A date for the new cat on the block

17Oct07

Obviously the biggest news this week has been the news that Mac OS X ‘Leopard’ has gone Golden Master¹ and then hours later Apple announces to the world that Leopard will arrive on Friday 26th October at 10am PDT (which just so happens to be the day I get paid, coincidence? I think not…).

The splash page on Apple’s website has been updated with a snazzy countdown timer and the ‘X’ representing Mac OS X in the Leopard style, against a cosmic background (a la Time Machine):

Its not the splash page that got a facelift, Apple added a mammoth page that lists all 316 new features of OS X in Leopard. So, if you’ve got an hour or two to spare, feel free to browse the 300+ features.

As a bit of a sidenote, five of those 300+ features relate to Front Row. Now, some people may recall that Front Row was bundled as a .app (in a similar way to Dashboard) in Build 9A559 of Leopard and was given an icon that resembled the buttons on the Apple Remote. That icon has now apparently been changed for the release, with the new icon as a red armchair (shown right).

Now if you’re thinking, “Damn and blast, I just went out and bought a new iMac because they were all shiny! Now I’m gonna have to fork out for Leopard!”, fear not. Apple is running a program called Up To Date. If you bought a qualifying Mac on or after October 1st from the Apple Online Store (see if you qualify here) that does not have Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard included you can upgrade to Leopard for $9.95 / £5.95 / €8.95. But don’t wait too long, this program expires on December 29th, so get ‘em in quick!

1. A term used to describe a stage in development process of software. A feature lock-down where bug fixing is the primary focus. Golden Master is similar to ‘Release Candidates’, which are favoured by companies such as Microsoft.

Filed under: Apple, Mac OS X, Technology   |  1 Comment