Apple has just released a new security update for client and server users of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard). This Security update 2008-005 is "recommended for all users and improves the security of Mac OS X," and includes fixes for a dozen or so features in Mac OS X.

This update fixes a QuickLook bug where loading a malicious Microsoft Office file could lead to "arbitrary code execution." Doesn't sound too good to me! It also fixes a DNS vulnerability that has been highly discussed over the past week (and which many other vendors have already patched).

You can download this update by opening Software Update (Apple menu > Software Update). You can also find more information on what this update fixes by looking at Apple's support note.

Along with today's announcement of Leopard's release date, Apple has also now updated the Mac OS X site to reflect all the enhancements you can find in the latest release of OS X. So, what's new?

Apple, clearly keen to show what they've been working on in the last few months (what with the delay n'all), have listed all 316 features, categorised them and allowed you to peruse them at your leisure. Here's just a few that caught my eye:

• AppleScript can now read and write plist files (whilst a little thing, and a niche feature at best, this is promising if you're wanting to backup items such as serial numbers for applications from the application plist files, and do it in AppleScript)
• .Mac syncing of more system items (Dock items, Dahsboard widgets, Mail notes and, it appears, even the entire System Preferences)
• TextEdit now support Open Document and Word 2007 files.
  
• Open panels now have a Media Browser tab, allowing you to open items directly from the relevant location.
  
• Library Randomization - identical to Windows Vista's Address Space Layout Randomization, meaning that people looking to exploit Mac OS X can't rely on system code being at a specific memory address (i.e. it's harder to persuade an OS X system process to execute malicious code). Whilst Apple has always touted the more robust security of Mac vs Windows, it's good to see they're not sitting on their laurels and becoming complacent with OS X. Also of note is the digital signature technology in all the Leopard applications (and third-party developers can sign applications too). I've always believed this to be a technology that would be used in any iPhone SDK, so seeing it within XCode is a promising move - even if the possible use of Digital Signing in an iPhone SDK is pure conjecture on my part.
  
• Front Row now sports the Apple TV interface, and the integration with the Apple Movie Trailer site.
  
• iChat has seen a smorgasbord of new features added - Photo Booth effects, new media codecs, video and audio chat recording, tabbed chats, the ability to hide your own local video from a chat window, and screen sharing.

The list goes on. After a somewhat disappointing WWDC Keynote this year, the '300+ feature' proclamation has reassured me that Apple hasn't necessarily lost its way as a desktop OS and computer company. 26th October just cannot come quick enough.

A quick roundup of some additional reactions to the Leopard delay announcement -- if you haven't read David's cogent analysis, well, we'll wait:

• Daniel Jalkut worries that Apple can't fight two wars at the same time, developmentally speaking, and should globalize development efforts
  
• John Gruber responds that iPhone and Leopard are the same effort, since both run a flavor of OS X
• Brent Simmons thinks our readers are borderline hysterical
• Crazy Apple Rumors thinks Scott McNulty is all-the-way hysterical
• Wall Street weighs in: no long-term impact seen
• Jeremy Horwitz wants a coupon for 10.5
• Dan Frakes urges everyone to just settle down
• Fake Steve wants you to look deep into his eyes and count backwards

Welcome to the social, everybody! Now let's get back to downloading those MGM movies.

Apple may have just dealt us the bad news about Leopard, but already reactions are pouring in from across the web and even on our own comment thread. This announcement is huge, and it'll take a while to unpack it all, but I've had some early thoughts and reactions on what this all means, and I wanted to respond to some comments left at our original post of the news. There is quite a bit to deal with, but here are some ideas in no particular order:

1) I agree with sentiments that some sort of OS upgrade time frame would be a great idea, especially since October is way too late for the EDU sales rush. Microsoft did it, and Apple makes their money from hardware sales, not boxes of Mac OS X. It would speak volumes and make - or break - a lot of customer loyalty. No word on whether Apple might actually do this - AFAIK, they never have before. Then again, they've never been this popular, and I don't think such a highly anticipated product has been delayed in light of another even more anticipated product before, either.

2) I also agree that I would rather have it this way than a craptastic release in June that's full of more holes than swiss cheese. Tiger is a damn fine piece of software and I'm happy to keep using it for a few more months.

3) We have to face that fact that the iPhone is likely going to sell more units than Mac OS X. In all likelihood, many more units. Mobile handsets sell in the billions each year; last year I think Apple sold around 6-10 million Macs. They sold double that in iPods over the 2006 winter holiday season alone. The iPhone is likely to be big - even bigger than we feel Mac OS X is.

