Apple announced a couple of months ago that they were delaying (again) the launch of the latest version of their operating system OS X, to be called Leopard, until October. (Its former slot of the exciting new Apple release for the first half of 2007 seems to have been given over to the iPhone, though that also won’t be available in Britain until at least the autumn).

Their latest preview of Leopard seems to show that they have used the delay to put some more into it - but if they were delaying until they feel they have enough new developments to justify a major new release, while that’s an improvement I think they still have a way to go yet.

I’m sure it will contain all sorts of hidden improvements to backroom processes which won’t be visible to a mere user like me, but the visible new features seem pretty thin. There’ll be a slightly different way of managing files on the desktop, and they seem very pleased with themselves for giving the ”˜dock’ at the bottom of the screen the ability to show reflections of other items. And there will be a completely new system for handling back ups and old versions of documents - which personally seems very overdue: it’s long seemed odd to me that there has been no built-in system for backing up.

But apart from that the improvements seem pretty minor: the Mail application (which I don’t use) and iChat (which I do) will move forward a bit, and there’s a new option for organising running applications, called Spaces, although I haven’t really been able to understand how it will be much more use than Exposé, which already allows you to see all current applications at once. It will introduce a new application called ”˜Quick Look’ which will allow you to view the contents of files without actually opening them - as someone once said, I haven’t yet understood why I would want to do this, but maybe I will come to learn!

But overall it does feel like they’re releasing a new system (formally OS 10.5) because they feel it’s about time they did, and the updates of Tiger (10.4) have now reached 10.4.9! It certainly seems some way from the impression of their marketing strapline, “The Biggest Mac OS X Upgrade Ever!”