“Earlier this month, Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs unveiled new hardware at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) — and more importantly, offered an early look at Mac OS X 10.5, code-named Leopard. Although Jobs noted that some features of the company’s next operating system, which is due out sometime early in 2007, would remain secret for now, he did take developers through a tour of some of the software’s new features,” Yuval Kossovsky reports for Computerworld.
“Apple, unlike Microsoft, keeps its operating systems tightly veiled in secrecy until they are formally launched. That means real hands-on experiences are far and few between,” Kossovsky reports. “Lucky me: I got a chance to see it up close and personal. What I saw proved again that Apple has the most sophisticated user interface (UI) for an operating system out there — and at the same time is always looking for ways to make computing even more practical, simple and fun.”
Kossovsky reports, “In Leopard, the operating system, comand-line interface and even the application interface are 64-bit. This means all applications will have access to the full amount of installed RAM and will not be limited to 4GB. Imagine 16GB of RAM allocated to image rendering or genome sequencing. This should have the science, technology and creative folks salivating. Moreover, unlike some other operating systems [like Windows], the 64-bit version is fully 32-bit compatible. So there is only a single flavor of Apple’s next Mac OS, which is fully native on Intel and PowerPC machines and offers one master install.”
“The first close-up view I had of Leopard told me this is going to be a great release,” Kossovsky reports.
Full article here.
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