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Review: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

It's been two and a half years since Mac OS X has seen a major update, the longest period of time between two consecutive versions of the popular Apple operating system. Despite the delay, the latest incarnation brings many changes and additions that not only make it worth the wait for Apple fanatics but may be a huge incentive for PC users to make the switch to the Mac platform.

Released October 26, Leopard brings a host of new features dispersed throughout various layers of the operating system. Let's highlight some of the more notable additions:

Spaces

Tired of your absurdly cluttered desktop? Say hello to Spaces, the virtual desktop implementation that will help keep you organized by dividing your applications into 2 through 16 different desktops. 

Time Machine

Probably a long-overdue addition, OS X will now automatically back up your hard drive at regular intervals to ensure minimal data loss in the event of a disk failure. This is especially useful for users (like me) who often forget to back up their files.

Your favorite web browser (Safari, of course), has also been updated. Version 3 includes an enhanced "find" function that makes it much easier to search for text within a page by highlighting matching text while darkening everything else. Possibly the most notable addition is the ability to take any portion of a page and instantly convert it into a Dashboard widget. These "Web Clips" update each time Dashboard is opened.

Leopard also includes several new features for developers that should make them feel even more at home on a Mac than before. In addition to an overhaul of Xcode and the Objective-C programming language, 10.5 includes upgraded versions of Apache and PHP, the equivalent of the one-two punch for web developers.

All in all, Leopard is a huge leap forward for OS X. There are still one or two kinks to work out, but these are largely overshadowed by the numerous additions in functionality.

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