Okay, so Leopard gets released tomorrow and I've pre-booked my copy. Unfortunately due to not having a credit card I had to book over the phone using Internet Banking so hopefully my payment clears today (as of writing) meaning I should have it tomorrow. If not Saturday.

The ordering process was interesting. I called the 0800 number and after 4 or 5 menus selects I spoke to a nice chap called Andrew who was in America. Funnily he couldn't understand my accent so when I said "e" he heard "v" or "b" so I had to phonetically spell my e-mail address.No biggie though because once he had that ALL my details came up on his screen and so he went into the New Zealand store and made the order and done as a dog's dinner.

It was nice to speak to someone who spoke English (well as much as Americans can speak it) instead of some Asian (read Oriental or Indian) who speaks English as a second or third language. I'm not making a racist comment there, I'm speaking purely from a logistical aspect. Many companies outsource their helpdesks and so forth to China or India and while they try to do a really good job, they miss subtle aspects of the language and thus meaning is missed and information is lost. Speaking with numerous IT experience this happens a lot.

But anyway, because I live in the Wellington region I will have Leopard either tomorrow or Saturday giving me a weekend of playing. There's probably going to be numerous reviews over the next few days as well as comments on this site so I'll use this opportunity to tell you why I think this is a must have upgrade.

Tiger was a vast improvement over Panther. It ran faster on older machines, it had numerous networking features, it had better frameworks thus creating more stable applications, and it moved toward a more simplified layout. But it had issues. FTP is kind of lame (you can connect to a server and read but you can't write, a feature that even Windoze has). It's networking features are somewhat difficult compared to Windows especially for things like persistent drive mappings which can be worked around using the likes of AppleScript. But Leopard's networking features look awesome. Bonjour all around, drive mappings easily accessable via Finder, but it will still be interesting with regards to its FTP support.

Mail is finally moving towards an Outlook nature only unlike Outlook it's actually very good. Admittedly I'd prefer to see iCal merged in with Mail but there are also great benefits to having two apps. The datasets that Mail has is just unbelievable. I mean it automatically recognises addresses and allows you to add it to a contact despite the fact it's nothing more than text? Phone numbers are the same as are dates. I'm not only impressed by the fact the programmers managed to get these features working, I'm impressed by the people that came up with the idea. If there is one application in the whole of Leopard that just screams innovative thinking then Mail is it, only...

It isn't. TimeMachine is amazing. Apparently, according to a leaked report, the first time TimeMachine is run it will ask which drive you want as your backup drive then it uses that from that point on. I'm not sure about whether or not that's including networked drives (read drives connected to Airport and drives on other machines) but it would be seriously cool if this was the case. Backups will be a regular thing for me now.

iChat. Get past the naff video backgrounds and you find something that will destroy the way we think about sharing information. iChat is the darkhorse of Leopard. One of the many amazing features of this app is the ability to run presentations across a conference. Now that's an awesome feature but what I'm about to tell you you should really be sitting down for, and if exciting things make you lose control of certain bodily functions you may want to be sitting on the dunny. iChat is not just a chat program. iChat allows you to REMOTE CONTROL machines. Holy cow. This is amazing. I mean you have features that are built into Windows but you have it in a program that has other features as well. Before to remote control a machine effectively you had to have Apple's Remote Desktop software but now you can do it through iChat and still talk to the person. That'll make John Davidson, Cathy Lee Crosby, and Fran Tarkenton astonished (20 points to whoever get's the 80's TV reference).

BootCamp has been in use by many now but the Hybernation style booting into Windows and back is brilliant. It will remain to be seen how good this really is though.

Developers aren't left in the cold. XCode 3 has major advancements, DashCode allows plebs to create widgets, and Automator has a cool feature called "Do as I do" which records your movements as a workflow.

For $80 less than Tiger the Ultimate cost of Vista is a complete and utter insult to people who prefer Windows over Mac OS X.

Unfortunately it looks like the Apple Store is running on US time so Apple Store users may have to wait until Saturday to play with it (at time of checking the date was 5:30am 24/10/07).