As promised IT is giving a review of the latest release of OS X, 10.5 aka Leopard. Here’s my (very) rough take on a couple of favorite features, in no order whatsoever.

First, the Look & Feel. Aesthetically Leopard is very pleasing, but not radically different from the previous version. There are some variations on the Aqua theme: new dock, translucent menu bar, new icons. Summed up, it’s all still glossy and gorgeous.

Spaces: I used VitrueDesktops with 10.4 to give me multiple desktops. Spaces is the built-in desktop manager that gives you as many desktops or “spaces” as you’d like. It’s a real improvement for the OS and a nod to it’s Debian heritage (multiple desktops/desktop management has been a feature of most Linux systems for years). You can assign an application to a specific desktop or to every desktop. For example, I’ve assigned Parallels to space 4, so when I first launch Parallels OS X automatically moves to 4 and then keeps the app there. I keep my web browsing on another desktop and NeoOffice on yet another.

One thing I had to tweak was the way Finder plays with Spaces. If I opened a Finder window on space 1, every time I cmd+tab’ed to Finder I’d be moved back to 1. I prefer to be able to open a Finder window on any and all spaces. In the Spaces pref pane you can assign applications to a desktop(s), so I added Finder to the list and assigned it to “every space,” which gave me the desired behavior. (You can finder Finder.app in the CoreServices folder.) IMO, I think this should be the default setting for Finder’s role in Spaces, but to each his own.

Preview: Preview, the all-purpose PDF and image viewer, has been dramatically revamped: Easier navigation between pages — you used to only be able to scroll one page, then click either ‘next page’ or click the next page in the drawer — now you can scroll an entire document; adjustable thumbnails; image cropping & capturing; and bookmarks. I don’t know if bookmarks were part of the old Preview, but now you can bookmark images and documents like you would a webpage so you quickly bring it up later.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.