Mac OS X Leopard

I'm going to chiong blogging in this blog for the next hour or so before I chiong mugging.

Note to MC: MAC is different from Mac

Mac OS X Leopard is the next generation of operating system for Macintosh. The ones we are using in the iMac G4s (Mac Lab) are Mac OS X Panther. A few of them are Mac OS X Tiger though, like the Admin's iMac and 2 of the iMacs at the back. The audio and video PowerMac G5s in the studio are Panther and Tiger respectively.

Just for your info, the generations of Mac OS X:
Mac OS X v10.0 (Cheetah)
Mac OS X v10.1 (Puma)
Mac OS X v10.2 (Jaguar)
Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther)
Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger)
Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard) [Release on March/April 2007]

For those who are interested in the features of Leopard, I'm going to sum up the info for you in this post. Apple first previewed Leopard on 7 August 2006 at Worldwide Developers' Conference (WWDC) and many of you may know nuts about it, which is not surprising since its a developers' conference. The one most of you will be interested in is Macworld Expo, which is a consumer conference held in January every year. This is when all those new iPods are usually revealed.

Back to Leopard. At WWDC, Apple refused to show the killer features, which they claim to have, but they do not want to reveal them until a later date as they 'do not want the photocopiers to start running'. Instead, they showcased several major features which were already out in the market as third party applications.

Time Machine
This, as you may have guessed it from its name, is a backing up tool to restore any file on the spot. Instead of Windows' System Restore (which fails 75% of the time), you do not have to restore your entire computer to that particular time in the past. Instead, you can choose to only retrieve a single or multiple files from the time in the past. This does not only work with files in Finder, but also in every other application like iPhoto, Address Book, Mail etc. Click on the link above to see how it works. It has a sweet user interface too.

Spaces
Some of you might go crazy by opening up one hellava bunch of applications at a time, surfing the net, chatting on MSN, listening to music, video editing etc. Eventually, you will end up with so many windows that when you try to do a single task at a time, your desktop is cluttered up with unnecessary apps. This is when Spaces come into the picture. It allows you to have multiple desktops at any one time, and you can shift applications to and fro between each virtual desktop. Don't be mistaken, you don't need to have multiple monitors for this. Just one. Again, check out the link above for a preview of it.

The other features are more for developers than us so I'll leave it to you guys to find out for yourself. Check out iChat, its pretty cool too.

Count yourself lucky to be using the most advanced operating system in the world. I believe you'll be able to use Leopard next year, and maybe even acquire new iMacs.