Hello, Leopard

My pre-ordered copy of Leopard arrived yesterday afternoon and I didn’t wait around very long before booting up my MacBook Pro and preforming a fresh install.

Install took about 25 minutes on my 2.2GHz MacBook Pro, not long at all really, everything went smoothly and I was up and running in no time.

Desktop

The first thing you notice in Leopard is the new desktop, the menubar is now semi-transparent and the dock has a refreshed ‘glass’ table effect which I really like the look of.

The dock also has a new feature ‘Stacks’. Stacks is simply a folder you drop onto your dock for fast access to files, when you click on a stack the items in the folder fan out across your desktop.

I download a lot of files and usually have to navigate through the finder to get to the file I need, stacks makes this easier for me, when I download a file it’s automatically added into my downloads stack so I can get to it in two clicks, it’s pretty neat.

Finder

The new finder is fantastic, the sidebar has had a re-design and now looks like the sidebar you would see in iTunes, the four default headings in the sidebar are devices, shared, places and search for, these new headings are collapsible so if you don’t think you’re going to find yourself using one of the headings that often you can collapse it and make more room for the icons under the other headings.

Networked computers (both mac and PCs) are now automatically shown under the shared heading so you can get to them quickly. One thing I’ve noticed is that the Windows machines on a network have a PC with the blue screen of death as the icon, quite amusing.

The new search for heading in the finder sidebar displays preset spotlight searches for today, yesterday and past week which shows any files opened or edited within that time-scale. There are also three other preset searches; All Images, All Movies and All Documents.

The finder now has Coverflow as a new view option so you can flick through files and folder just like you’re used to doing with album art in iTunes.

When I first heard about coverflow in the finder I expected it to be slow at rendering and quite jumpy but it’s actually really smooth to use, and the reflective effect looks amazing.

Quick Look

Quick Look is another new feature which allows you to preview files without even having to open an application. Say for example you have a PDF file which has some information you need to quickly get to, with Quick Look you simply navigate to the file with coverflow and hit the space bar, a live preview is then opened and you can even navigate through different pages.

Quick Look works with all types of files, you can even play full length video in coverflow thumbnails, in the Quick Look previewer or full screen without having to load quicktime.

Time Machine

Time Machine is the new backup tool built into OS X, when you connect your backup disk Leopard takes an up-to-date copy of all your files and creates a backup of them. If you ever loose a file you just launch the Time Machine application and go ‘back in time’ to the file you want and recover it to your local hard-drive.

At first I wasn’t too sure if I would be using Time Machine, I usually manually backup my files as I need them but I thought I would give it a try anyway and I am very impressed, It’s really simple to use and I’ve found myself deleting files just so I can use the cool interface to go back in time to get them.

Spaces

Spaces is like having several different desktops on one computer, you can assign applications to different spaces, so if you have lots of windows open this becomes really useful. You can place all your image editing software in one space, all your coding applications in another and then you might put itunes into another. It really tidies up the desktop and hides any clutter or distractions in other applications.

Mail and iCal

Mail and iCal both have some new features too. In Mail you can now add notes and to-do lists, and if you use both mail and iCal they syncronise with each other so both applications show the same to-do list, this is something I am going to find really handy.

So far I’ve got no complaints about Leopard, all the new features are great and most of them help to make everyday tasks easier. I’ve only outlined my favourite features in this post, Leopard has hundreds of other new features which are all shown on Apples own 300+ new features page.

If you have any Leopard questions or comments feel free to leave them. I would also love to hear from other people who have used Leopard to see how they are getting on with it.