14 DAY TRIAL // Now that Windows Vista is only a few steps away from the final release to the public, Apple has one more reason to work harder on Leopard and the applications that will be bundled with it. After all, even if they launch it in the last day of spring (the idea is that Leopard will be out in "late spring", so if they manage to do it on the last day of May, then all should be fine, and let me tell you why), there is a lot of hype surrounding the new Mac OS already, and sometimes delays could be useful.
The most interesting part is that Mac OS X Leopard's delay will still be useful to Apple, in my opinion. How's that? Well, it's simple - from what everybody has seen so far, Windows Vista is going to be a resource hungry operating system, more than everything that Microsoft has put up before, and during the period between its launch and Mac OS X Leopard's launch, there's enough time to discover most of the problems that will come with Vista. This is a really interesting topic, and I am sure that time will show us really interesting things, but now I have to tell you about the new version of Apple's Xcode.
If you don't know this by now, Apple's Xcode is a suite of software tools for developing applications on Mac OS X. The latest version, Xcode 2, is bundled free with Mac OS X Tiger, despite the fact that is not installed by default. The current development release is Xcode 3.0 9A343, and it seems that this was seeded to the developers together with the pre-release versions of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Client and Server, and now some new features have been added, as well as a large number of bug fixes.
The new features are not the key to Apple at this time, since various developers stated that the company is more interested in slowdowns or temporary freezes at this time rather than small issues concerning the program's features. Despite the fact that this version is far from being perfect, it seems Apple is going into the straight line before the spring sprint. Let's hope they'll make it right and have the Leopard ready to bite in time!