User interface Mac OS X Leopard made many changes to the
user interface. This includes a more detailed, transparent menu bar,
skeuomorphic system icons, and a glossy, reflective, 3D Dock. Windows lost their metallic, lined look they had previously. As well as this, the Apple icon is now black instead of blue. This is notably very similar to
IPhone OS 1's user interface. Rory Prior, on the ThinkMac blog, criticized a number of changes to Leopard's user interface, including the transparent menu bar and the new folder icons.
End-user features Apple advertised that Mac OS X Leopard has 300+ new features, • New
Desktop, comprises a redesigned 3-D Dock with a new grouping feature called
Stacks, which displays files in either a "fan" style, "grid" style, or (since 10.5.2) a "list" style. Rory Prior, on the ThinkMac blog, criticized the shelf-like Dock along with a number of other changes to the user interface. •
Dictionary can now search
Wikipedia, and a dictionary of Apple terminology as well. Also included is the Japanese-language dictionary
Daijisen, Progressive E-J and Progressive J-E dictionaries, and the 25,000-word thesaurus , all of which are provided by the Japanese publisher
Shogakukan. The icon also reflects the current date even when the application is not running. In previous versions of Mac OS X, the icon would show July 17 in the icon any time the application was not running but the current date when the application was running. •
iChat enhancements, including multiple logins, invisibility, animated icons, and tabbed chats, similar to features present in
Pidgin,
Adium and the iChat plugin Chax;
iChat Theater, allowing users to incorporate images from
iPhoto, presentations from
Keynote, videos from
QuickTime, and other Quick Look features into video chats; and Backdrops, which are similar to
chroma keys, but use a real-time difference matte technique which does not require a green or blue screen. iChat also implements screen sharing, a feature previously available with
Apple Remote Desktop. •
Mail enhancements including the additions of
RSS feeds, Stationery, Notes, and
to-dos. To-dos use a system-wide service that is available to all applications. •
Network file sharing improvements include more granular control over permissions, consolidation of
AFP,
FTP and
SMB sharing into one control panel, and the ability to share individual folders, a feature that had not been available since
Mac OS 9. •
Parental controls now include the ability to place restrictions on use of the Internet and to set parental controls from anywhere using remote setup. •
Photo Booth enhancements, including video recording with real-time filters and blue/green-screen technology. •
Podcast Capture, an application allowing users to record and distribute podcasts. It requires access to a computer running Mac OS X Server with Podcast Producer. •
Preview adds support for annotation, graphics, extraction, search, markup, Instant Alpha and size adjustment tools. •
Quick Look, a framework allowing documents to be viewed without opening them in an external application and can preview it in full screen. Plug-ins are available for
Quick Look so that users can also view other files, such as Installer Packages. and viewing a file using
Quick Look •
Safari 3, which includes Web Clip. •
Spaces, an implementation of
virtual desktops (individually called "Spaces"), allows multiple desktops per user, with certain applications and windows in each desktop. Users can organize certain Spaces for certain applications (e.g., one for work-related tasks and one for entertainment) and switch between them.
Exposé works inside Spaces, allowing the user to see at a glance all desktops on one screen.) Users can create and control up to 16 spaces, and applications can be switched between each one, creating a very large workspace. The auto-switching feature in
Spaces has annoyed some of its users. Apple added a new preference in 10.5.2 which disabled this feature, but there were still bugs found while switching windows. In 10.5.3, this problem was addressed and was no longer an issue. •
Spotlight incorporates additional search capabilities such as
Boolean operators, as well as the ability to search other computers (with appropriate
permissions). •
Time Machine, an automated backup utility which allows the user to restore files that have been deleted or replaced by another version of a file. Though generally lauded in the press as a step forward for data recovery, Time Machine has been criticized in multiple publications for lacking the capabilities of third-party backup software. Analyzing the feature for
TidBITS, Joe Kissell pointed out that Time Machine does not create bootable copies of backed-up volumes, does not back up to AirPort Disk hard drives and will not back up FileVault encrypted home directories until the user logs out, concluding that the feature is "pretty good at what it does" but he will only use it as part of a "broader backup strategy". One of these issues has been resolved, however; On March 19, 2008, updates were released for AirPort and Time Machine, allowing for Time Machine to use a USB hard disk which has been connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station. •
Universal Access enhancements: significant improvements to applications including
VoiceOver, along with increased support for
Braille,
closed captioning and a new high‐quality
Speech synthesis voice. • Russian language support, bringing the total to 18 languages. • Leopard removes support for
Classic applications. • Introduced the Alex voice to
VoiceOver.
