A Few Thoughts On Mac OS X Leopard

12 Nov 2007

Having used 10.5 for about two weeks I must say I am very impressed. There are, however, a few things that could use a .1 upgrade. Here are a few things I’ve noticed.

• Spotlight is very fast and returns mostly relevant results. I am disappointed that iPhoto keywords are not supported (presumably to avoid breaking the iPhoto structure). Looking for images I am thus forced to find an instance of the Media Browser.

• Having a media browser in every Open panel is a welcome addition, with media files being organized by applications other than Finder. I wish Finder had a media browser as well.

• Quick Look is simply an amazing tool. I wonder how I ever managed without it. Live previews on almost every file in Finder is great and very fast. Even fonts are displayed with a preview.

• Dictionary.app has been updated with an Apple dictionary and (yay!) built-in Wikipedia! Though hardly better than the online version, it illustrates perfectly how integral part of computing the internet has become. Even better, there is now a documented way of creating new dictionaries, something I’ve requested since Tiger.

• I love how Mail now reads my RSS feeds. Makes perfect sense to me having incoming items collected this way. I do wish I could select all feeds by clicking the RSS headline, though.

• Web Clips (for turning parts of webpages into Widgets) is incredibly easy to use. It does not, however, store sessions making it impossible to use it on pages that require login. And I really want to use it with Google Analytics…

• Saved Searches cannot be added to the Dock as a Stack. Would have been cool to have a stack of the 10 most recently opened documents.

• SVG support in Safari is a great addition. Completely missing are scrollbars as well as any way of zooming. Also it would be good to have (read) support in Preview.

• Time Machine is a beautifully easy backup tool. It does behaves erratically, however, when backing up to a disk formatted with a partition scheme not matching your CPU. It refuses to find deleted files through the Finder Spotlight search bar but reveals them by manually navigating to the relevant folder. Look at this Apple Discussions thread for more.