Leopard: an upgrade with spots on, and some bells and whistles

Stuart Corner
Friday, 26 October 2007 08:43

Business IT - Technology

Apple previewed the latest upgrade to OS X showing only a handful of the claimed 300 new features, but I reckon there is plenty there to tempt lots of Tiger users to shell out $A159 for the upgrade.

Many of the new features are designed to make life easier for people who, typically, handle lots of different files in lots of different applications at the same time. Are you one of those people whose desktop is cluttered with dozens of downloaded files? Well, with Leopard you will have to work very hard to be so untidy because, by default it will store them in a new item in the dock called the stack. Click on it and it will sprout a tower of icons, each one showing a preview of what is in that file. You can also choose to display these as a grid across the screen.

Do you, like me, have folders full of files with names that meant something at the time they were created but now might as well be in Swahili for all they convey about the contents? Well, now  there's a much quicker way of finding out what is in each file. Preview has been upgraded to allow you to peek into the contents of a whole range of files from different applications. You can view it as tiny icon, or zoom in for more detail, and you don't need to have the application that created the file to do this.

Another pain that I, and I suspect many other users, encounter is having the desktop perpetually cluttered with multiple windows from multiple applications. Leopard offers you a way to bring order to this chaos with a feature called Spaces.

Spaces lets you divide your desktop into a grid of up to 16 discrete areas and assign one or more applications to each area. Documents for that application can then be found in their allotted 'space'. You can set applications to default to a specific space and toggle between spaces, and set different windows into different spaces: so for example the main Mail window could always be in the top left corner and open messages in the top right.