My unedited notes from the Leopard Tech Talk at the Hilton Hotel Düsseldorf today.
As I’m not a Cocoa Developer with in-depth knowledge, I just wrote down some interesting points for me to get an impression of all the technologies available in Leopard and Mac OS X in general. For instance, I didn’t note any in-depth code examples, or all the new features of the Xcode tools.

1st Block

(Speaker: Paul Burford)

Resolution Independence

• remove any resolution-dependend code
• use Quartz Debug to increase resolution

Spotlight

• need plug-in for own filetypes
• automatic menu indexing in leopard
• Spotlight runs with user-rights

64-Bit

• 32- and 64-Bit applications coexist
• Java 1.6 will support 64-Bit (on Intel) as well as Cocoa

Core Animation

• originally developed for devices like the iPhone
• not an animation engine
• adds realism and valuable feedback to the UI
• setup and forget about it (really easy to add to an existing application)

Time Machine

• Backing up to a network-harddrive will be back in the future (they found a bug short before releasing Leopard)
• you’re able to roll back to a previous state (before an OS-Upgrade for instance)
• tell TM what files (of your application) shouldn’t be backed up
• .tmp files are never backed up
• backups are indexed by Spotlight
• backs up forever until you run out of diskspace
• so far no compression of backups

Dashboard

• Widgets now execute in one process

Apple Script

• Bridges for Python and Ruby

Objective-C 2.0

• Garbage Collection
  • Build Settings -> Enable Garbage Collection
  • much more readable code
  • less code to maintain …
  • use -finalize instead of -dealloc
  • not available in Tiger

• Properties
  • shortcut to get getter- and setter methods
  • @property NSString *name; -> creates these methods for you (yeah, really ruby-like ;-) )

Core Animation

(Speaker: Paul Burford)

Architecture

• based on OpenGL
• Access to all other graphic libraries (Core IMage, Quicktime, Quartz)

Cocoa Slides

• Demo app

• No blocking of UI (runs in a seperate thread)

• implicit animation

• you don’t have the app to tell it “do this animation now”
• really easy to add to an existing app
• set animation method (optional)
• set duration

Overview

• enhance the user experience
• create meaningful motions that provide live feedback
• examples: cover flow, moving items to dock, front row…
• don’t confuse the user
• don’t add constant motion
• don’t add meaningless motion
• only Objective-C (no Java support)
• lots of layer properties to style your layer
• layers are really lightweight (because originally designed for devices like iPhones)
• your mac can handle thousands of layers flawlessly

Implicit Animations

• superclass CAAnimation

  • CAPropertyAnimation
    • CABasicAnimation
    • CAKeyframeAnimation

  • CATransition
  • CAAnimationGroup

• Built-in animation for grid views, scroll views, toll bars…

Spotlight & Quicklook

(Speaker: Paul Burford)

Spotlight

• preview content in searches
• new syntax
• Spotlight plug-ins
  • declare set of handled file formats
  • start with spotlight plug-in template in xcode
  • edit info.plist

Early lunch break at 11:45h (the beamer went out of order)

Lunch was really great: A lot of nice Hilton-worthy food! Hm….

Spotlight (continued)

• Spotlight for Help
• Works for Cocoa and Carbon Apps

Quick Look

• Preview vs. Thumbnails
• Preview really usefull in cover flow view
• thumbnail: low-res image, static image
• preview: feihtful representation of your document, richer format (PDF, rtf etc.)
• how to create previews
  • Preview saved as any native Quick Look type
  • pregenerate (at save time) or
  • create on demand (using a quicklook plug-in)

• QL-Plugins are quite the same Spotlight-plugins (if you know one, you should be able to code the other)

Xcode 3.0 and Interface Builder 3.0

(Speaker: Alberto Araoz)

Xcode 3.0

• Repositroy-support (subversion etc.)
• faster
• code folding
• code focus
• improved syntax coloring

…lunch is taking its toll…

Interface Builder 3.0

*zZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

64-Bit Development in Leopard

(Speaker: Alberto Araoz)

*zZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

Image Processing & Manipulation in Leopard

(Speaker: again Paul Burford)

Image I/O

• 1 API for all different file formats and operations
• preservs metadata (EXIF, Tiff etc.)
• RAW support
• floating point support
• Floating POINT HDR Images
• Thumbnails: 3 choices
  • generic OS thumb picture
  • small preview (rought sketched real content)
  • bigger preview (exact data thumb)
  • everything is stored in 32-bit floating point numbers

ImageKit

• Components
  • Viewer
  • Edit Panel
  • Browser (pictures, movies, quick looks)
  • Picture Taker (use built-in camera, screenshot)
  • Slideshow
  • Others

• New Panels for Core Image filters, so you don’t have to built your own for accessing the filters

Core Image

• New in Leopard:
  • Adjusting RAW Images
  • Core IMage Filters do the work (every step configurable)

Unofficial stuff (said after finishing event)

• Apple didn’t ship an iPhone SDK, simply because it was not ready
• The first iPhone software was really ready just in time, with many processes running as root user
• iPhone SDK next february