Friday, October 26, was a day highly anticipated by Macintosh users everywhere. At 6:00 PM, Apple unveiled the latest version of its operating system, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Two and a half years in the making, Leopard is packed with over 300 new features offering something for everyone — users and developers alike. This Leopard is spot on. Some primary selling points are...

The interface has been spit polished. The desktop sports a translucent menu bar and reflective 3D Dock to perfectly frame one’s desktop picture. Stacks enable quick access to a folder of files. Finder windows have been unified so there is now only one window look having an elegant gray band at top with optional tool bar below. Spaces group application windows to banish clutter completely.

The Finder has been totally revamped. Now browsing files on a Mac can be much like browsing in iTunes — access everything on a Mac by using Cover Flow or by clicking on items in the sidebar. Never has it been so easy to work with documents and media files. Spotlight is beefed up. It works much faster now, and offers boolean searching.

Time Machine automatically backs up everything on a Mac, transparently in the background. It keeps a copy of every file ever made. Now a Mac can be restored back to its original state from any point in time. Or just restore a single file. Quick Look provides a sneak peak to a file without opening it, even when searching for files in Time Machine.

Front Row works like an Apple TV to control digital media on a Mac using a remote. DVD Player sports a new full-screen interface. Video quality is enhanced, and can smoothly play back DVDs that may be damaged.

Mail transforms email into personalized stationery. Notes offer access from anywhere. A dictionary and grammar check is built in, providing services system wide. iChat uses an advanced audio codec to deliver the clearest possible sound during audio chats. And text messaging has been streamlined.

Safari is the fastest web browser today. It features movable tabs and resizable text fields. Parental controls makes it easy to set limits on how one can work with a Mac. And security is ironclad — application signing, sandboxing, and library randomization fortify a Mac using the latest security techniques.

Boot camp turns an Intel based Mac into a PC such that one can run Windows at native speed. Now it’s possible to boot in either Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or many flavors of *nix. Never has a personal computer been so flexible.

Developers have never had it so good. DTrace can monitor system activity from a high-level application behavior down to the operating system kernel. Xcode compiles much faster and supports real-time debugging. And Objective-C has been enhanced with automatic garbage collection. Interface Builder is completely rewritten and makes it a breeze to construct a user interface for an application.

Leopard is now a fully certified UNIX operating system, thus can be deployed in environments that demand full UNIX conformance. Fully 64 bit, it also runs 32 bit code transparently without user intervention. Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and Python are built in. And AppleScript has been polished.

These are but a few of the features that make Mac OS X Leopard the finest personal computing operating system made today. Learn more about Leopard by visiting the Apple website (www.apple.com), and by reading the review by Jon Stokes at Ars Technica (www.arstechnica.com). Then head out for your local Apple Store at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh or The Steets at Southpoint in Durham. There you can test drive the latest goodness from Apple. Just know that once you go Mac, you’ll never go back.

Anthony Williams