One year ago, we wrote about the first Leopard preview being leaked onto torrent sites. That release lacked the “secret features” that were to be announced sometime this year. As it goes with OS releases, Leopard was repeatedly delayed, and now, one year later, the feature-complete developer preview has been released and, consequently, leaked to BitTorrent.
Announced by Steve Jobs in his keynote at WWDC ’07, Leopard is the fifth iteration of the Unix-based operating system. It is the “feature-complete” release and is not expected to change much before it goes on sale in October of this year. New features include, among others, a new version of the Finder, the Mac file manager, a new unified interface, Time Machine, a backup application heavy on eye-candy, and Spaces, an integrated virtual desktops implementation.
Creative Commons picture by M. Caimary.
The developer preview was handed out to attendees of the Apple developer conference almost two weeks ago. Normally, one would start to see torrents for such a thing appear hours, if not minutes, after it is handed out. It seems Apple developers aren’t as quick on the uptake as our Windows-using friends. The Vista RTM (Release to Manufacturing) was uploaded even before news sites had the chance to write about Microsoft pushing out its first non-beta release of Windows Vista.
Titled “Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard 9A466 WWDC ’07” or “The New Big Cat”, Mac OS 10.5 can be found on almost every torrent site on the web. But before our Mac-using friends rush to download a copy for themselves, it’s best we mention that this is beta software, and even if no new features are going to be added to it, the OS is reportedly buggy and requires work. We recommend you hold out till its release in October and buy yourself a copy. It’s cheap.
