Leopard to be a hit, ‘top secret’ features or not
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Oct 18, 2007 at 1:46am
Thank goodness. Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”), delayed since spring (due to work on the iPhone), goes on sale Friday, Oct. 26. That’s 2.5 years after Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”) began to prowl. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the system update, even though it won’t have all the bells and whistles rumors, speculation and wishful thinking had Apple trotting out at the last minute.
As AppleMatters points out looking at Apple’s “300+ New Features” web page for Leopard reveals nothing significant above what was first shown in August 2006. The Finder upgrade, Quick Look, Time Machine, Mail 3, iChat 4, Spaces, Safari 3, Parental Controls upgrade, and Boot Camp are what are highlighted—and we’ve known about all of this for months.
So what were the “top secret” features everyone expected? There was speculation that Apple planned to allow Windows apps to run directly in Mac OS X without having to reboot using Boot Camp. Of course, third party solutions (Parallels Desktop, Fusion, Crossover, etc.) allow you to do this, but some folks were hoping it would be an innate feature of Leopard.
There was also talk that Apple planned some revolutionary (or eye candy-ish, depending on your point of view) Finder attributes that would incorporate 3D graphics and animation. There was talk of features specifically designed to appeal to enterprise users, facial recognition log-on security using the iSight camera, and other stuff that never saw the light of day.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m jazzed about Leopard and its previously announced features. But if some folks are disappointed and were expecting some new earth-shaking features beyond what Apple CEO previewed at the 2006 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, the company only has Da Boss to blame.
During his WWDC keynote, Jobs started by saying: “Let me start off with some of the stuff that we can’t show you. There’s some top secret features to Leopard that we’re going to keep a little close to the vest and not going to show you today. I just want you to know they’re there. We don’t want our friends to start their photocopiers any sooner than they have to. So we’re going to keep a few things a little secret.”
Top secret features or not, Leopard looks to be a major enhancement of the Mac OS and a big seller. And for more fun, we can start speculating on what Mac OS X 10.6 will bring.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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