Notes on Leopard Preview :

Developers that have received their copy of Leopard Preview have started providing comments on the web, giving hints at some unnannounced details.

MacFixIt provides some great screenshot-enriched notes, showing new Help and Battery menus, the preference pane of Spaces/Exposé and the new Spotlight menu with its new categories.

AeroXP also gives some comments on the Preview build of Leopard, we learn more about developer API improvements, the inclusion of Ruby on Rails for web development and some hints at a longly rumoured resolution independant user interface on Mac OS X.

Meanwhile, readers noticed that Apple also previews Leopard Server on its web site. Among the revealed features are iCal Server, Wiki Server, Spotlight Server, Podcast producer.

Follow-up on our Leopard rumours:

Some of the Leopard features revealed by our sources before WWDC, such as virtual desktops, iCal's collaborative features, iChat's tabbed chat and XCode versions have been confirmed during Steve Jobs' WWDC 2006 opening keynote, the MacFixIt posting mentioned below also confirms the improvement of Spotlight performance we had mentioned.

Our earlier report on collaborative is only partially confirmed though. Apple's calendar application and Leopard server indeed have some collaborative features and we can also say that iChat is more collaborative oriented with its desktop sharing tools.

As for the virtualisation we had also reported on, we believe Apple has certainly thought about it seriously but has apparently decided to stick with the dual-boot solution (Boot Camp) instead of developing its own virtualisation software. So maybe we should forget about it. Except if Apple decides to take-over one of the many companies that are going to play the virtualisation battle on the Mac platform. There is already one dead in this battle and its Microsoft's Virtual PC.

To end this note, let's mention one of the most read rumours we've ever published. That redesigned Finder rumour that shaked the Mac-centric web last year. It was claiming Apple would redesign the Finder and provide further integration with Spotlight. Though it doesn't seem to be really confirmed with WWDC's Leopard Preview, sources are confident that there are still some things about the Finder UI that Apple has kept secret.

One last thing, we had reported that the new Finder's code-name was "Chardonnay". Well err... well.. actually we learned some months later it is actually the code-name of Mac OS X Tiger port to the X86 platform.

We're now seeking confirmation for the other features we mentioned in our two latest reports. Among them, user-account wide file syncing, and code refactoring on XCode. Also, if any of you see hints at that collaborative API that we had previously mentioned with a bit less of certainty, we'd love to hear confirmation on it. Any other Leopard related information is of course welcome too.