After announcing that iTunes has sold 4 billion songs (20 million on Christmas Day), 125 million TV shows, and 7 million movies, Steve Jobs today announced the availability of iTunes Movie Rentals (for US users only!) with content from Sony, Universal, Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, Lionsgate, Newline, Fox, Warner Bros, Disney and Paramount.This will include over 1000 movies available 30 days after DVD release. Watch on Mac, PC, iPod or iPhone within 30s start time (assuming you’ve got decent broadband), and movies available for watching within 30 days but must be watched within 24 hours of starting to watch. US$2.99 for library titles and US$3.99 for new releases
Finally the disembodied heads at TidBITs mentioned the Give Good Food To Your Mac site, with products from European Mac developers and a tiered discount of 30% for 3 apps, 40% for 5 apps, 50% for 7 apps and 70% for 10 apps. Only 2 days 11 hours left on these deals though at the time of posting. Titles include Unity Indie, Tables, Pixelmator, Together, Feeded, FotoMagico Express, Art Text, Money, FreeWay 4 Pro, Freeway 4 Express, RapidWeaver, Merlin, Geophoto, Contactizer Express, Contactizer Pro, CSSEdit, PulpMotion, Video Pier, BannerZest, Cheetah3D, iStopMotion Home, Expert Wine Cellar, iDive, Morphage, Magnet, CoverScout, Personal Trader and Remote Buddy.
The very cool Eye-Fi wireless memory card is now available (at least to those in the US). With 2Gb of RAM for photos, and a WiFi card built in you can upload photos directly to your Mac or PC (I believe it was demoed at WWDC uploading into iPhoto directly). Or you can upload to the Eye-Fi service and into your favourite photo site (Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, etc.)
Apple have posted a list of some 300 new features in Leopard.
Looking through them, the interesting ones that I haven’t noticed being mentioned before (well, mainly) are listed below. Notable absence of mentions go to Java, iTunes and QuickTime.
Transparent overlay of DVD playback in DVD player (ala TransLucy)
Share any folder (just like in the days of System 6,7,8,9…). The cool part is that you can authorize people in your AddressBook to use the shared folders
Braille support (presumably external Braille ‘displays’?)
DVD playback in Front Row
20 new CoreImage Filters, CoreImage enhanced for multicore processors, support for colourspace information from EXIF tags
Image Capture - More tethered camera support, more Canon and Nikon models supported, Wireless image importing, Sharing of scanners over Bonjour.
Instruments - (Originally called X-Ray I think), lets developers analyse performance metrics and record and replay user interface events.
Mail.App - Data Detectors - Another System 8 technology back from the dead. Photo Browsing of your iPhoto Library. Sync Mail Notes via .Mac. Archive your Mailbox.
International - Russian, Polish and Portugese, better multilingual Spotlight indexing, Pinyin and Zhuyin input methods, Russian and Danish Spell Checkers.
Networking - New Airport Menu, Automatic TCP buffer size adjustment
Parental Controls - Set time limts for kids, violate their privacy by logging websites and applications used, list people who have chatted and keep a transcript (I hope nobody uses it on adults!) Control parental controls remotely, and filter profanity from the Wikipedia (That should prove amusing).
PhotoBooth - Make video clips, add backdrops, export animated GIFs for use on your website.
Preview - Better leverage of Core Animation. Add better annotations, including links to websites or other pages inside the PDF. Highlight text. Save your annotations (really wouldn’t be much good without that last feature would it?). Relevancy ranking of PDF searches. Automatically add your name to annotations for collaborative work. Remove Alpha background or select irregular shapes. Adjust white and black levels automatically. Re-order PDF pages. Perform batch image operations. Send images to iPhoto. Use GPS Metadata support to open a photo’s location on a Map or in Google Maps. Woohoo!
Printing - Simplified by making common settings presets (Yay!). Kerberos authenticated printing. Location-aware printing (so it doesn’t print your home porn to the work IP printer over the internet Support for printer driver updates via Software Update.
Safari - Presumably you’re already using the Beta
Screen savers - Arabesque, Shell, Word of the Day, Clock Overlay, Collage or Mosaic from your Picture screen savers.
Security - Downloaded applications are tagged and you’re prompted when you open them. Apple Applications are signed (Hmm… That could make modding stuff more difficult!). Application specific firewalling. 256-bit AES encryption (previously only 128-bit) for disk images. VPN client supports Cisco Group Filtering, DHCP over PPP. Sandboxing of applications (Bonjour, Quick Look and Spotlight indexer are sandboxed) to restrict what they can do. Multiple user certificate support. Smart cards to unlock FileVault volumes and the keychain. Supports PIV standard for Feds and contractors to them. I hope FileVault is finally ready to use without hosing your files! Library randomisation to frustrate hacking attempts (and cause developers to find more bugs :). Windows SMB packet signing.
Spotlight - Search any Mac on your network (woohoo, great for those of us with big numbers of documents on a central server). Now understands boolean searches, dates and category labels. Also (like Google) does dictionary definitions and calculations). Recently visited web pages are indexed too. Search by Filename (ala System 6, etc.). Search system files.
System - Icon mode in open and save panels (Yay!). iLife browsing from open panel. Live partition resizing in disk utility (assuming you’ve got space Auto-purging guest accounts (Yay!). Grammar checking. Scroll non-active windows (yay! Although we move ever closer to focus follows cursor). Empty Trash button (Yay!) Eject some or all partitions of external USB or FireWire volumes.
System Preferences - Hot corner for sleep display. Control click accounts for advanced (ie dangerous, unixish) account options (User ID, login shell, home directory)
Terminal - International character support (Use vi on your Mandarin Save multiple terminal window locations and settings as a workspace.
TextEdit - Autosave. Open Document and Word 2007 formats. Hyperlinks. Go to Line. Print header and footer. Smart quotes. Smart copy and paste (meaning it now confirms to Apple’s HI Guidelines?)
Time Machine - Asks you if you want to backup to a drive when you connect it (My, that will get annoying when you want to copy one file and disconnect!). Automatically stops and resumes. Browse other time machine disks. Use Migration Assistant to move users from a Time Machine backup. Manual Backup if you can remember to hold down the control key and cilkc the Time Machine icon in the dock.
Universal Access - Braille support during OS install. Support JAWS and Windows-Eyes numeric keypad commands. Portable VoiceOver prefs via flash drive (Hmm… I wonder if that could be parlayed into a security problem). Notification of changes in screen hotspots. Drag and drop via keyboard only. Audio misspelling alerts. Audio positional cues. Enhanced VoiceOver accessibility in new Leopard Apps.
UNIX - AutoFS to mount/dismount network filesystems, Separately threaded (Yay!). Wide Area Bonjour. Streaming IO (Is this TCP streams?)
Apple are sponsoring the Insomnia Film Festival, giving film makers 24 hours to create a three minute film. (Rules state that it has to be compressed on Mac hardware, I hope the teams allocate enough time if they’re using Apple’s software
The open source XMeeting seems to do a pretty reasonable job for those requiring videoconferencing. Doesn’t seem to support Polycom’s data streams for screen sharing though (and I can’t seem to convince Polycom’s free Windows client to recognise the iSight from within Parallels). XMeeting supports H.323 and SIP, along with some display modes similar to iChat with the images reflecting off the virtual ‘table’ surface, if you’ve got grunty enough graphics hardware.
Support for printer driver updates via Software Update.