If I’m late on this, it’s because my normal source for Apple news is Ars Technica, but I only ever get error messages from that site anymore.
Xcode 3. I don’t really care about the IDE, since I don’t use Xcode for my own projects, favoring Ruby anyway, and using Rake and Vim even for things that are using Objective C. But if Interface Builder will be nicer in 3, that’s good, since I do use Cocoa and IB for my stuff.
The big thing though on the developer side is going to be Objective C 2.0. I’ve never really sat down and learned how Objective C memory management works, so having garbage collection available will make me very, very happy.
Spaces. Woohoo! I use Desktop Manager to get a virtual desktop setup here on Tiger, even hacking it up a little myself in order to keep it from hogging half my menu bar (with two 1280×1024 monitors and 8 virtual desktops, it was getting wide, so I set a limit to the width). But this setup has limits because there’s zero OS integration. Apps aren’t aware of it. That should change with Spaces, the virtual desktop manager coming with Leopard, much to my delight.
And that’s all I can find on the Apple website that interests me about Leopard. And that’s fine: At some point the rapid revolution had to slow down. Things are settling in.
I just hope Leopard won’t bring more gray into the Apple world. I hate the amount of gray that already exists in this OS.