Apple – Mac OS X Leopard – Features – Accessibility

Lost in all the hoopla, are a couple of other important new features that will be in Leopard. Above, is a link to experiencing a very nice one. A new Text-to-Speech voice named Alex, that sounds very natural.

Another is that Photo Booth can now record video and do all the cool backdrop effects seen in iChat. The DVD Player now has full-screen controls, and a time slider at long last. Front Row works and looks like Apple TV.

One ‘feature’ I’m not happy about though, is the non-inclusion of a new blue Aqua wallpaper image. You don’t fuck with tradition. The green grass used during the keynote looked very Vista to me. And Steve claimed nobody uses the blue wallpaper for long, they like to put their own digital photos up.

In my own experience, no matter what I change the wallpaper to, I always come back to the blue Aqua gradients. Because they work, are soothing, and don’t distract the eye from anything else on the desktop. If any delicious generation developers can code a shareware app to randomly create those Aqua-style wallpapers, they’ve got my $15.