The Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is not quite ready to pounce but eager prey are restless as to what this cat can and cannot do. The grapevine flows with speculations that it it'll include a system-level, encrypted BitTorrent client for iTunes Store, a Windows virtualization software and full screen applications. But these are well inside the territory of tech-gossip.

One developer thinks resolution independence is one of those rumoured features that could turn fact based on little clues he picked up here and there. According to Dustin MacDonald, "this stuff (referring to resolution scaling) is actually in the OS already. It showed that this "resolution independent" stuff won't necessarily be all vector. Yes, NSBezierPaths and fonts automatically scale correctly, but what about graphics? Although Apple hasn't said anything yet, it only makes sense that they would further the use of .icns files, letting you have different graphics for multiple sizes, scaling near perfectly. This is already the case with all application icons in Mac OS X."

Then he cited talks regarding scaling websites. "And we're not just talking about good CSS manners here, these guys are talking about implementing Adobe's vector-based SVG as a first-class image format in WebKit, and most likely OS X. Holy shitz. Obviously, no one is simply joking around here. This is going to happen."

And finally some graphic designer spilled the beans that they were contracted by Apple to make icons for the system. "Except, these icons weren't 128x128px, no, they were a whopping 512x512px. I'd say that these kinds of icons would be big enough to be scaled down a fair bit. With larger resolutions on new Macs lately, it makes sense that Apple would do something like this. Even I find myself squinting sometimes when using my 23" Cinema Display at a far distance. Mark my words, this is going to be huge - WWDC can't come soon enough." 

Until the OS X 10.5 makes it debut at  AppleÂ?s Worldwide Developer Conference in August  this year,  it's going remain as elusive and mysterious as the cat it was named after.