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

Stuart Corner
Friday, 26 October 2007 08:43

Business IT - Technology

Safari also has a couple of neat upgrades: it will now open and display pdf documents within the browser window. But best of all you can select any area of a web page, say the hottest video on YouTube, and create a window in the desktop widgets that will show what you selected and keep it updated every time the web page from which it is taken is updated.

Another new feature: Back to My Mac enables you to remotely access one Mac from another, transfer files and control the desktop. This is done via a .Mac account and only between Macs running users registered to the same .Mac account. You don't have to be logged in on the remote Mac: it just needs to be running (ie not in sleep mode) and with an active Internet connection.

Apple says that while this could be done before it was a big hassle needing static IP addresses and tweaks to get around firewalls and Network address translation.

There is much more: more even than Apple managed to show in an hour long preview. Most notable perhaps is Time Machine: simple backup to any attached hard drive: you can set this to happen hourly daily and to back up the entire hard drive so that in the event of a total disaster you can restore you complete operating environment with operating system, applications and documents to an entirely different machine.