 2.x implementation. Threading of these resolution-independence implementations means that windows/objects drawn by different graphics layers (Quartz, QuickTime, OpenGL, etc) may be able to operate at different resolutions simultaneously -- that is, one window's contents may be displayed at 72ppi and another at 128ppi for example.
Terminal.app is being overhauled even more dramatically than seen in developer seeds to date, with an increasing number of Apple-customized technologies and file formats being used over the BSD UNIX-standard versions seen in Tiger.
The Terminal is also being enhanced with InkWell and resolution-independence technologies designed to enable its use on hybrid Mac-iDevice products like Project T-7.
Numerous drivers for as-yet unreleased products have been injected into the latest internal builds, but are expected to be left out of the "developer fork" which is used to build Developer Seeds sent out every few weeks to trusted third parties. Notably, these include multi-core/multi-GPU/multi-card graphics acceleration products offered by nVIDIA and ATi. Internal notes state that testing the "SLI" multi-GPU/single-display acceleration functionality offered through those drivers and the cards they support is a high priority if Leopard is to ship on time.
Interestingly, while most internal builds have been far less stable than their "developer fork" counterparts to date, the latest internal versions have been subject to an exhaustive stabilization effort and appear to be quite a bit more stable in areas like Finder copies over LAN/WAN, high resolution QuickTime playback under Quartz 2D-Extreme Acceleration, and the like.
Time Machine continues to evolve, and although it has been considered "largely mature" for the past two months or so, still experiences serious bugs which undermine its reliability. And of serious concern, according to reliable sources, is Apple's goal of delivering a production-quality degree of reliability from Time Machine in time for a "late spring" final release. If anything could hold back the 10.5.0 release beyond the final deadline of June 21st, Time Machine is frequently mentioned as the most likely cause of serious delays.
The Developer (Xcode) and Server (Leopard Server) add-on functionality which was significantly lagged behind Leopard "Proper" as of late last year, have now both leapfrogged ahead and are now comfortably on-schedule. In particular, features which cross over between the two (making Leopard Server a likely preferred environment for serious developers and large software companies) are intended to increase Server's market penetration and make it a key component of Mac software development. More on this convergence in an upcoming Rumor Report.
Anti-Phishing/Anti-Spam techologies continue to be a major focus for Safari and Mail, with developers at Infinite Loop focusing a majority of the time dedicated to those applications on functionality intended to completely and utterly shame Windows Vista's protection mechanisms which are already paltry in comparison to what was seen at last year's WWDC. Key anti-phishing/anti-scammer features which will operate system-wide in cooperation with Apple's anti-virus technologies are expected to be kept under careful wraps until this year's WWDC so that scammers/phishers will have limited time before release to adapt their scamming methods.
All in all, Infinite Loop's software geeks have been hard and work and although Leopard's incredible feature-richness has caused "slewing" of the projected release date (originally targeted at mid-Spring, now edging the very limit of the definition of "Spring" -- i.e. mid-June), we are very excited about Leopard's ongoing nature as a "Vista-Crusher." Every aspect, every facet of Mac OS 10.5 is designed to embarass and shame Microsoft's best operating system efforts.
And in fact, just by nature of its extreme flexibility in running on devices as "thin" as the iPhone and as "thick" as massive Xserve clusters or even Internet-distributed "virtual hardware," Leopard is far and away more 'future-ready' than Vista could ever be.
Part of this lies in the nature of OS X as a platform-agnostic, highly flexible platform which it has been since day one when NeXT's OpenStep became "Rhapsody".....but the rest is directly tied to Goal #1 on the very first Leopard Concept Document: "Run anywhere, Port Fast, Consolidate all Devices."
Stay tuned for much more in our ongoing series of Leopard development reports! We are proud to be the only Mac Rumor Site to have covered Mac OS X from the days of the Be-NeXT competition through to today, and we are very much looking forward to a future powered by Leopard and Beyond.
