Apple Developer Connection have posted a series of sessions for developers.
To help you get acquainted with what’s coming in Leopard, ADC is presenting a series of articles on Leopard technologies over the next several months. These articles will take a deep look at Xcode, Objective-C 2.0, Core Animation, Image Kit, Xray, and much more.
Resolution Independence
The old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology. Macs now ship with displays that sport displays with native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system, including the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks, will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays.
The introduction of resolution independence may mean that there is work that you’ll need to do in order to make your application look as good as possible. For modern Cocoa and Carbon applications, most of the work will center around raster-based resources. For older applications that use QuickDraw, more work will be required to replace QuickDraw-based calls with Quartz ones.
Calendar Store
The Calendar Store framework provides access to a user’s iCal calendar data. Using the framework, you can fetch calendars, events, and tasks from iCal’s data storage. This allows your application to work with the same data as iCal, Mail, and any other application that a manager uses to interact with their schedule and to-do items.
Picture Taker Panel
Mac OS X has used images in many applications for a while. For example, when you first set up Mac OS X, it will take your picture if you have a camera built-in or attached. Leopard exposes the ability to take a user’s picture to any application using the Picture Taker Panel. It will handle all the details of whether a user has a camera built-in or plugged in as well as providing a flash. In short, you can open the Picture Taker Panel and, once the user is satisfied with their picture, your application will be handed a picture return value.
Security Enhancements
Leopard brings several new security enhancements to Mac OS X. The first of these is the adoption of the Mandatory Access Control (MAC) framework. This framework, original developed for TrustedBSD, provides a fine-grained security architecture for controlling the execution of processes at the kernel level. This enables sandboxing support in Leopard. By sandboxing an application, using a text profile, you can limit an application to being able to just access only the system features, such as disk or the network, that you permit.
Also new in Leopard is code signing. This means that Leopard will be able to identify applications by using digital signatures and then use that identification to base trust decisions on.
Calendaring Server
The Darwin Calendar Server allows users to collaboratively share calendars across an organization. It provides a shared location to store their schedules and sync them between machines. It also allows users to send each other invitations to events. Implemented using the CalDAV protocol, it supports multiple calendaring clients, including Leopard’s iCal, Mozilla’s Sunbird, OSAF’s Chandler, and Microsoft Outlook.