Developer technologies • Native support by many libraries and frameworks for
64-bit applications, allowing 64-bit
Cocoa applications. Existing
32-bit applications using those libraries and frameworks should continue to run without the need for
emulation or translation. • A new framework,
Core Animation, allows a developer to create complex animations while specifying only a "start" and a "goal" space. The main goal of Core Animation is to enable the creation of complex animations with small amounts of program code. • Apple integrates
DTrace from the
OpenSolaris project and adds a graphical interface called
Instruments (previously Xray). DTrace provides tools that users, administrators and developers can use to tune the performance of the operating system and the applications that run on it. • The new Scripting Bridge allows programmers to use
Python 2.5 and
Ruby 1.8.6 to interface with the Cocoa frameworks. •
Ruby on Rails is included in the default install. • Leopard's
OpenGL stack has been updated to version 2.1, and uses
LLVM to increase its vertex processing speed. • The Graphics and Media State of the Union address confirmed many other features are possible because of Core Animation, such as live desktops, improvements to
Quartz Composer with custom patches, a new
PDF Kit for developers, and improvements to
QuickTime APIs. • The
FSEvents framework allows applications to register for notifications of changes to a given directory tree. • Leopard includes a read-only implementation of the
ZFS file system. ::In mid-December 2006, a pre-release version of Leopard appeared to include support for Sun's ZFS.
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President of
Sun Microsystems, boasted on June 6, 2007, that ZFS had become "the file system" for Leopard. However, the senior project marketing director for Mac OS X stated on June 11, 2007, that the existing
HFS+, not ZFS, would be used in Leopard. Apple later clarified that a
read-only version of ZFS would be included. • Leopard includes drivers for
UDF 2.5, necessary for reading
HD DVD and
Blu-ray discs using third-party drives, but the included DVD Player software can only play HD DVDs authored by
DVD Studio Pro. • Leopard includes a framework implementing
latent semantic mapping for classifying (e.g. textual) data. • Leopard is the first operating system with open source BSD code to be certified as fully
UNIX-compliant. Certification means that software following the
Single UNIX Specification can be compiled and run on Leopard without the need for any code modification.
Security enhancements New security features intend to provide better internal resiliency to successful attacks, in addition to preventing attacks from being successful in the first place. ;Library Randomization: Leopard implements
library randomization, ;Sandboxes: Leopard includes kernel-level support for
role-based access control (RBAC). RBAC is intended to prevent, for example, an application like Mail from editing the password database. ;Application Signing: Leopard provides a framework to use
public key signatures for
code signing to verify, in some circumstances, that code has not been tampered with. Signatures can also be used to ensure that one program replacing another is truly an "update", and carry any special security privileges across to the new version. This reduces the number of user security prompts, and the likelihood of the user being trained to simply clicking "OK" to everything. ;Secure Guest Account: Guests can be given access to a Leopard system with an account that the system erases and resets at logout. Security features in Leopard have been criticized as weak or ineffective, with the publisher
Heise Security documenting that the Leopard installer downgraded firewall protection and exposed services to attack even when the firewall was re-enabled. Several researchers noted that the Library Randomization feature added to Leopard was ineffective compared to mature implementations on other platforms, and that the new "secure Guest account" could be abused by Guests to retain access to the system even after the Leopard log out process erased their home directory. ==System requirements==