“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.
I finally spent some time with 9A527, and at first I thought I may very well dead end my G4 PowerBooks with 10.4.10. Evidently the hidden functions of mds, mdimport, mdsync were swallowing my dated CPU, but once their mysterious functions were accomplished. I quickly became addicted. So let the beach ball bounce, because there a whole lotta info about your stuff that Leopard want to know.
About the eye-candy: Space is great, have several virtual desktops where certain apps get to play in private will work for me. I just wish I could put different background pics on each one.
Stacks will help me reopen, but the limit of items is too small for my mess. The show artwork and new sidebar in finder will change my life. Shared volumes lack an eject triangle.
The screen sharing and enhanced parental controls are also going to get used in this house.
SInce I ran my test, another 30 build have happened, icons have changed, voice over has been revised etc. Time machine was not completely deployed though it tried several times to start even though it was off. It does prompt you if you want your backup on the same volume as startup, since this does defeat the purpose.
Shit! Leopard is so much better than Vista! But it doesn’t matter. Windows is da bom! We’ve have the marketing niche for so long Apple can never catch up. Besides, I’m a Harvard drop-out, so that makes me really smart.
By the way ladies… I’m rich, too! Melinda won’t mind; we’re not on speaking terms (except email using Microsoft Outlook)!
Leopard is expected to be released on Friday the 26th of October 2007. 9A559 has been running on my system (without shutdown) for seven days, no Kernel Panics (compared to 9A466 with 1 every two days) Buttons have been solidified and are no longer aqua lozenges in more places. The new display views of System Preferences, Photo Slideshows have been updated to use RAM not VRAM in order to prevent KP’s. And by the way, Kernel Panic windows are much easier to read, so you know…Okay need to restart this PREVIEW BUILD. with any Shitty Windows Crap Out 4.0 you spend around three hours trying to read the crippled yellow font in the Blue Screen of Death and the DLL error Hell and the Registry Errors, the Errors “Please Re-Instal WIndows. FATAL ERROR” dialogues. Should I continue???. The menu bar has been updated to be more opaque and the icons included have been re-designed to better suit the colour and style of the menu bar. (The new Leopard Design is not a Theme, it is a full overhaul, not little graphics placed over the Mac OS 9 meu bar and backgrounds, unlike windows. Oh, and with every Mac that supports Leopard, It has the Deafult Leopard Style, not the Mac OS 9 Theme with a dialogue saying “Sorry, the Base Score of your computer doesn’t meet the requirements for the default Leopard Theme.”
And you don’t need to disable elements or hack the Registry (if it even existed) to enable the Leopard Theme. And on comparison, the Dashboard doesn’t take 400 MB of RAM.