The 5 Things I’m most looking forward to in Leopard


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So, Leopard is 7 days away. I can’t wait. I had a chance to use Leopard shortly after WWDC this year and I really enjoyed the experience. I’m very much looking forward to having the final copy on my Macs come Oct. 26th. There are a lot of new features in Leopard…some big…some small. There are over 300, in fact – but I thought I would write up the 5 that I’m most looking forward to.

I’m curious to know what your Top 5 are too, so please feel free to leave your Top 5 in the comments below, or post about them on your own blog, and leave us a link.

5. The Desktop

While I don’t really dig the semi-transparent menu bar, I love the look of the Dock, and I find Stacks to be incredibly useful. I am the world’s worst about desktop clutter, and I cannot wait to have all of that automatically placed in my downloads stack, so I can get to it easily, without having to look at it on my desktop. The Spring-loaded Dock feature sounds interesting, but I’m already sold on Stacks and the new look of the Dock.

4. Auto Font Activation

Yeah, I know…WHAT? It may sound stupid, but I’m a graphic artist too. I have over 4,000 fonts on my Mac, mainly because I get artwork from people sometimes that need one of those fonts. Do I use them? Hell no. I don’t use 1,000 of them commonly, but it’s nice to have them all there, so that when I do need one, I have it. What sucks is having to wade through all of them to get to the ones that I commonly use.

With Auto Font Activation, I’ll be able to disable about 3,000 fonts, that will only pop up if I need them in the future. That’s AWESOME!

3. Dashcode

I love Dashcode. You might remember this little video tutorial that I did a while back with the beta. At the time the beta didn’t support the kind of hosting we are using for the podcast. The final version should have that corrected, and I’ll be able to make an Apple Gazette Daily Widget.

I’m looking forward to making all kinds of widgets and trying to really get into the Dashboard, which is something that I don’t really use very often.

2. Multipage PDFs in Previews

You know the thing that sucks the most about Adobe illustrator? The fact that you can’t make multipage PDF documents with it. It’s insane that you can’t do that (and by the way, if someone can tell me how, I’d LOVE to know), but Preview for Leopard makes it so easy you won’t believe it. It creates beautiful PDFs, and all you have to do is drag and drop your pages in.

1. The New Finder

I HATE the Finder in Tiger. HATE. HATE. HATE it. The new Finder in Leopard is fantastic. I even found Coverflow to be extremely helpful when trying to find an image file that I had forgotten the name of (which happens to me a few times a week). The new Finder is, to me, the best innovation of Leopard, and the thing I’m looking forward to having the most on my machine.


Kokou Adzo

Kokou Adzo is a stalwart in the tech journalism community, has been chronicling the ever-evolving world of Apple products and innovations for over a decade. As a Senior Author at Apple Gazette, Kokou combines a deep passion for technology with an innate ability to translate complex tech jargon into relatable insights for everyday users.

18 Comments

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  1. 1. Time Machine – I can’t express in words how bad I want this feature
    2. New Finder – Looks awesome. I can’t wait to see how well coverflow performes/boosts productivity.
    3. Quick Look. – I can’t stand waiting three yeares for NeoOffice to open everytime I need to see if “is that the doc?” This will be a welcomed addition.
    4. Spaces – used it in Linux years ago. Very handy.
    5. Desktop stacks – very nice, I can totally use that. I’ve placed a folder in the dock that holds all my downloads from Safari, but it’s just not the same.

    It’s hard to keep the list at 5. I mean, there’s so much new stuff. Mail updates, 64 bit… the list goes on and on.

    Leopard is going to be amazing. Just amazing.

  2. @nimbus

    I’m not 100% sure if that’s true or not. I think Time Machine sounds like a great idea, and I’m sure I’ll use it when I buy some more external storage, but right now, I don’t have the hard drive space laying around to dedicate to it.

    Once I do, I’ll use it, and I’m sure it will be great…it’s just not in my Top 5.

    🙂

  3. Just a quick FYI, your wording for item 4 is pretty much admitting to typeface piracy. Some companies frown on this. The feature is great though and I too am looking forward to it. Though lino and others have nice tools for this sort of thing.

  4. Does Time Machine require A LOT of space in the extrenal drive? I mean I’ve got an 80 Gb external disk but I do use it for a lot of stuff so it wouldn’t be worth it if Time Machine uses up more than 10 Gb…. What do you guys think?

  5. My Top 5 list is of things I’m most disappointed in.

    1. New GUI, they talked about consistency, but really where is it? Some programs have an all metal interface, others have aqua components, others have the space look, others have glass, talk about consistent. Not to mention the various imperfections, such as the back and forward arrows in the Finder being a few pixels too high.

    2. Finder, I know its an improvement, and Tiger’s Finder really need a refresh so I’m thankful for that, but I can’t help but get extremely pissed off that they didn’t add support for tabbed browsing, why? When they add tabs to all windows, but not the Finder, that alone drives me insane. Not to mention the new Cover Flow view is going to make you have bigger Finder windows to have a decent view of both text and art, this is where tabs would really be useful.