4) With #3 out of the way: don't worry about the future of Macs or Mac OS X. Product launches like the iPhone are a tremendous effort for any company, but they typically herald in a period where many of that products resources can go back to their regularly scheduled focus. This certainly isn't always the case, but what I'm trying to say is that, in all likelihood, most of the engineers Apple said they had to commandeer from the Leopard wing at Cupertino for the iPhone will go back to Mac OS X development and, for the most part, stay there. The Mac isn't going anywhere.

5) In a few days, maybe a week or two, John C. Dvorak is probably going to pen part 2 of his 'Apple to trash Mac OS X for Windows' article, a concept which he loves to push our buttons with. I recommend you don't bother reading it, and highly recommend that you don't submit it to us as a tip. We're not linking to good ol' Johnny until he shows us some TUAW love for once first.

Apple's next-gen OS, Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, is expected to ship in Spring '07. This is not a secret. But somehow we feel better when Amazon confirms it for us. As Nelson pointed out in the iWork '07 on Amazon comments, they are already listing Leopard with a note that says "Scheduled to ship in spring 2007."

Amazon is conveniently offering to email you when it's available for purchase. I guess Mac lovers who plan to be in hibernation for the next 3 months might need that.

Thanks Sean and Nelson!

Cocoa Blogs has linked a blog post from Gus Mueller, developer of such apps as VoodooPad, that an upcoming FlySketch 2.0 update will be Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard-only. This adds to a growing list of upcoming app releases such as TextMate 2 and Delicious Library 2 which will only play with Apple's next big cat.

So what does this tell us about 10.5 and its impact on the Mac, both for developers and users? Sounds to me like there are some pretty ground-breaking changes in Leopard since, from what I understand, developers typically try to keep theirs doors as open as possible by maintaining backwards compatibility with at least one previous version of the Mac OS. Of course, this can vary depending on how difficult it is to keep these doors open, as well as whether the developer works out of an office or a living room.

Personally, this boosts my excitement for Leopard. If it changes things as much as developers keep hinting, 10.5 sounds like it'll be a fun ride.

In what would seem, on the surface, to be an odd move for a text editor, Macromates has stated that TextMate 2.0 will almost certainly be Leopard-only. Allan Odgaard gives some good reasons as to why, though. And it's not just because the Halloween icon will look better with Leopard's resolution independence!

Rather than paraphrase him, I'll paste what he's already said quite well:

First of all, 2.0 is a free upgrade, so I won't miss out on any upgrade fees from people that want to stay on Panther or Tiger.

Secondly, roughly 90% of my users are early adopters and have in all likelihood upgraded to Leopard within a few months of its release, so by keeping compatibility with older operating systems I am catering to less than 10% of my users.

Thirdly, it has a significant cost to stay backwards compatible, this price is paid in the form of:

1. Time spent debugging (and sometimes making workarounds for) issues only present on the older OS version.
2. Time spent implementing stuff that Apple offers for free on the new version of the OS.
3. Not being able to make use of features only present on latest version of the OS when it's too impractical to conditionally make use of them.
4. Code complexity, because it needs to do different things on different versions of the OS.

Is eliminating those costs worth a 10% drop in sales? You bet they are! The reason why I have kept Panther compatibility for this long has nothing to do with additional sales and all to do with me just not liking to cut people off.

I think Allan defends his decision quite well. Much better than Adobe does, in regard to Soundbooth's lack of PowerPC support. There's more to Allan's statement, but you should hop over to his blog to read the rest of it and let him know your thoughts on the issue.

To balance any potential backlash, Macromates will surely win a few hearts and minds by the free TextMate 2.0 upgrade. Any other TextMate users out there have an opinion on this?

A new Apple patent uncovered by PC Pro hints at the possibility of portable user accounts making their way into the Spring '07 release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. For a quick break down: the long-standing rumor has been that this would allow a user to keep their account - the entire home directory, applications, media, preferences, you name it - on an external storage device like an iPod, and simply plug that device into any Mac and log in with access to all of their stuff. The possibilities are pretty juicy, and for once the language in the patent is fairly straight-forward, if not a little repetitive: "The multi-user computer system, eg. through its operating system, locates user accounts not only in local storage of the multi-user computer system, but also in any removable data storage attached to the multi-user computer system."

While this particular rumor has been in the wind for a few years now, we don't have anything else specifying that it is for sure arriving in Leopard. This could be yet another unused patent, or it could be slated for 10.7 for all we know. As usual, we'll keep our ears out.

[via Slashdot]

Let's face it: Apple on Monday previewed some really slick new features in the next version of Mac OS X, but they aren't going to let us get our hands on them until some time next spring. Even though that's technically 6 months or so away, that's really like a few years when translated into computer industry years. So why wait for Leopard?

