A Closer Look At Today's Leopard Revelations [Updated]

As the dust settles from today's announcements at WWDC, we take some time to make a few additional notes on some details of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard."

Where's Screen Sharing?
One feature that was present in previous Leopard builds but is no longer advertised is screen sharing via iChat.

This is would not be the first time a previewed feature of Mac OS X has been axed prior to launch. Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther's" Home On iPod feature was mentioned on Apple's site, but then pulled without explanation. Currently, all Leopard pages feature a disclaimer stating that "all features referenced in the Mac OS X Leopard website are subject to change."

Update: Forum member lancestraz notes that Screen Sharing is still being shown on Apple's site, however modestly.

Performance Optimizations
The addition of the 8-core Mac Pro saw benchmarks that demonstrated diminishing returns with some applications. Barefeats had speculated that this was due to inefficiencies in Tiger's scheduler. It appears that Leopard will be addressing this with a scheduler further optimized for multi-core systems, as well as built-in support for Message Passing Interface (MPI) 2.0.

In addition to multi-core enhancements, Apple states that other various portions of the OS have been optimized including a self-tuning TCP stack (eliminating the need for specialized tools such as Broadband Tuner), and a multithreaded 'autofs' filesystem layer.

Apple states that all these technologies are universal, meaning both Intel Mac users and PowerPC users will benefit from the enhancements.