Lucky developers...

Apr 19, 2006 11:46 GMT  ·  By

Yesterday, Apple invited members of the Apple Developer Connection to register for the Worldwide Developers Conference 2006. The email promised, among other things, a "sneak peek preview" of Leopard, "Apple's next major release of Mac OS X."

Unlike in previous years, this year the WWDC will take place later than usual, in August. Starting on the 7th of August and lasting until the 11th, the conference will take place in San Francisco, CA.

So far, there is little known about the upcoming Leopard, except from what can be gathered by taking a look at the patent applications as well as recently released Apple software.

While many rumor sites predicted that Leopard will have powerful virtualization features built in, other have suggested multiple running OSes and the ability to change between them. At the time, the community was divided, but with the release of Boot Camp, and Apple statement that this is a beta and that the final functionality will be included in Leopard, this seems more than likely.

Other things that we can expect include a better spotlight integration, one that will take it beyond the search function it serves today, to the interpretation of files and metadata in order to search in a manner that is more akin to the way the human mind stores information by cross linking it with other relevant information.