Some of the features in the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 either already exist in present applications (as Dan pointed out), or developers have been inspired from Monday's keynote and are producing their own versions, with Web Clippings as our first example. The developer of Shrook looked at this new tool, realized that it's utilizing a fairly simple trick and whipped together his own Dash Clippings tool.

After playing with this for a bit, I can say it more or less works very similarly to the Web Clippings tool demoed in the keynote. You enter a URL into the widget, and it loads up the page. You then drag the widget to the proper size and over the specific area of the page you want to clip, and presto - you've just made yourself a live, dynamic web clipping tool that will check the page for updates as often as you tell it to.

Hey, who says Apple is the only company that can use the "good artists copy, great artists" steal philosophy? Once you're done answering that (or not), go snag yourself a copy of Dash Clippings and check one drool-inducing feature off your Leopard shopping list.

Phill Ryu, a man who must have some sort of direct neural interface with the Mac shareware community, has posted a list of applications which could very likely be killed off by features of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard which were announced yesterday. Seasoned OS X users will have immediately seen parallels between many of the new Leopard features and software that has been available for some time.

Most obviously, Spaces are just fancy names for virtual desktops; something that can be easily achieved by VirtueDesktops, DesktopManager, and VirtualDesktop Pro. The new application launching features of Spotlight take aim at popular applications such as LaunchBar, Butler, and my personal favorite of OS X applications, Quicksilver. With iChat, tabs kill off Chax, live presentations kill off ShowMacster, and backgrounds kill of ChatFX.

Be sure to click through to the original post for all the other apps now lining up at the unemployment window, and to see what the shareware developers themselves have to say about the announcements.

Update: Buddy'o'mine and BarCamp mastermind Chris Messina has a similar post.

We've been hearing talk about a completely redesigned Finder in Leopard as far back as October of '05. Granted, all that stuff is just rumors and wishful thinking but it is probably the one feature throughout the majority of the Mac community that everyone nearly 100% agreed was outdated and in need of a major, major update, sometimes even a rewrite.

So what happened to it? The keynote's up, and as I cruise through it to verify, the only time the word 'Finder' seems to be mentioned is when talking about something you can do with a different app. There wasn't a peep about a Finder update, or even a feature bump.

The one saving grace that we're going to have to pin our hopes on is the Finder being one of those top secret features Steve said they couldn't even preview today. You can bet the bank if there is a Finder update coming, it isn't in the Leopard previews that are being handed out to developers today. Could we still see a Finder update? Well, let's just hope either that Apple schedules another flashy event before Leopard is released in Spring, or that Steve's Macworld Keynote has even more in store for this next installment of Mac OS X.

If the WWDC 06 tension is becoming too much to bear, TUAW reader Gernot Poetsch probably isn't helping anything, as he sent a link to his Flickr account with a pic of some more banners in Moscone hall. If you check out his larger copy at Flickr, you can (almost) clearly see the banner at the top of the image says, and I quote: "Introducing Vista 2.0"; an attitude that clearly reflects just a slight bit of confidence on Apple's part in light of what is now four years of Vista setbacks.

Another image in Gernot's photostream is titled Hasta la Vista. Vista, and while it isn't a clear shot of the banner, it doesn't sound far-fetched from all the other marketing previews we've been graced with so far.

Here's hoping Apple previews a Mac OS X 10.5 on Monday that lives up to all the Vista jabs they've been taking. We'll post more of these goodies as we come upon them, but for now, you can resume your anxious pacing.

Sample code posted at the ADC could prove that preview versions of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard might be unleashed to WWDC attendees next week. The page has since been taken down, but DuggMirror retained a copy for our speculating eyes.

The piece of sample code is QTNoStepsDemo, a meaningless chunk of code to us non-developers, but one aspect of the page (posted on Apple's site 8/01/2006) is what raised the flag: the code's build requirements specify "Leopard Preview". If this page is legit, it certainly isn't a blatant statement from Apple that Leopard will indeed be unleashed to our developer overlords, but it definitely is suspect. As with all other tidbits we've been uncovering over the past few weeks, we'll just have to stay tuned for Monday's events to see what Apple's engineers have up their sleeves.

Thanks, Jesper.

Brent Simmons, developer of the most popular RSS reader on earth, has published some pre-WWDC predictions as to where he sees Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's UI will evolve. He throws down the gauntlet on brushed metal, delves into customizable toolbars and even touches on what might happen to 'bubbly popup menus'.

If you are at all interested in UI design, this is definitely a good read from a most prevalent Mac OS X developer. Keep in mind, however, that Brent - unlike the Scobleizer - doesn't have any insider info, so don't get your mouse cable tangled if next week proves his post to be way off the mark.