“Apple Computer’s recently previewed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has made quite a stir, not because of what was shown at the World Wide Developer Conference but of what was excluded from show, cited ‘Top Secret.’ However, the build released to attendees at the conference includes a huge number of ground-breaking changes to the underlying technology in Mac OS X and the APIs exposed to developers,’ AeroXperience (AeroXP), a Windows Vista Developers Community, reports.

AeroXP has received information detailing several of the API improvements to Leopard, including:

• Leopard will feature resolution-independent user interface and there are several functions to get the current scaling factor and apply it to pixel measurements. It is a good idea to use vector controls and buttons (PDF will work fine) or to have multiple sized resources, similar to Mac OS X icon design, so you can scale to the nearest size for the required resolution.

• Carbon, the set of APIs built upon Classic MacOS and used by most 3rd party high-profile Mac OS X applications, now allows Cocoa views to be embedded into the application. This could provide applications like Photoshop and Microsoft Office access to advanced functions previously only available to Cocoa applications.

• Time Machine has an API that allows developers to exclude unimportant files from a backup set which improves backup performance and reduces space needed for a backup.

• Core Image has been upgraded to allow access to RAW images directly

• Leopard also gives developers access to a “Latent Semantic Mapping” framework, which is the basis for spam protection in Mail. It allows you to analyze text and train the engine to restrict items with specific content(like spam e-mail for example).

• Quicktime 7.1 is included, and the underlying QTKit framework is greatly improved. There is improved correction for nonsquare pixels, use of the clean aperture which is the “user-displayable region of video that does not contain transition artifacts caused by the encoding process”, support for aperture mode dimensions, improved pitch and rate control for audio and a number of developer improvements, like QuickTime capture from sources like cameras and microphones, full screen recording or QuickTime stream recording. Live content from a capture can be broadcast as a stream over the network.

More here.

MacDailyNews Note: We’d treat these as unconfirmed rumors for now. Make of them what you will.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "vitaboy" for the heads up.]

Related MacDailyNews article:
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to feature ‘resolution independence?’ – May 21, 2006