The following statements under this heading are entirely speculative, though they would make any Mac fan more excited about the upcoming Mac OS X software to be released, version 10.5 or the Leopard.

Everybody's been wondering about the essential new feature that the Leopard will have. Recently the speculation has come to this; that the Leopard will feature resolution independence, an application that could render its windows irrespective of the physical resolution of the screen.

With the Leopard's Core Animation, resolution independence will allow building things like iTune's cover flow very easily. But the only thing missing is an easy way to manipulate objects in three dimensions. Our source mentions garbage collection: a new feature in Leopard that allows the system to determine whether the memory is still needed and to free it if it isn't.

Unfortunately, garbage collection doesn't apply as a way to manipulate objects in three dimensions. Garbage collection only looks at whether a program still points to a block of memory. If it does, the block is in use and it's not garbage collected.

There are more speculative details about what the Leopard essential new feature will be, but the fact of the matter? We'll all see about it in due time.