Marshall plans to adapt Mac OS X Leopard

Matt Crist

Issue date: 10/31/06 Section: News

Apple Computer Inc.'s next operating system, Mac OS X Leopard, is scheduled for a spring 2007 consumer release. The new operating system will include many of the same features, in some cases simply refinished, of Mac OS X Tiger, along with several new features.

"The step from Tiger to Leopard will not be, in my opinion, like the step from XP to Vista," Kenneth Lester, university computing facilities senior support specialist, said. "Most of the changes in Leopard are fine tuning of the OS 10."

Mac OS X Leopard is more user-friendly largely due to improvements to the operating system interface, he said.

One of the new features of Mac OS X Leopard will be Time Machine, which is a file backup and restoration program that functions on a server or a hard drive. Time Machine automatically backs up saved files, so if a user goes in and changes that file, the old file can later be retrieved.

At Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs, the company's CEO, said Time Machine offers a new way of backing up and restoring files.

"We back up absolutely everything, which means we can restore everything," Jobs said in his keynote address. "So, if your hard drive dies you can buy a new hard drive, put it in your machine, and be right where you were before that hard drive died. We can restore everything. On top of this, you can restore a la carte. So, if there's one file that you are missing, you can go and restore just that one file, one photo, one folder…whatever."

Mac OS X Leopard will also come equipped with some features to accommodate special needs.

"We've got some major enhancements to voiceover a technology we introduced in Tiger, which is really important," Jobs said. "We're adding brail support. We're adding closed captioning support in QuickTime. We've got some much faster and better ways to navigate around the whole system…so, a lot of work is going into universal access."

Students who use Apple computers on campus can expect to see Mac OS X Leopard sometime during summer 2007, said Lester.

For more information about Apple's newest operating system, visit www.apple.com/macosx.

Matt Crist can be contacted at crist6@marshall.edu.