Mac OS X v10.5

Encyclopedia : M : MA : MAC : Mac OS X v10.5

This article or section contains information about scheduled or expected .
The content may change dramatically as the software release approaches and more information becomes available.

Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" is the upcoming sixth major release of Mac OS X for Apple's Macintosh computers. Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated during his keynote speech on June 6, 2005 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that Apple intended to release Leopard at the end of 2006 or early 2007, and that he would talk about the operating system in greater detail during the 2006 WWDC.

Contents

1 Processor
2 Features
3 Speculation
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

Processor

Leopard will be available for PowerPC machines, as well as new Intel machines. It is not known if both the PowerPC and Intel versions will be a single disc using Universal Binaries, but evidence so far suggests this will be the case. The Apple DVD developer install kit took advantage of this feature, meaning a user can install the operating system on either a PowerPC or an x86 system using the same disc. Universal binaries allow software manufacturers to make one binary which is compatible with both platforms, greatly easing the transition to the Intel architecture.

Features

Leopard will include a software assistant currently called Boot Camp, a piece of software that was revealed as a public beta on April 5 2006, that assists in the installation of Windows XP Home or Professional Edition (SP2 only). This software, which only works on Intel-based Macs, prepares a separate partition for the installation of Windows XP on the Mac's hard drive. This allows Windows XP to run natively, rather than emulated with Microsoft Virtual PC or virtualized with VMware or Parallels Workstation. This means that applications can run at full speed, although only one operating system can be run at one time.

Although intended for the installation of Windows XP, Boot Camp can be used to assist in the installation of other operating systems such as beta versions of Vista as well as other operating systems such as Linux and Solaris.

Speculation

Garbage collection for the Objective-C runtime was rumored to be a planned feature of v10.5, based on the man page for Apple's version of GCC that was included with Xcode 2.2:

-fobjc-gc
Enable garbage collection (GC) for Objective-C objects.  The
resulting binary can only be used on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and
later systems, due to additional functionality needed in the (NeXT)
Objective-C runtime.

However this man page was changed to remove all mention of 10.5 with the release of Xcode 2.3 in May 2006.

Another theory is that the new OS will feature a redesigned Finder that relies almost entirely on Spotlight search technology. The new Finder would help users search through the metadata of their files (name, file type, creator, creation date, modification date, associated keywords, size, etc.) in real time, as they currently can in iTunes. Along these lines the Finder might display files and their metadata in much the same way as iTunes displays songs; with the ability to quickly sort on and modify that data.

A more ambitious rumor is that Apple plans to gather secondary metadata through a number of analysis techniques. For example, analyzing the tone and pitch of an MP3 to determine the genre, using speech recognition to extract the lyrics from a song, using OCR to index and search images, or analyzing a photograph to determine if it was a night or day shot, etc.

Leopard is expected to include user-accessible resolution independence, i.e. the capability to size system graphics in physical units--inches, for example, as opposed to pixels. This feature results in standard size graphics independent of the device on which they are viewed. While there was some support for this in 10.4/Tiger, the developer documentation for 10.4 stresses that this is preliminary support in preparation for a "future release of Mac OS X".

References

External links

History of the Apple Macintosh Operating Systems
Mac OS>Classic Mac OS (History): System 6 · System 7 · Mac OS 8 · Mac OS 9
Mac OS X (History of Mac OS X>History): Public Beta · v10.0 · v10.1 · v10.2 · v10.3 · v10.4 · v10.5
Mac OS X Server: Rhapsody (OS)>Rhapsody · Mac OS X Server 1.0 · Mac OS X Server
Other OS projects: A/UX · Taligent · Copland · Darwin (operating system)>Darwin