More digging reveals other things that Steve skipped for the sake of brevity in this morning’s keynote. I’ve been rifling Apple’s pages for any hint of what else Leopard contains, and I’ve found quite a lot. I’ve already posted about Mail 3.0’s inclusion of RSS and iChat’s Screen Sharing, so let me mention a few other things.
For example, according to the press release, Apple will add a Movie showtimes widget in Leopard. They’ll also reportedly be beefing up security in Safari and Mail with anti-phishing technologies (a good move on their part; phishing scams don’t care what OS you run), and adding “an automatic firewall that limits network resources available to an application.” Fairly vague, but nice to hear that security is getting its due. More control over the firewall will definitely help to appease some power users.
Apple was surprisingly mum on what platforms Leopard would appear on, with speculation having run rampant in the past few days over whether or not the PowerPCs would be supported, or whether Apple might start dropping older iterations of the processor. So far, the only clue I can find is on the 64-bit computing page:
Bridge the Generation GapWell, that seems to suggest that PowerPCs are safe for a while yet. I can’t say I’m surprised: PowerPC is way too much of their installed base for them to abandon it so soon after the Intel transition. But glad to hear the G3s are still supported; I’m looking forward to adding Leopard to my upgraded B&W G3.
Now that the entire operating system is 64-bit, you can take full advantage of the Xeon chip in Mac Pro and Xserve. You get more processing power at up to 3.0GHz, without limiting your programs to command-line applications, servers, and computation engines. From G3 to Xeon, from MacBook to Xserve, there is just one Leopard. [emphasis added]
THANK GOD, PowerPC isn't dead yet at Apple.