Leopard

A little more about Kerberos in 10.5: Interestingly, now in Leopard, each and every 10.5 machine is a Kerberos server. In some ways, very cool. Kerberos on its own is a pretty big topic. My fear is that while it's operating as expected, it's going to catch some people by surprise.

I know we've had IMAP discussions here before about Mail.app's less-than-stellar application of IMAP standards. Mail.app 3, shipping with OS X 10.5.0 has some nice improvements - the data detectors, etc. The are some annoyances: mail plug-ins are changed, so, developers will need to rewrite them. Here's my two big gripes, though:
1 - Mail.app has been a crash machine, dumping itself about once or twice a day.
2 - Offline changes seem to disappear once you're connected to a network again.

Mac OS X v10.5 ("Leopard") contains vast changes under the hood.  One of the greatest additions is Sun's dtrace.  The November issue has a fantastic introduction to dtrace, and we were able to put it online this morning!  Go check it out at:

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.23/23.11/ExploringLeopardwithDTrace/index.html

C'mon.....really!  After talking about sensationalism recently, Intego comes up with this winner today:

http://www.intego.com/news/ism0705.asp

Working just fine for me under 10.5 without an official Leopard release:

iListen - copied over, not installed new.  Supposedly, you can't create a new voice profile, but that doesn't affect me at the moment.

Ecto2 - Writing this entry in Ecto copied from my Tiger install.

Daylite 3.2.3 - Yes, 3.6 is out any day now, but, I have too many people on 3.2.3, and it's working nicely, along with the newer DMI.

Well, OK, there are a few favorites, but the new capabilities in Preview.app are way up there: this is something I'll use on a daily basis.  PDF manipulation, markup/annotation...if you haven't dug into the new Preview.app, check it out.

If you didn't catch it, while booted from the Leopard 10.5 install DVD, there's an Airport icon in the toolbar.  From there, you can enable Airport and join a network.  In the latest TidBITS, Joe Kissell asks, "Why would Apple include this seemingly useless feature, which can only tempt people to take an unnecessary action that might actually cause problems?"  I'll take issue with the "seemingly useless" connotation.

So, out of the gate, there have been a number of people talking and blogging about security in Leopard from a number of perspectives.  Some, though, are just looking for attention.  Take the two posts at "Internet Security for Your Mac" warning that people stay away from the new "Back to My Mac" feature: