The Leopard Unveiled

The big news in the blogosphere today is of course the unveiling of Mac OSX Leopard during Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference (WWDC). Steve Jobs devoted a large chunk of his keynote address to the new features of the next generation operation system. As usual, there was a lot of speculation as to the hidden features of Leopard that Jobs was likely to unveil at the event. Much was said about an upgrade to the user interface. Leopard does herald changes to the user interface but nothing that is really revolutionary. There is definitely a lot of new eye candy that will be introduced which continues to set the bar and distinguish OSX from the less flashy Windows interface.

The ubiquitous Finder interface receives an welcomed upgrade and the now famous Coverflow interface is introduced as an alternative way of flipping through the documents instead of the traditional two dimensional iconic view. The Dock is also upgraded with a more three dimensional look and feel and acts less like a dock but more like a platform that extends into the desktop. The Dock is further enhanced by an animated Stacks interface that behaves like a springloaded folder that causes the contents of a stacked folder to pop up its contents when clicked. Again, very cool but not unnecessarily a huge leap in user interface design.

The multiple desktop concept is now embedded in Leopard as "Spaces". It works pretty much like many third party utilities that provide the capability to define multiple virtual desktops to hold windows. Leopard introduces a super fast preview capability called Quick Look that looks great. This is a significant upgrade to the Preview application in Tiger. The contents many common file types can viewed instantly by pressing the spacebar when the document is selected.

There were a couple of features that Jobs demoed that really got me to sit up. The first is a technology called Core Animation. This is not a end user capability but a framework that allows developers to build richer and more visually engaging applications. Jobs demoed a test application that had the WOW factor set on maximum. Unfortunately I've not been able to find that specific clip on YouTube but it's in the streamed keynote video feed and it's worth checking out. The application is a variation of the video wall demo clip found in Apple TV. The awesome part is that each clip on the immense video wall is a live running video clip and not static snapshots. Furthermore, each clip has been tagged so that when keywords are typed in, the relevant clips fly out from the video wall and line up Coverflow style. It makes more sense when you actually view the keynote video - go check it out ! Extremely slick effects.

The other hot feature that Jobs demoed was iChat. I have to say, I don't even use iChat but the new features blew me away. Firstly, there was iChat Theatre. This uses Quick Look to allow users to effectively run videos, slideshows, presentations of share any file over a video iChat session. This is an incredibly useful feature that is not found in any personal desktop video conference application today in any platform. For less productive capabilities but nevertheless incredibly fun are the Backdrop and Photobooth effects. Backdrop allows users to select different video backdrops for a video chat session and Photobooth brings the awesome effects to video. The hologram effect has to be seen to be believed !

Am I looking forward to Leopard - hell yeah ! Drop by the official site and check out the demoes of the new features. And as an aside, I'm very happy that Apple has finally upgraded the look and feel of Apple.com. I complained previously about the dated site.

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