Although I didn’t attend Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference last year, (nor will I this year) I was able to download the presentations through my Apple Developer Connection account. From what I’ve seen, it looks like Apple has tightened up Leopard quite a bit. The pre-releases I’ve seen look almost identical to Tiger with a little more polish here and there, so nothing too radical in terms of the interface or the Finder. Spaces is new in Leopard, but old if you’ve used Gnome or KDE in the past. Core Animation is new as well, and it’s what Time Machine uses for it’s slick graphic UI. Looks like it’s based on OpenGL.

Here are the top features that have me intrigued the most:

lookupd has gone away and has been consolidated into one service, Directory Services. This should eliminate the redundancy in the lookups, and just let Directory Services do all the work. Hopefully, we won’t have any long boot up times when bound to a directory service, that Apple only quietly acknowledges. This should also mean there will be fewer resources consumed (fewer RPC calls) and faster lookup times when authenticating.
NetInfo is dead! - Finally. Some people liked it because it could be run across the network, although that feature in particular hasn’t been supported since 10.2. Yet again, something else that has an extra RPC, which means more complexity. Legacy support for NetInfo has been removed too. Apple has many command line tools to migrate the old records to the new format. Similar to Gnome or KDE in Linux, Leopard will allow the ability to directly edit the accounts from within Accounts in System Prefs, including GUID and home directory path (although the ability to edit these attributes is slightly hidden).
Packet Signing for Active Directory - Until now Active Directory integration lacked SMB packet signing. SMB packet signing is a security mechanism that protects the data integrity of SMB traffic between client computers and servers, and prevents man-in-the-middle attacks by providing a form of mutual authentication.
Time Machine seems pretty neat. Finally, Apple has a better way to backup desktop and laptops that leverages Apple’s expertise in designing a terrific user interface. It has always ticked me off that Apple charged for using the Backup application, which is part of .Mac and Backup was not available uncoupled from this service. To be sure, Apple does offer PHDs or Portable Home Directory, but that requires the use of OS X Server for complete Home Directory synchronization, although PHDs are available using only AD and will sync some elements in the home directory. As an Apple Enterprise Consultant privately confided to me when I complained about the problems a customer of ours had with the Active Directory plug-in, “We gotta sell product”. This of course is why I advocate open source anywhere and everywhere where possible because of vendor issues like this, where the incentive is get the customer to buy a feature or fix that they shouldn’t have to. Once again, if you want a certain feature, you must go out and either buy a separate product or wait to purchase an upgrade. Frustrating, but I guess it’s ok to sell the end-customer the disease and later on, the cure.
PackageMaker - Apple’s new PackageMaker 3.0 is much improved. The biggest feature I see here is the ability to deploy “flat files” instead of the old method which was hard to edit, and the ability to install to local home directories.
ZFS Support? - I’ve only tried a few builds of Leopard and my main interest is the afore mentioned improved directory services/Active Directory support, but one other notable improvement may be the addition of Sun’s ZFS. HFS is an aging file system that, despite Apple’s improvements like journaling, is really an old relic of the OS 9 and earlier days. It’s prone to crashing, needs frequent maintenance, and plain stinks compared to ext3, reiserfs, jfs or SGI’s xfs file system, all of which are available on Linux. This would be a much welcomed improvement to have a file system that essentially self-heals and needs little to no end-user maintenance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a small, albeit cryptic error with applications like Photoshop where the end-user can’t save to their home directory because of corruption at the file system level, and a utility such as Applejack must be run in Single User Mode so that diskutil can be run in order to fix the problem. It’s great to see Apple is willing to ditch this legacy file system, and please, encourage Apple to do so.

I’ll comment on some more compelling enterprise features in Leopard Server (iChat, Open Directory, RADIUS support) and some of the other new improvements in OS X client/server as I watch more of the videos.

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