Some Leopard features uncovered and posted on 'Aero XP'. (The story has been posted on Appleinsider.)
As a world wide exclusive, AeroXP has received information detailing several of the API improvements to Leopard, detailed below:
- Complete 64-Bit support for Intel and PowerPC through all frameworks excluding QuickTime C, QuickDraw, Sound Manager, Code Fragment Manager, Language Analysis Manager and QuickTime Musical Instruments. These modules are deprecated and one should use the modern equivalents instead.
- Leopard will feature resolution-independent user interface and there are several functions to get the current scaling factor and apply it to pixel measurements. It is a good idea to use vector controls and buttons (PDF will work fine) or to have multiple sized resources, similar to Mac OS X icon design, so you can scale to the nearest size for the required resolution.
- Address Book adds support for sharing accounts, allowing an application to restrict content according to user.
- Automator includes a new user interface and allows things such as action recording, workflow variables and embedding workflows in other applications.
- Time Machine has an API that allows developers to exclude unimportant files from a backup set which improves backup performance and reduces space needed for a backup.
- A new Calendar Store framework allows developers access to calendar, event and task information from iCal to use in their applications or to add new events or tasks.
- Carbon, the set of APIs built upon Classic MacOS and used by most 3rd party high-profile Mac OS X applications, now allows Cocoa views to be embedded into the application. This could provide applications like Photoshop and Microsoft Office access to advanced functions previously only available to Cocoa applications.
- A new control for creating matrices of views is available, NSGridView. This allows a grid to be created from any view in the system, including OpenGL or Web Views.
- Core Animation allows layers to be used as backing stores for a view, windows to use explicit animations when resizing (can be three dimensional, akin to the Time Machine view). Any view can now be put into fullscreen mode and a CoreImage transition effect can be used. Using Core Animation you can create anything including GPU-accelerated Front Row-style user interfaces without having to write OpenGL code. A Core Animation layer can include OpenGL content, Core Image and Core Video filter effects and Quartz/Cocoa drawing content, like views and windows. (Comment: Expect to see Core Animation all over the new UI.)
- Text engine improvements include a systemwide grammar checking facility, smart quote support, automatic link detection and support for copying and pasting multiple selections.