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Seeking Nerdvana The Road to Leopard or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apple Mac
Seeking Nerdvana The Road to Leopard or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apple Mac | The Road to Leopard or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apple Mac |
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| by Adam Turner | |
| Tuesday, 04 March 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 While my XP ThinkPad has its strengths, my Leopard MacBook certainly makes life easier.Featured Whitepaper
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On the software side, the biggest timesaver with Leopard would have to be Spotlight and Mail's built-in search features. Finding old emails in Outlook 2003 on XP was a slow and painful experience because I had to break up my inbox into multiple .PST files. If the .PST files got too big they would corrupt. I could only search one PST file at a time and it was amazingly slow. The move to Thunderbird a year ago was a revelation, with the search bar at the top of the inbox working so much faster. When someone called on the phone, I could call up recent emails from them in seconds rather than minutes. On XP, Google Desktop made it easier to search through multiple email archives, but it had to be regularly re-indexed because it couldn't keep track as I moved incoming emails to sub-folders and then later archived them to separate files. Nor could it keep track when I moved files between folders. If you're not using a desktop search tool, something like Google Desktop will change your life. Moving from Google Desktop on XP to Spotlight and Apple Mail on Leopard is as big a leap again. When searching for emails from with Apple Mail, you can instantly flick between searching To, From, Subject and Entire Message. Another click switches between searching the current folder and All Mailboxes. Suddenly all the valuable information locked away in your inbox is at your fingertips. Spotlight is accessed from a drop down menu on the menu bar and it narrows down you search as you type, breaking the results into categories such as email, documents, events and images. One click opens these results in a new window for a better look. Spotlight is also built into the window that pops up when you want to attach a file to an email in Mail, so you don't need to drill down through folders to find the document you're after. Of course to get the most out of Leopard you need to be using Apple's apps, for example it doesn't keep track of my Firefox browsing history which is a little frustrating. After Spotlight, Leopard's biggest timesavers would have to be Spaces and Expose. Spaces helps you navigate the pile of windows that can build up on your desktop even with benefits of a widescreen display and tabbed browsing. It's especially useful on a small screen where it is awkward to have apps open side-by-side. Spaces lets you create up to 16 desktops (four by default) and easily switch between them - a feature that many Linux distros already offer and some Windows users have access to thanks to third party utilities. When you call up Spaces, large thumbnails of each desktop are shown on the screen. You can click on which desktop you want to use and even drag windows between desktops. You can also assign specific applications to open on specific desktops. Switching between desktops is easy, just press Control and the corresponding desktop number, or Control and an arrow key to navigate through them. Unfortunately there's no Control button on the right hand side of the keyboard next to the arrow keys. After I week or so I dipped into the System Preferences and changed the trigger key from Control to Option, so I can now flick between Windows with one hand (left index finger on the Option key with the middle finger working the arrow keys). At first I pined for Window's trusty taskbar for switching between apps, but Spaces quickly grows on you. Using Spaces is very personal thing, you need to decide what works of you and which apps need to be on the same desktop. I've got my browser, word processor and instant messengers on desktop 1, with my iCal next door on desktop 2. Apple Mail is below desktop 1 on desktop 3 and iTunes is next to this on desktop 4. I mentioned before that Mail lacks pop-up notifications, but I've got around this by using Growl - which also works with Yahoo Messenger and Skype. The great thing about Spaces is that it's a core feature of Leopard so it doesn't get confused. Growl and iCal pop-ups appear on whichever desktop I'm working on, so I don't have to worry about missing calendar appointments because I wasn't looking at the right desktop at the time. If I click on a mail notification it opens the message in the desktop I'm working on, rather than dragging me back to the Mail desktop. I'm yet to come across an application or feature that doesn't cope well with Spaces, although I'm sure there are a few. The perfect companion for Spaces is Leopard's Active Screen Corners feature, but there's a few extra download you need to make Leopard really purr. CONTINUED |
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