Has Apple rested on its laurels, basking in the success of Mac OS X 10.4? No, while the rest of us have barely caught our breath since Tiger launched last summer at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple has been working away on OS X 10.5. However, other than its codename - Leopard - little is known about the release. No developers outside of Apple have been seeded with copies, and no specifications are yet known. But having talked to our experts, users and inside sources we can give you a sneaky insight into what Leopard might bring.
Despite the dearth of released information, there are some facts that can be gleaned about Leopard by reading between the lines, and lookin.g at both the directions Apple is following with its hardware and the pressures of the marketplace. Windows Vista, the update to Windows due before the end of the year, will place competitive pressure on Apple - which the company will have to answer with Leopard. And, finally, Apple will undoubtedly take into account the needs of its third-party developers creating new applications, as well as the thoughts of users.
So far, the clearest information about the arrival of Leopard is also the simplest: the date. According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who first mentioned the existence of the product at last year's WWDC, it will be delivered to users some time around 'the end of 2006 or the beginning of 2007'. This means Leopard will be the second release of OS X to break the cycle of major updates occurring every 12 months or so, as it will be at least 18 months since Tiger's debut.
The timing of Leopard is significant, as it means the product will make its first appearance around the same time as Vista. The next version of Windows will contain many features aimed at catching up with the current state of OS X, but also several that are likely to take it a step beyond Tiger. The aim with Leopard is clearly two-fold: to steal some of Microsoft's thunder from its announcement, and to emphasise that Apple's rate of operating system development continues to outpace that of its rival.
At the heart of creating a great operating system is a simple maxim: give users what they want, but make it easier than they could possibly imagine. To that end, Apple will have been listening to the Mac community about what they want, and will undoubtedly respond with features to match.
However, the company also has a wider community in its sights: the huge base of Windows users that have grown disaffected with the platform, lamenting the time they have to take ensuring that their machines are free of spyware, malware and viruses. As Jobs put it in a recent interview with Newsweek, 'All we have to do is just convince 4% of the Windows customers to buy a Mac, and we'll double our market share.' To that end, Apple is likely to look towards solving the problems of Windows users as much as those of existing Mac customers.
Most Windows users want relatively simple things from their operating system: reliability, security and consistency. And, as you'd expect, OS X is mostly ahead of Windows in these areas.
In light of Vista's release, however, there's little room to stand still in these areas. Reliability and security will undoubtedly be a priority, with bugs and potential security holes being plugged as the developers go, but one area that's likely to see significant work is the consistency of the look and feel of OS X. Open a standard Mac application such as Word and you'll be faced with the Aqua-style interface that's been the staple of the product since it was first shown in 2000. The blue buttons may not quite pulse with the same brightness that they used to, but the interface remains recognisably the same.
Now open up Safari and you'll be faced with a totally different look - the infamous brushed metal. This theme, introduced with iTunes, has divided human interface experts, and caused some confusion in the massed ranks of Mac developers. Initially, Apple advised developers to use brushed metal if the application provided an interface for a digital peripheral, recreated a familiar object or provided a source list to navigate information.
However, as Mac commentator and web developer John Gruber put it in a post on his site in 2004, 'Apple has simply ignored [the human interface guidelines]... The release of Safari was a watershed; it's an app that fits none of the criteria for when brushed metal is appropriate. You could perhaps put forth a contorted argument that the "source list" in Safari's bookmarks view qualifies it, but that's a real stretch. It's quite obvious that the one and only reason Safari uses brushed metal is that someone at Apple thinks it looks better that way.'
Since then, the situation has worsened: Apple itself has introduced not one but two other interface looks. First came the 'mock wood' effect used for GarageBand, which simply attempted to emulate an old synthesiser. More recently, iTunes 5 and 6's cleaned-up brushed metal looks very different from the old version.
Will Apple take the plunge with Leopard and reduce the number of looks available? While it's certain the company won't prevent developers from using any of the existing looks, it's likely it will try to answer some of its critics and make the Finder more consistent, perhaps by adopting the brushed-metal look in its entirety all the way through the system.
The time may also be right for a revamped Finder, due to the changing nature of how users handle files. This feature is being written on a laptop with a 100GB hard drive, with more than 50GB used up by files, from simple text documents through to video and audio files. This is far removed from the world of 1984, when the first Mac was introduced with its desktop metaphor of files stored in folders, yet this metaphor persists today in both OS X and Windows.
In fact, the sheer scale and variety of data stored on the average user's hard drive has led some to question whether the folder metaphor has reached the limits of its usefulness, and should be abandoned. Apple took a step towards this with Tiger, especially the implementation of Smart Folders, the contents of which change dynamically according to search criteria.
One report indicates that Apple will take this further in Leopard, in a new version of the Finder. Codenamed Chardonnay, the revamped Finder purportedly puts Spotlight searching at the centre of the experience, and makes better use of the information tagged to each file. For example, just as iTunes allows you to view everything from a particular artist by clicking on that artist's name in a list, so Leopard's Finder may allow you to click on the name of a document author and see all the documents they've created.
One developer, who has previously worked with Apple and spoke under condition of anonymity, summed it up: 'The Finder is currently a mess. It hasn't scaled well since the days of 400KB drives. I'd rather use something that looked more like iTunes; I can find a song in iTunes extremely quickly, and I don't have to worry about where it is on the drive. Why should I care where a document is, either?'
However, end users aren't the only customers for OS X: there's also the developer community. Although Apple continues to create its own software, third-party developers are the ones who create the vast majority of applications used on a day-to-day basis by Mac users, and including features that will encourage them to continue creating great Mac applications is an important part of each new release.