    3. Dock, I know you may like the fancy effects, but its really an eye sore for those who like detail which I thought Apple did too. The 3 different shadows (4 if you could the icon’s) make the Dock look like crap on any background thats not very dark. The icon reflections, don’t symbolism a glass desk like they are intending to do, the “reflection” is nothing more than a icon flipped vertically. Granted that may look good on some, definitely not most. The crosswalk separator annoys me too, very big and obnoxious, can’t not notice it, I like the simple and discrete one in Tiger and other Mac versions.

    4. New Icons, specifically the folder icons, where do they fit in? No where. They have a bland design and use the exact same shape for every icon, and don’t even adjust the angles on different sizes, seems like a very half-assed job to me. Just through a dark glyph over the folders, that likely saved them boat loads of time and money. The colours don’t even fit in either, why aren’t they grey like the rest of the GUI? Why do they use the blue from the iTunes scrollbars, yet Leopard doesn’t even use those (according to their latest images) The icons most definitely needed to be replaced but man did they go down the wrong road.

    5. Window Shadows, this one part annoys me quite a lot, what’s with the obnoxiously large shadows on every window, talk about overkill. I know they are trying to indicate depth in the desktop, but man, not that much. Major overkill.

    Most of not all of my problems stem from the new GUI. I love it so don’t get me wrong, I’m just very pissed Apple didn’t pay attention to the minor details that made their work so outstanding in the past. I’m aware this is the first significant change in their GUI since Mac OS 10.0, and likely 10.6 will fix all of my concerns, but it just seems rushed and they didn’t spend enough time on the finer details. Besides, no tabs in Finder? what the hell :@

  6. I am new to Mac! I just placed my order yesterday for a 15″ 2.2GHz Macbook Pro with 160 GB HDD. I will pay the $10 for the Leopard update!

    I’m excited to get Tiger! lol. Never used a Mac. I will likely use Tiger for a few weeks then move on to Leopard if I see good reports around the web.

    I like the sound of the Time Machine feature. Although, I can’t seem to find an answer to my question. I’ll be using a laptop. So obviously it won’t be connected to an external HDD. Will TM simply perform a backup when I plug the HDD into my MBP? Or will the backups be on my machine’s internal hard drive?

  7. @g-bot

    How on earth am I admitting to typeface piracy?

    A) how do you know that I haven’t purchased every single font on my computer based on that statement?

    B) Dafont.com – alone – has over 7,624 fonts in its directory, all of which are free for personal use, and many of which are free for commercial use as well.

    I don’t care much for being called a pirate – especially when I don’t pirate fonts. I don’t have any reason to. There are too many great ones out there that are completely free.

  8. You missed an important failing of the new Dock. Take a folder containing other sub-folders and place it in the Dock. Click and hold on the folder to access the sub-folders within it. In Tiger you were able to navigate the entire hierarchy of the folder and sub-folders easily. In Leopard that important functionality has been removed. Why?

  9. Here’s another issue about Leopard. On their website, Apple initially said that Time Machine would work over your home wireless network. They described in detail how to connect a hard drive to your airport extreme basestation and then use Time Machine from any computer on the network to back up to the connected drive. What happened to that?

  10. @Osgood

    Have you used the final version of Leopard? If not, I’d wait until you have before getting upset over anything being missing. Having said that, they may have taken it out for some stupid reason, but if you haven’t tried the GOLD release, then it may still be there.

    @Fred

    Where have you read that you can’t do that?

  11. @nimbus

    I know someone who has the last ‘public’ build of Leopard, and Time Machine DID work on another partition, but it advises you not to before it allows you to do it. I think Apple may disable backing up to your main drive in the final version. There certainly is a good reason behind that, which is people might actually do it, and when their hdd fails (and with it the backups), it will defeat the purpose of TimeM, which not only is bad for the user, but looks bad on Apple. The only reason I can think to be able to backup to your main drive is if you are on a laptop on the road and dont have an external drive handy but want to quickly try something risky and need a backup asap. I don’t think thats worth all the potential idiocy that people might commit with backups, so if Apple disables it, I won’t complain.

    @Outlaw

    Time Machine will backup to an external drive anytime it is plugged in, and if you interrupt it (shut down, sleep, take it with you somewhere, etc.), it will simply stop and then continue the next time the drive is available. I recommend you backup to a network drive. This can be done wirelessly, or even over the internet.

  12. g-bot wrote: Just a quick FYI, your wording for item 4 is pretty much admitting to typeface piracy.

    g-bot: That’s pretty rude. I’ve got 1300+ fonts, which either came with my Mac, came with purchased software, were purchased, or are free for download. Get out on the Internet — you’ll find thousands and thousands of free fonts for personal use.