Maybe some people were drooling over the release of Mac Pro systems at this year’s Apple WWDC, but I wasn’t. Heck, it’s a box with some faster kit. No, I was interested in Mac OS X, Leopard, due to ship Spring 2007.

In particular, improvements to and/or introduction of the following:

• Apple Mail 3 and iCal
• iChat Shared Screens
• Time Machine

Apple Mail seems to be sprouting features unrelated to mail in the same way that iTunes grew photo support. However, now that Apple Mail has Notes and ToDos, it’s possible that entire workflows can be managed from within it. Especially when one exploits Smart Mailboxes. True, Microsoft Entourage had similar features years ago, but has always been crippled by dismal search capabilities.

By providing system-wide, any-application creation of ToDos (which integrate with iCal), Apple Mail can become the centre of one’s work. This assertion is backed-up by the new version supporting RSS feeds, much like Mozilla Thunderbird currently does.

Taking all the improvements to Mac OS X as a whole, it is apparent that Leopard will be about collaboration. We have iChat’s remarkable Shared Screen capability, and although the idea is not new, the execution is stunning. I can see us using this in an office environment: remote pair programming.

iCal will now support group calendars, meetings, attendees, location reservations and files for events. It’s currently unclear whether Mac OS X Server, .Mac and/or iCal Server will be a pre-requisite for all this. There should also be a calendaring API which will allow application developers (and perhaps those who use Automator) to leverage the technology in their software.

For user-friendly backups and ad-hoc restoring, Time Machine provides version controlled files for the ‘rest of us’. All you need is an extra hard disk. Time Machine is not merely a copy of Windows System Restore – they serve entirely different purposes – because Time Machine is file based, not system based. This will be ideal for all of those times I’ve accidentally overwritten a working version of a source code file.

With these features alone, I’ll be buying Mac OS X Leopard when it’s released.