In late July Apple released Build 9A499 of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to ADC members. This build represented the first since WWDC and offers very little major change but does implement some excellent visual changes and many, many minor ones.

View Exclusive Gallery of Mac OS X 10.5 Build 9A499

In this article we’re going to take a look at a few of the changes in the latest Leopard build, it is impossible to show all of them but if you wish to know something in particular then ask in the comments and we’ll endeavour to reply with an answer.

Finder

At WWDC this year the Finder got a major revamp, adding a brand new 3D style Dock, transparent menu-bar and Stacks.

In this build Apple has tweaked all of these features, the menu-bar is still transparent but feels more natural now as the majority of the icons no longer have white backgrounds. Text sometimes feels out of place, especially if you have a dark desktop background and the menus that drop down from selected objects still feel a little too solid.

The newest addition to the Dock is what has already been dubbed “Abbey Road”, Apple has chosen to add a dashed line to represent a separation in the Dock.

The System Preference applications also sports a new icon to match that of the iPhone.

Possibly the biggest addition in this build and the most welcome is the arrival of a Path Bar (bread crumbs) in the Finder window. The Path Bar is disabled by default but once enabled is pretty handy. Objects from the current window can be dragged into a folder on the Path Bar and are moved to that folder.

Time Machine

On boot up Time Machine began slowly backing up the disks I’d asked it to. The process was very long and was cancelled after several GB’s.

System Preferences

The Appearance preference panel appears to be untouched since Tiger as the only colour options are Blue and Graphite of which the system displays neither, opting to Display black only.

Photo Booth

Photo Booth has been growing healthily since the inception of Leopard, now the application features three types of image capture, Normal Photo, 4 Successive Photos and Movie Capture.

Photo Booth also features a huge range of effects of which the majority now feature some level of control over how “intense” they are.

Note: This article will be expanded with reader questions and further discoveries