“Apple’s newest build of Mac OS X 10.5 distributed to developers is showing signs of nearing completion, but Leopard has not yet reached release candidate status with build 9A559,” Think Secret reports.
“Of note, Front Row has seen a substantial face-lift with 9A559 and along with getting its own icon in the Applications folder, like Dashboard, Expose, and Spaces, the interface now resembles that of AppleTV,” Think Secret reports.
“Also completely revamped in 9A559 is the VoiceOver utility, which gains Braille support and other features for the first time in Leopard… Support for resolution independence, which has rudimentary support in Tiger and had been rumored to be arriving with full support in Leopard, remains no where to be found. With Apple still planning to ship Leopard in October, the company has roughly two weeks to push Leopard to golden master status to allow ample time for the final product to reach retail channels,” Think Secret reports.
Full article, with link to a gallery of Mac OS X Leopard (build 9A559) screenshots, here.
Whatever. I’m sure it will be great. I’m getting tired of all the “here’s a new icon” posts. I’m more interested in functional aspects, like a rumored speed improvement over Tiger…
Looks pretty and all, nice new features… BUT
It ain’t working very well folks. Lots of bugs. Lots of panics. Lots of spinning beach balls. Lots and lots of crashing going on. Lots of problems with lots of apps, including many of Apple’s own.
Just wondering if that note from Cupertino about transferring the best and brightest over to iPhone thus delaying Leopard release has been bigger problem than we know.
We’re very, very close to lines forming outside Apple stores coast to coast and at no time in the history of Apple has a new OS ever been less ready to go this close to launch date.
Pictures are fun. Eye candy. A fully ready, fully stabilized, fully functional OS 10.5 is what we need. There won’t be another delay, so here’s hoping for miracles in the next couple of weeks.
Apple got serious about security and privacy.
For instance I would like to be able to turn off downloading in Safari. It’s not good for my newbies.
Second I wish there was some sort of filtering to elliminate the “trick links” to illegal images and sites. Comercial software is just too darn slow, can screw with your system/updates.
Third I wish Apple would give users a choice of glossy or matte screens. Not mandating glossy which is annoying as all hell.
Fourth, there should be absolutely no reason for most application installs to demand such root like power to do what the fsck it wants with your machine. It’s like playing russian roulette. Once you give a malicious app the admin password (aka sudo w/root powers) it can alter everythng you see, including Mac OS X itself.
App installs and other “admin type” actions should use the admin password, but Mac OS X itself should only be alterable with a geniune ROOT password. This way regardless of what someone installs, marketing motivated developers, spies and whatnot. Mac OS X stays Mac OS X. Rock solid secure.
The more levels of security the better. As long as it’s not being assine like Vista is.
@MDN
Have you run 9A559? How’s it working for you. Is the core OS ready or not?
Why no specific release date? Next week is October already. The UK release of iPhone is 7 November. The release of MS Office for Mac (ughh) is set for 15 January, yet no specific date for Leopard. Why???
This is not something that Apple can quietly release. It’s needs to be advertised, marketed, hyped, the whole nine yards, yet we have silence.
Some sites are touting that Leopard is near Final Candidate. Yeah, that’s great, but considering during the Developer’s Conference (way back in early June), we were informed that it was nearly or almost finished. I guess that “nearly” and “almost” are subjective terms.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a cow over it being delayed again, but rather that the secretive and silence concerning a specific release date. Apple “should” keep it’s loyal customers informed.
ack in June, Mary Jo Foley of ZDnet fame wrote a stunningly concise article, “Leopard looks like … Vista”. Truer words were never spoken! Many of you peolpe out there do not realize the truth, all software is born at Microsoft, even our competitor’s! You see the Apple hackers constantly scour our site for hints of what we are planing for the future, they send spys, moles, fake pizza-boys,… In their desperation they even steal experimental betas so far from production that even most MS employees don’t realise that we are developing them. They then slap some of their crappy code under these interfaces and claim to have developed it first.
This is why Leopard and all of the so called versions of OSX over the past 5 years looks like Vista, you see, Vista is the real thing. We just take our time to make sure it is done right before releasing to the public. We care, we take our time, we do stable coding. Don’t be duped by imitations.
Ms Foley, you have been backing down, trying to explain, apologising, … DON’T! Stand strong, tell the truth, you were absolutely right all the time, “Leopard looks like Vista!”
Hey, Caution Ahead… Why must you write such crap when you know you’re full of it?!! I don’t think you have any “inside” info as you seem to pretend and are just looking for attention!
