The key observation is that there can be a conflict between agile methodologies and traditional project based contracts.

Since most clients won't wear an infinitely open ended (by the hour) contract and most developers can't afford to iterate past the end of an agreed number of payments there needs to be some flexibility in the billing relationship.

How you codify that into a contract or set of contracts is an interesting challenge. I don't do too much freelance work these days - when I did it was either of two extremes: pre-agreed price per project or simple hourly billing.

Does anyone have any examples of agile project contracts that worked well (or didn't)?

* 64 bit to framework level in leopard
o nothing new there

* multicore
o OS frameworks higly threaded with fine grained locking
o cpu and i/o prioritisation support
o new NSOperation and NSOperationQueue to provide OS support for simple concurrent processing

* memory management
o garbage collection added to the ObjC runtime - hooray! (although hardly breaking news)
+ garbage collection is opt in (at the application level)
+ all objects collected
+ release method is a noop!
+ not mark and sweep - generational, which makes use of the fact that new objects are more likely to be able to quickly be released than old long running objects

* graphics
o the buzzword is "cinematic experiences"
o core animation looks pretty damn cool - it's even integrated with the new cocoa widgets
o resoloution independant user interfaces by 2008 - hooray, just like X11 in 1988 ;)

* developer tools
o the new interface builder is also very cool :)

Update: Gah - now I realise why this doesn't sound new, because it's from August 2006 I assumed it was from Macworld, but it turns out that I just got an email because Apple decided to release it to all ADC members. At least they did I guess.