After a months-long delay that only seemed to provoke greater buzz and anticipation, Mac OS X Leopard and OS X Server Leopard will go on sale at 6:00 PM on October 26, 2007. Apple boasts 300 new features in its Leopard client OS, and 250 new features in its server operating environment. During a harried 15-minute briefing, Brian Croll, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Mac OS X, rattled off what he considers to be the high points in the client version of OS X Leopard: A redesigned desktop with a consistent look across applications, and a semi-transparent menu bar to allow desktop backgrounds to show through. A redesigned Dock, a row of icons for launching frequently-used applications, with a semi-transparent background and reflections under each icon. Finder, OS X’s counterpart to Windows’ Explorer, has an updated Sidebar. The customizable collection of icons for frequently-accessed folders now locates and displays network files shared from PCs and Macs on the same LAN. Finder has gotten an overall revamping to a more intuitive and modern look and feel. The new Finder borrows its appearance and behavior from iTunes, Apple’s media player and content purchasing interface, including an iTunes feature called Cover Flow that lets you flip through images and other viewable content like pages in an album. “It’s really fun and useful to browse content on the PCs and Macs on your network using Cover Flow,” said Croll. Most viewable content types, such as images and PDF and Word documents, can be viewed with Finder’s integrated Quick Look without launching an additional application. To-do lists synchronize with both Mail and iCal, OS X Leopard’s bundled e-mail and calendar/scheduling clients. Croll said, “We’ve noticed that people send reminders to themselves in e-mail.” Leopard’s Mail application implements Data Detectors, which scan e-mail messages for phone numbers, e-mail addresses and street addresses. These can be added to Leopard’s Address Book, located in Google Maps or copied into iCal. iChat, Apple’s bundled instant messaging client, takes on a host of new features in Leopard, including special effects from OS X’s Photo Booth Web cam snapshot app (iSight Web cameras are standard in Intel-based Mac client systems). Leopard’s iChat also supports the live playback of images, audio and video during a live chat, and users can share their screens for remote viewing or remote control. Croll also pointed to several new facilities for OS X Leopard Developers: Core Animation automates smooth 2-D animation with simulated 3-D paths and transforms; Xcode 3.0 is a rich integrated development environment for programs written in C, C++. Objective-C and other languages; Xray, adapted from Sun’s DTrace, lets developers monitor and profile applications while they execute without the hassle of a debugger. Croll described “reasonable system requirements” for Leopard that reach well into Apple’s legacy PowerPC platforms. Any Macintosh with a 32-bit PowerPC G4 CPU running at 867 MHz or higher can run Leopard, as can all Macs with 64-bit PowerPC G5. All Intel Macs support Leopard, and Croll said that the minimum memory requirement for all architectures is 512 MB. An optical drive capable of reading DVD media is also required.Croll laid out the plan for upgrading recent buyers of Mac systems from Apple’s currently shipping operating system, OS X Tiger, to Leopard. Apple is giving Mac buyers, including those who purchased Apple’s Xserve rack server, a free copy of Leopard (for a handling fee of $9.95) provided that they purchased their systems after October 1, 2007. Customers purchasing new Mac or Xserve systems after October 26 will receive Leopard either pre-installed on their systems or as a DVD inside the box. Boxed copies of OS X Leopard client and Server will be priced at $129 and $999, respectively. A family pack with five client licenses of OS X Leopard will sell for $199. Apple’s Web site for Leopard can be found at http://www.apple.com/macosx. Software Development