There are many areas that developers across the world have mentioned as possible features for Leopard, but two of them stand out. The first is increased support at the operating system level for syndication technologies such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom. RSS is a technology that allows information and files to be automatically distributed from a website and downloaded to a user's machine, and is the underlying mechanism of podcasting. However, although Safari includes support for RSS, each developer currently has to write their own support for it. Adding a syndication framework would take the pain out of adding support for RSS for developers, and encourage a new generation of communicating applications.
Another key area is the closed nature of the iLife applications. Fraser Speirs, the developer of the Xjournal LiveJournal client and FlickrExport plug-in for iPhoto, speaks for many when he says he would like to see Apple open up iLife to third-party development. There are many features within the iLife suite that could be expanded by developers if Apple created hooks that allowed new applications to link into them. Some of these features could also be added to the operating system itself - for example, as Speirs points out, 'a good first step would be to unbundle the Media Browser palette from iLife and iWork and give that to developers.'
One area that's likely to see significant change is Safari. Although the web browser has been continually updated since its release, it has suffered compared with Firefox, the open-source browser that has taken the Windows world by storm.
On the face of it, some would argue that Safari needs little updating. After all, it features excellent bookmark management and some support for RSS feeds (certainly enough for lightweight RSS users). However, some aspects of Safari's core are showing signs of age, so much so that they've limited the kinds of sites that developers can build with it. This is particularly true of so-called 'Web 2.0' applications, which include advanced interface elements on websites to mirror those of native Mac and Windows applications.
One example of this kind of application is Writely, a word processor hosted on a website. Writely eschews using Java or Flash to achieve its goal; instead, it simply uses HTML and JavaScript. There's one problem: although it works perfectly with both Internet Explorer for Windows and Firefox on all platforms, it doesn't work on Safari. Although some have blamed the developers for this, the team behind Writely insist that it's limitation in the browser that's the problem.
Writely co-founder Steve Newman says: 'Believe me, we would love to support Safari. I've been a Mac user since 1984 and a Mac developer for most of that time, and nothing would make me happier than to add Safari support. We've spent a lot of time on it and we're pretty close. However, for all the progress Safari has made since the initial release, there are still bugs and limitations in its DOM support... Apple is aware of the problems that are blocking us, and we're hoping it will fix them in the next Safari update.'
Of course, the biggest change in the hardware for 2006 is the switch to Intel processors, with virtually all Macs likely to go Intel by the end of the year. Although Apple has done sterling work in converting OS X 10.4 to the new processor - so much so that it was able to bring forward the date of the release of the Intel Macs - Leopard will mark the debut of the first Apple operating system built with Intel in mind, and that's likely to lead to several new features.
Most likely is that Apple will take advantage of one of the security features built into most of Intel's current range: Execute Disable Bit (EDB) functionality. EDB works by enabling the processor to categorise areas of memory as either executable or non-executable so that programs can only run in specified parts of the memory. This prevents many kinds of exploits from running, as they rely on so-called buffer overfl ow attacks, which insert executable code into memory and, through bugs in the system, force it to run. By effectively preventing code from running from parts of memory that are dedicated to data, EDB prevents buffer overfl ows from working. Support for EDB is one of the few security areas in which Windows has crept ahead of OS X, thanks to the lack of support for the system in PowerPC processors. Windows has supported EDB since the release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 in August 2004, although the effect was limited, as most processors didn't support it then.
However, EDB has since proven itself as an effective way of stopping certain kinds of malware from running - for example, it blocked the recent WMF vulnerability in Windows, which potentially allowed a machine to become infected with a virus simply by visiting a web page. Adding support for this useful technology to OS X seems like a simple way to increase the security features of the operating system, without having to rewrite its core from scratch.
Less likely - but more controversially - Leopard may include increased support for Intel's Trust Platform Module (TPM), an industry-standard chip that implements 'trusted computing'. This technology, advocated by the Trusted Computing Group, includes features that would make computers more secure - for example, by preventing keylogging software from working or by implementing hardware-based encryption of files on disk. However, TPM also enables software makers to implement digital rights management (DRM) software that would be more difficult to break than anything currently available.
For a company such as Apple that derives at least a portion of its income from DRM content in the form of songs sold on the iTunes Music Store, the attraction of TPM is obvious. One developer, who declined to be named for this article, says: 'Apple's almost certain to use [TPM]. Maybe not in Leopard, as it'll still be selling plenty of PowerPC Macs, but certainly beyond that.' And it appears this may not be a bad thing. 'There's so much you can do with TPM that could actually be good. It can make the system more secure, more reliable. It can allow you to easily do things such as rights management, so you can make documents readable only by a select, named group. It all depends on what features Apple builds at the OS level, because rolling your own support in each application is a pain,' explains the developer.
Whatever features Apple comes up with, it will have to compete with a revitalised Windows camp that's expecting the biggest upgrade since the release of Windows XP, Vista. Vista has been criticised by some for aping features that already exist in OS X - virtual folders behave similarly to Tiger's Smart Folders, and there are some smaller touches such as movies playing in the Dock that will make their Windows debut with Vista - but it also has some features that go beyond Tiger.
The features outlined here for Leopard are largely speculative, but none go beyond current technology, and all of them add pieces to the OS X jigsaw. Whatever happens, Apple will face serious competition for the first time since the first OS X release from Microsoft's Vista. Leopard needs to be a major advance if it's to retain the position as king of the operating system jungle.
Author: Ian Betteridge
Leopard: Mac OS X 10.5
