Darn. I was just settling into summer, and now I can’t wait for October. Wait a minute. That’s not entirely true. Only part of me can’t wait until October. The geek part. The rest of me will enjoy the sun, the beach, the swimming hole, the kayaks, boat trips to the eagle’s nests on the Kennebec, Heritage Days, concerts in Library Park, all of the glory of summer in Maine.

But simmering below the surface, the pocket pencil protector part of Pete will be looking forward to October when Apple’s Leopard operating system will be unleashed. This week software developers and the Mac community got “the rest of the story” of the new features coming in Apple’s sixth major revision to their OS X (pronounced “oh-ess-ten”) in the last five years.

Here’s a brief overview of Leopard’s promise. If you’re a Windows user, it’s pretty easy to sum up Leopard. The Mac operating system two revisions ago was more advanced than Windows XP. The most current version of Mac OS X, called “Tiger”, was a more advanced operating system when it was released two years ago than the long-awaited Windows Vista is today. Leopard raises the bar even higher, and, taken as a whole, makes Vista look dated already.

With the advent of touch screen technology (coming this month on Apple’s iPhone and in the near future on Microsoft’s Surface concept computers), some of the more wild-eyed pundits (who’ve seen Minority Report more than once) hoped that Leopard would bring revolutionary changes to the Desktop/Folder/Mouse paradigm currently shared by all computer operating systems. Leopard, however, is more evolutionary, refining the paradigm rather than replacing it.

The Leopard desktop is unmistakably OS X, but gains a semi-transparent menu bar and new reflective 3-D Dock (similar to the Windows task bar but much more attractive and user-friendly). The highlight of the new Leopard Desktop is called “Stacks”. If you’re like me, your computer desktop can become (to put it nicely) cluttered. Stacks will dramatically reduce desktop clutter. Stacks lets you take folders, or any group of files or applications, and drop them into the Dock, creating a stack icon. Click on the created stack icon, and icons and names of the items in the stack are displayed in an animated list or grid, making them easy to select. Plus, you can tell your Mac to put all the stuff you download from the internet, or email attachments you want to save, into a stack for easier and more organized future reference. As with much of the Mac experience, it’s beautifully simple, and simply beautiful.

Mac OS X’s Finder also gets a major overhaul in Leopard. The Finder is actually a program that runs all the time, and is used to navigate around the Mac, similar to Windows Explorer. Leopard’s Finder window now looks a lot like an iTunes window. The Sidebar contains links to everything that’s on your Mac, or connected to it (like external drives or other computers on your Network). The Icon, List, and Hierarchical views are still there, plus a new “CoverFlow” view just like the one in iTunes. You can scroll through your files like you scroll through your album art. From within the CoverFlow view you can select a document and look inside it. Page through a PDF file or Microsoft Word document, or view a QuickTime movie. Sweet.

That should be enough for this time. Leopard contains over 300 new features, so at this rate we should be done previewing Leopard by the first snowfall (just kidding). Seriously, though, we’ve just scratched the surface. More next time.