I installed Leopard on Friday and have been exploring it over the weekend. There are a few very nice improvements over Tiger and I think it is worth the $90 investment. (I bought a family pack with five licenses for $190.) Here is my take on it:

Leopard User Interface
The main change in Leopard is how you access and manage information. Apple has taken some of the innovation in UI from the iPhone and iTunes and incorporated these things into the UI for the Mac.

The Finder now incorporates Cover Flow from iTunes so you can scroll through documents within the major areas: deskop, home, documents, music, photos, etc. I don’t use the cover flow in iTunes so I’m not sure how much this is going to buy me in terms of document management. But it is pretty.

The Finder also saves all of your computer searches and organizes them as Today, Yesterday, and This Week. This is a quick way to get at things you have been working on.

There is quite a difference of opinion about the aesthetic quality of the new dock. It has a mirrored bar underneath the icons. The aesthetics are fine for me. But the big change is in the way the dock handles stacks. When you drag a folder to the dock, it opens up like a fan so that you can see all of its contents (which can be sorted along a number of parameters.) I can see this as a useful way to manage multiple project files.

The Finder now aggregates all of your images, movies, and documents into groups that can be scanned through cover flow. This is a nice way to quickly review what you’ve got.

Leopard also gives you a new Dock, which is a nice aesthetic improvement. I like the Stacks feature of the dock which allows you to drop folders onto the dock. When you click on these folders, they open like a fan and you can quickly find things inside. This is another shortcut to getting to things on your computer. And there is a new downloads folder that stores all of the downloads from mail and firefox (if you set the preferences to drop things there). This is another nice organizational improvement.

The Rest
Leopard includes improvements in Mail, iCal, and .mac integration. I now use gcalendar and gmail so I won’t be taking advantage of much these things. Mail now has nicely integrated to-do lists and notes, as well as RSS feeds in the Mail finder.

Spotlight has been improved and is much faster. It also has an integrated dictionary that gives you results in wikipedia, thesaurus, and the Apple database. This is actually really nice and handy.

iChat has a whole bunch of improvements. You can send text messages from iChat windows. You can also record video and audio chats. This is very useful for doing podcast interviews (with people on macs). And there is a chat theater presentation system, which I am interested in exploring.

Share This

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 7:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.