The official release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is only hours away. Rumor sites actually report some got lucky and received their copies early. Obviously the press got their copies too. Developer - paying ADC members - unfortunately still haven't seen the GM build.

I have submitted some nasty feedback to ADC - suggesting I will ask for a refund if they fail to provide early access to Leopard. At least I got them scared to the point of calling me. Trouble is that the person on the phone couldn't (wouldn't ?) understand the issue. She thought I was asking whether ADC members will receive a copy of the release DVD. It turns out that isn't decided either. Up to know this was a given to me.

The upshot is that I am unable to make a definite statement as to the Leopard compatibility of HoudahGeo and HoudahSpot.

The good news is that - as of the latest Leopard pre-release build - HoudahGeo was working pretty well under Leopard. There is only a small glitch in the way sheets are displayed. They ought to have rounded corners, but Leopard seems to insist on drawing square corners around the round ones. This will be fixed in a forthcoming update.

HoudahSpot, on the other hand, does not work at all on Leopard. That news isn't all bad though. HoudahSpot was in for a complete rewrite anyway. Thus HoudahSpot 2.0 will be a major update and require Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Today I have released HoudahSpot 1.5 (Tiger Edition) as freeware. Thus: Tiger users get HoudahSpot for free. As they upgrade to Leopard they will need to purchase a license or recycle a previously bought 1.x license.