Leopard to get first outing at Apple developer conference

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 27 June 2006 02:12

Business IT - Technology

Apple has confirmed that it will preview the next incarnation of OS X, codenamed Leopard, at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in August.
CEO Steve Jobs will lead a team of Apple executives, including Philip Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing; Bertrand Serlet, senior vice president of Software Engineering and Scott Forstall, vice president of Platform Experience.

Apple promises that developers will "receive detailed information and best practices on developing universal applications that take advantage of the performance of Intel-based Macs, including special sessions on performance optimisation using Apple software development tools."

{mosgoogle left}Jobs announced plans for the preview at WWDC last year. Leopard is expected to be released in late 2006 or early 2007, around the same time as Vista, the biggest upgrade to Microsoft Windows in years.

The strongest rumour circulating about Leopard features is that it will have a completely redesigned Finder that relies almost entirely on Spotlight search technology. The new Finder would help users search through the metadata of their files (name, file type, creator, creation date, modification date, associated keywords, size, etc) in real time, as they currently can in iTunes.

According to Wikipedia, "A more ambitious rumour is that Apple plans to gather secondary metadata through a number of analysis techniques. For example, analysing the tone and pitch of an MP3 to determine the genre, using speech recognition to extract the lyrics from a song, using OCR to index and search images, or analysing a photograph to determine if it was a night or day shot, etc."

Technologies such as the Google Mini and Google Search Appliance, introduced into Australia last week,  are touted as being the next generation of user interface to enterprise IT systems by using search technologies rather than traditional hierarchical directories to access both content and applications. Apple's Spotlight goes some way in this direction within a single computer, so it seems highly likely that Leopard will extend this to make major changes to the way users routinely access the files and applications on their Mac.

 Rumour sites are also reporting virtualisation features in Leopard that will allow the Windows operating system to run inside Mac OS X.

Australia's Mac community will get a preview of WWDC well in advance of their US counterparts, although it is almost certain that Apple will keep its powder dry on Leopard until the big event.

Apple announced in May that it would preview WWDC 2006 conference at seminar events in all mainland capitals except Darwin. Speakers at the events will include David Colville from Key Options Technology, a specialist in IT services to the Education and SME markets, and Tess Collins who is the partnership manager of Apple Developer Relations for Australia and New Zealand.