Apple’s new Mac operating system, version 10.5 (Leopard), was released to much fanfare last Friday. You can read all about it. There’s been lots of talk over the weekend about the souped-up interface and the built-in backup software, but here are three things I’m most interested in:

1. Updates to iChat: You can now present slides, photos, and video clips via iChat. (For you Windows folks, iChat is Apple’s client for AIM and other conferencing protocols.) Think of what this means for professional development and coaching! Say I’m a teacher in Kansas, and you’re a coach in California. Instead of flying out here to observe me, you can have me record my class and then we can meet later, online, and watch the video together. I can pause, fast forward, and rewind as we talk about the clip. We tinkered around with this feature in a beta release of Leopard and came away impressed.
2. Teams Server: Teams is a feature on the Server version of the new Mac OS. Imagine five or six of us are on a project together and need a place to collaborate online. With Teams, I can quickly set up a shared calendar, mailing list, blog, wiki, and file storage. It’s all web-based, so even team members using Windows can use the shared space. I think this will be much better than what we’re been working with in Moodle.
3. RSS in Mail: Apple’s built-in e-mail client, conveniently called Mail, now includes an RSS reader. People who’ve read this blog before know that I’m a big proponent of RSS, and anything that makes it easier to adopt this wonderful technology is aces in my book.

As I mentioned, we’ve been playing with a beta release for several weeks and I plan to install the official release on my laptop sometime this week. In the meantime if you have any questions about the new Mac operating system, feel free to ask them in comments below.

Tags: collaboration, ichat, leopard, mac, RSS, teams