Whats with the ugly “windows” like folders in Leopard? Some icons and such look great, but other stuff looks very plain jane!
hey fakesteveballmer,
Steve Ballmer is a bad choice to parody as he is a real life parody of himself. Throwing chairs, sweatily dancing back and forth repeatedly screaming “developers!”, claiming the hardware division will make a profit this year; its like everything he does is a setup for a wacky reality show – except its real life Microsoft 2007. Your drivel is no where as entertaining as the real thing.
Actually, I would like to see a “real” uninstaller… dare I say, like Windows has. If you install a game or two, it adds files all over and it turns out they don’t all have their own uninstaller.
I would be fine with a Nov ship date if they have it rock solid in stability VS just getting it out.
I agree with Jaxson. the days of just “throwing the app. in the garbage” is long gone. There are remnant files EVERYWHERE! Pain in the ash it is. It’s almost as bad a XP…
I wonder how much Apple is paid to place web sites like Expedia and Monster Jobs in the default bookmarks of Safari. Has to be some revenue there. I agree with Jaxson about the uninstall, and it cannot be left to the 3rd party app publishers; Apple needs to have this now at the System level. But please don’t make it like the Windows version. You always run into the “XXX.xxx is a file that may be shared by other applications. It might be okay to remove, but won’t hurt to leave it.” I remember removing one of those and discovering too late that 3 or 4 other apps quit working.
I love how some people are purposely saying that it has lots of bugs and spinning beachballs… if that is the case how is 559 my main OS and I have not had one app crash or the OS crash? Everything is faster than Tiger and everything runs smoothly. CS3: flawless, MSOffice: Flawless, iApps: flawless. So… please tell me what is so buggy and crashy about this build? This build could ship as 10.5.0 and no one would report malfunctioning.
@jtrwallace
Thanks for the spin free info (no pun intended)
This thread is a classic of the genre.
FUD production by people so scared of Apple they have to waste their time doing nothing constructive at all for anyone…
Thank you jtrwallace
I have enough screenshots of Leopard that if i run it as a slide show
its like having Leopard, but not. Whens ‘actual’ Leopard coming Apple?
It’s going to be an awesome release. Even with all the teenage angst dripping from these posts.
I’ve been running ‘559 on my computer for six years and it’s terrible. The network of bugs is so bad that when I click on some links all of the electricity in my house goes out. You’ve heard of the Iraq War? That happened when I tried dragging iPhoto into the garbage. Seriously everyone, Leopard sucks so bad that my kid was actually absorbed into the interface two weeks ago when he tottered by. Still, I bet they have it up and humming enough to announce on Oct 30 and ship by mid-November.
Perhaps it’s just a diversionary tactic from Apple. Leopard is almost here.
Wow whoever wrote down there that Leopard looks like vista is a retard! Vista looks like Mac OSX Tiger! come on now look at there search engine same as the Mac search engine which came out a while ago! Gadgets?…are you serious?…lol now if that isnt a rip off I dont know what is! I mean just the clean look that vista is trying to pull of is like copying Mac! The list goes on and on. And the fact that you had the nerve to write that MS takes there time to send out a good product is ignorant! I remember when XP came out… the a couple of weeks later there was a giant book of updates that needed to be done to XP before you could even get it work to an ….egghhh stage! Mac right now is taking there time to get a great product on the market. They dont make the same mistakes as MS as far as rushing a product out there for money. Thanks Steve Ballmer for the laugh though.
Thank you, Nick dePlume! I promise I will come visit you in jail!!!
“This is not something that Apple can quietly release. It’s needs to be advertised, marketed, hyped, the whole nine yards, yet we have silence.”
OH yee of little knowledge. Apple has a conference and talks about Leopard. Steve says, “And its available for sale today.” And the Apple stores quickly sell tons.
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What are guys talking about? Leopard was released in Spring ’07. Apple would never “Longhorn” this just for telephones, Geez.
Just my $0.02
You guys know what. I love Tiger. I could use this OS for 5 more years and still be comfortable using it.
I want 10.5 really bad for a number of reasons, but this OS I am using to process the text you read is still the best OS made to date.
Let apple perfect the way this current OS is. I’ll wait however long it takes as long as it is everything 10.4 is and more.
frisby
I have read that 559 is pretty damn stable.
What I would like to know is – where are all the “Top Secret” features. Let’s face it — the main 10 features Jobs showed are about it as far as I can tell. Maybe underlying system enhancements, and of course the eye candy, but “Top Secret” features?? Not so sure.