Apple releases its much awaited update to Tiger, OS X 10.5, or, Leopard, today. With over 300 new features and improvements, many are excited to slap the cat onto their Mac today. I know I am. But I’ll have to wait until Tuesday when it arrives from Amazon.

While Leopard isn’t Earth shattering, it also didn’t take six years to produce like Microsoft’s Vista, the Redmond-based computer software giants update to Windows XP. Again, unlike Vista, Leopard isn’t just eye candy with annoying security pop-ups with little else to offer than maybe five different version in which to chose from.

No, Leopard isn’t going to woo most like the iPhone, but it will do things better, more securely, and improve on other lack-lusting applications such as iCal. Interesting tid-bits is that there will be a new screen saver, “Word of the Day”, for all to watch when their Mac goes idle. A new font, Braille, is included and no, I don’t know if you put your finger onto your screen if you’ll be able to “read” it. The Danes will also get a built-in spell checker for their language. Wikipedia is now also fully integrated into Dictionary. Now you’ll be able to access the free online encyclopedia with the Apple look-and-feel.

One of my favorite and most missed feature of UNIX and Windows is X-Mouse. This lets the mouse constitute what is the active window. So you may have Mail.app open and in the foreground and Safari in the background to the left. If something is selected in Safari, say a word, in UNIX or Windows (with TweakUI installed) you could simply move the mouse to Safari, without clicking on it, and select Command+C, for copy, and then go back to your e-mail and paste the word into a message. Well, Leopard kinda has this with scrolling background windows. You’ll be able to scroll a window that is not the forefront with your mouse without clicking on the window. So maybe OSX 10.6 will have true X-Mouse in it.

If you’re interesting in seeing what else is this new cat, take a look at Apple’s Guided Tour of Leopard. You can also hone down on each of the 300+ features at Apple’s site as well.

Apple Stores to release the feline at 6:00 PM local time nationwide tonight.