Out of the box Leopard provides a few neat effects that use the new Alpha channel capabilities of iChat and PhotoBooth to put you in front of the Eiffel Tower or on a Roller Coaster, but it also provides an open mechanism for adding your own effects. Only 3 days after the release a number of clever alternative effects are already circulating on Mac Forums and a few of these are listed below for your pleasure.

Much has been made of the new features of Leopard and countless pages have already been posted with in depth analysis of Time Machine, Spaces, the 3D Dock. What you may not have spotted is an article covering some of the not so obvious new additions to Leopard. From my use over the last couple of days these are the ones I have come across so far.

So its finally Leopard day and I am up and running with the latest big cat from Cupertino. First impressions are very good and so far I am in general agreement with the reviews published today. Performance seems subjectively better than Tiger, but that could be down to the clean install. The new UI is nice, although I am generally disappointed with the folder icons in Finder which seem a little bland and uninteresting. I guess I can always replace with my preferred icon set in the future if it …

Looking at the Apple Store it appears that Leopard may well not be landing on door steps this Friday. As of 6pm on 24th my copy of Leopard is still showing as Not Yet Shipping and an estimated Shipping date of 26th. So it looks like delivery is likely to be early next week ( 28th-29th ? )

After months of speculation and nearly a year and a half since the last release, Apple are set to launch the fifth major iteration of OS X on October 26th. Originally previewed by Steve Jobs at the WWDC event in August 2006 Apples latest Big Cat has big a long time coming and has been eagerly anticipated by the Mac faithful despite it apparently only offering minor feature upgrades compared with OS X Tiger.

The Worldwide fever pitch is now at its peak as hundreds of blogs and Mac journals desperately try to out guess each other in predicting the high points of Steve Jobs Keynote speech. With literally only a few hours to go until all becomes clear there is an unbelievable amount of speculation, perhaps more than at any previous event.

According to AppleGazette.com the latest rumour regarding the mysterious secret features of Leopard, the soon to be released major upgrade to Apples OS X, is a re-worked GUI code named Illuminous. Apparently the interface is continuing to be tweaked and latest builds released to employees this week are said to be sporting a new glossy black look.