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Leopard, the name for the next version of Mac OS X, is due out spring of this year. It contains some new innovative features, once again taking it beyond the latest version of Microsoft Windows. What are these features, and why should you upgrade?

Screenshot of Leopard: souce Wikipedia

There are three major features that will make upgrading to Leopard worth it along with many other improvements. These major features are an improved Spotlight, Spaces, and Time Machine.

Spotlight

Spotlight debuted in OS X 10.4 and is a very useful feature of the operating system. It provides system-wide desktop search capabilities via metadata indexing. In Tiger, Spotlight’s features included instant background indexing of new and modified files, as well as boolean and substring text searching of files. This allowed users to quickly find particular documents (including Word and PDF), applications, and even emails. The ability to narrow the search down by type of file and date helped make Spotlight the easy way to access anything on your OS X system. It does for OS X what Google Desktop does for Windows XP (without reporting the contents of your hard drive to Google) and that Vista now comes with.

In Leopard, Spotlight gains new capabilities. The boolean search feature is expanded with more operators to help produce more specific searches. Also, a feature called Quick Look will give you a graphical preview of a document searched for in Spotlight.

The most interesting, and useful, feature of Spotlight will be its ability to index network volumes and remote Macs. Spotlight Server will be part of OS X 10.5 Server and will be a central indexing service for all the Mac servers on the network. It will allow Spotlight to easily locate files stored on network servers without clients having direct access to the contents of those servers. In addition it will adhere to the permissions set on those files so that users who aren’t supposed to have access will not be able to search for them either.

Spaces

Spaces, another new useful feature of Leopard, provides virtual desktops built into the OS. This feature itself isn’t revolutionary, and there have been applications that provide this functionality for OS X for a long time. Other operating systems, notably Unix and Linux due to X11, have had this capability for many years. There are also add-ons for Microsoft Windows that give it this capability.

The advantage of having virtual desktops using Spaces gives you the ability to organize applications by virtual desktop, much like having multiple physical displays. For example you could have your email client and web browser on one Spaces window, the document you’re working on in another, and VMware or Parallels running Microsoft Windows on another. Apple has chosen to merge Spaces with Expose making it easy to quickly switch between running applications by displaying all the windows on the Expose screen. By building this feature into the OS Apple has ensured that it will be easy to use and intuitive for all users.

Time Machine

Without a doubt Time Machine is the killer feature of Leopard. While a better Spotlight and the new Spaces are great features to have, Time Machine is probably the main reason to upgrade to OS X 10.5.

Time Machine is an automated incremental backup application for OS X. What is revolutionary about it is the user interface and the fact that everything is automatic with no need to configure anything. Time Machine allows you to go “back in time” - and the user interface certainly makes it look like you are doing just that - to look at snapshots of folders in Finder, or other Time Machine aware applications. To access previous or deleted versions of files, simply click the arrow to go back to the time it wasn’t deleted or which corresponds to the previous version of the file you want. You can then select the file you want and click restore to bring it back.

The backup and indexing is completely automatic and transparent to the user. When a file is changed, Time Machine will be aware of the change and allow you to go back to a previous version, or to go back to that particular version in the future after further changes to the file.

While backups are not new in themselves, this particular implementation and the user interface is. The only requirement is in terms of disk space and you will need an extra hard disk to store the backups. What this means for end users and those in business environments is simple and effective backup of users’ data. Far too often people neglect to make backups or keep them updated, and sooner or later they will find themselves wishing they were more vigilant about backups. Time Machine takes the effort out of making backups and puts it solely on the operating system. By taking user effort out of the equation, guaranteed reliable backups will finally be here. Since Time Machine doesn’t rely on a daily incremental backup schedule to know when to run but instead when a file is actually changed, backups are always current.

This feature alone in Leopard will probably change how people view backing up their files. It will bring new peace of mind to users when working on important documents that their files are protected, and moreover that they can go to previous revisions should they decide to undo any changes to a document that have been made.

In my opinion this is the main reason for anyone to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 and is the reason that I’m most looking forward to it.

Apple has a short video of Time Machine showing what it can do and what the interface looks like, so check it out.

Other Features

Spotlight, Spaces, and Time Machine are not the only things that will be new in Mac OS X 10.5. Since the transition to Core 2 Duo Intel CPUs, Macs now have 64-bit capabilities. Leopard will finally make use of this by providing native support for 64-bit applications through its libraries and frameworks and the entire OS being 64-bit. This will allow applications that need to take advantage of lots of memory (over 4GB) to be able to do so. While 4GB RAM may seem like a lot today, it will not be long before it is commonplace, so it is important for Apple to begin the transition before that point. Leopard will allow users to take full advantage of the new Macs that are out now.

The Mail and iChat applications will be upgraded with new features as well. Mail will include support for RSS feeds, Notes, and To-Do’s (a new service that will be available to Mac OS X applications). Mail will also include stationary, a feature that allows you to send rich email messages easily to others based on templates. iChat will finally support animated buddy icons, multiple logins, tabbed chats, and ability to link in Keynote presentations and photos from iPhoto. Interestingly, for video chat, it will include a backdrop feature that will allow you to appear like you are anywhere during a video iChat. It will also include advanced collaborative features, such as desktop sharing and the ability to give a keynote presentation while you narrate it over video. Not to be forgotten, iCal also includes new collaborative features similar to Microsoft Outlook.

Core Animation is a new graphics technology that is being implemented in Leopard. It will allow programmers to easily create applications that use cool effects so they can create new advanced user interfaces, similar in vein to Time Machine and Spaces (which themselves use Core Animation). Improvements to Dashboard will allow users to save an update-able snapshot of a website to their Dashboard.

Finally, Apple is improving the accessibility of its OS by adding better voice over technology, braille support, positional audio cues, and extended keyboard capabilities to give users with visual disabilities more support for using OS X.

Check out Apple’s Leopard preview to see more videos and information about the new features of Mac OS X 10.5.

So… what?

While I have not personally used any pre-release versions of Leopard, the information I’ve read about it, and the reviews I’ve read from people who have been able to try it out, has made me look forward with great anticipation to being able to upgrade my MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo to Leopard.

Rather than being a nice visual improvement on the existing operating system, Leopard will add some truly useful features to OS X including its innovative Time Machine. Considering that good backup software can cost near $100 and not have the capabilities that Time Machine offers, it alone will be worth the upgrade price. Not only that, but I’ll have a 64-bit OS for my 64-bit Mac.

Thankfully Leopard will still support the G4 and G5 processors so users of older Macs need not panic at being left in the cold when the new OS is released. If the past is any indication, users of older hardware have usually benefited from upgrades to OS X because it improved performance for them. It remains to be seen if that will be the case with Leopard, but we’ll know in a few months.