Winner of our recent “What’s your fa.vo.rit poll gave us the new mac finder as reader’s favorite new application in Leopard. With good reason. The new finder is faster, more intuitive and 100% more useful than the previous version.

Cover flow allows you to flip through the contents of your computer with a screen not unlike the iTunes cover art browser, a la 1970’s jukebox. It takes a lot to impress me, and I’m impressed. Preview photos, flip through document pages without opening them, even play a video in the winder window; all effortlessly and considerably faster than with Tiger.

Combined with a new version of spotlight, finding those long-forgotten files is no longer an issue. I can only speak for myself, but I have collected a huge array of files over the last few months and finding them with Tiger could be a chore. Leopard may not be a massive upgrade, but it’s far superior to Tiger.

You can, if you wish, go “old school” and use the more traditional hierarchical view. Even with this there is massive improvements. Photo and movie previews load quickly and accurately. And once again, you can play videos and flip through multi page documents, although it’s rather hard to read any pages of a document without a magnifying glass.

Apple have certainly upped the ante with Leopard and it’s my fa.vo.rit app so far.

Apple’s new operating system, 10.5 or “Leopard,” continues to surprise me. None of the new features is particularly well advertised or explained, but my current favorite has got to be “Spaces.”

I like to keep a lot of windows open and active at the same time. Even with two monitors, it’s a challenge to keep them from getting in the way of each other. If I have five browsers open (I use Firefox, Safari, Camino and IE7 in a Windows environment) along with PhotoShop, Word and a couple of FTP programs all at the same time, I can hardly see the forest for the trees.

That’s where I am finding “Spaces” incredibly useful. Spaces allows you to selectively have some of your open windows hidden, and switch between sets of open windows without having to go through all the others. It’s almost like having four desktops at the same time, and being able to effortlessly switch between them. Here are some screen shots of my normal working environment:

Even with Expose it still looks a mess. Here is an example of “Spaces” where I have placed the windows for each job in to a different desktop. I can now switch between them at the click of a button. The mess becomes much easier to navigate through. Leopard may not be quite ready yet, but this feature is incredible.

It’s not yet completely intuitive either, but I think once I get the hang of it this will be my most used new app.

Apple has jumped the gun with the release of their new Operating system, Leopard. My sources at Apple (who will remain nameless) tell me there are two reasons for this. One, the software engineers responsible had been “stolen” to complete the iPhone firmware updates in Apple’s ongoing battle with the hackers, and Two, the OS had already been delayed for too long and it was felt that Leopard should be let out of the cage without further delay, even though there were known issues. Here are five reasons to wait for 10.5.1

1. Installation problems. Despite many naysayers accusing people of creating problems where there are none, a good proportion of upgrades did not go well, and even Apple is admitting there is a problem. According to Apple, “After completing an upgrade installation of Leopard and restarting the computer, a “blue screen” may appear for an extended period of time.” The solution? “Reinstall Leopard (recommended)”
2. Disk utility issues. Despite doing a clean “erase and install” many people are reporting slow or non-existent reformatting.
3. Printer drivers. Due to a late alteration to Leopard’s print utility, many manufacturers were caught on the hop and are rushing to redo their printer drivers. There are known issues with certain Lexmark, Epson and HP printers, either with direct connections or through Airport Extreme.
4. Firefox. Firefox 2.0.0.9 is not fully functional. Mostly minor bugs but some embedded media will fail and no drop down menus at certain sites. According to Firefox, it’s “Nothing to lose your sleep to, but in this case the fix won’t come until Firefox 3. Think 2008.”
5. Photoshop. Older versions of Photoshop will not work, and a fix is unlikely.

Me, I think it’s well-named, a big pussycat with a temperamental nature. I’m already having a love/hate relationship with Leopard, so look out for “The Top Five Reasons to Upgrade to Leopard Today.”

Now, that you have been using leopard for a few days now; or you have seen demos and read articles about it, what is your favorite feature?

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Apple’s new OS, 10.5 or Leopard has some interesting new features. Time Machine stores an up-to-date copy of all your Mac’s files on an external hard drive, personal file sharing volume, or Mac OS X Server. That includes system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, and documents.

That would be everything, right down to the way your desktop looked at a given time. It is possible to restore any backup, from any particular time, or be selective and just restore a single file or photo, or whatever you wish.

You don’t even have to do any work. The first time you plug an external drive in to your computer, Leopard asks if you want to use that as a backup, hit “Yes” and it’s taken care of automatically.

You can literally go back in time and see how your computer looked on a given date, and the user interface is possibly the coolest looking piece of software I have seen. Looking down a tunnel into the past, you can pick which version to look at, scroll through the items on the desktop or stored in the hard drive, pick what you want and restore, or not. Here’s a screen shot of Time Machine in action.

I love it. In fact, it almost makes up for the insane amount of time I had to waste installing Leopard in the first place. Pity I can’t go back in time and change that….….Or maybe I can.