DACS February 2008 Program Review
Program Review:
Apple’s New Leopard

by Chris Novell

In a move to add to its virtual zoo that had already been previously stocked in succession with a Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger, Apple now offers Leopard. Sporting over 300 changes and improvements, encompassing core components, applications, and developer tools, Leopard (Mac OS X v10.5) first made its appearance in October 2007. Then, within 54 hours of being available, two million copies of Leopard were sold.

Dave Marra, Senior Systems Engineer at Apple, dazzled the audience with his nonstop explanations and demonstrations of many of the features of this likable Leopard.

Dave took the familiar – several months of DACS newsletters in PDF – and showed how quickly and easily he could reconstruct them in Preview, using such themes as ‘topic’ or ‘author’. Another feat of malleable magic was illustrated when he used Web Clip to portion off a favorite piece of a website to live dynamically on the Dashboard. There is room for 16 virtual windows in Spaces, an organizing feature that will agreeably move things around seamlessly as you map out your activities for work and leisure.

With research revealing that backup strategies are actively used by only a single digit population of computer users, Apple has provided its Mac users with live-in help: Time Machine is there to mark the spot, periodically recording almost the user’s every move. After the first full backup, incremental backups are done automatically every hour, with older backups pruned to daily then weekly backups and finally deleted, as space requires. To further assist quasi nomads to fulfill their nostalgic needs, Mac owners with a .Mac account can remotely access their home computers using Back to My Mac.

To prove that it is possible to have your cake and eat it too, Boot Camp allows for the user to alternate between using the Leopard OS and your copy of Windows XP or Vista on an Intel-based Mac; it won’t even mind if you want to copy a file originating in Windows to use in Leopard. And the cat will simply purr if you use the Text Workflow Automator to make an audio book from a word processing document.

Mac users will smile when they use the Spotlight feature, a high-powered search capability that will peer into every nook and cranny on the computer – and every computer on the network – to find occurrences of a word or phrase, even in emails, recently visited websites, and Time Machine backups. In Mail, diligent data detectors prompt the user to store a contact’s name or mark a meeting date on the iCal. And just when you think you’ve seen it all, Leopard offers you a Quick Look, an opportunity to look here, there, and everywhere – without needing to open a program, or even without needing to have the creating program installed – to peek inside Finder files, Mail attachments, and Time Machine.

Anyone who does collaborative work, and, in particular, teachers, can be pleased to use Screen Share in the iChat feature. Photographers and geographers and practically anybody will delight in using the Properties feature that can tell the when and where for photos taken with GPS chip-embedded cameras. Leopard comes loaded with Languages – 15 of them – to facilitate the use of the machines by many countries and as a handy aid for foreign language instruction. You can even be impressed by how well English is handled using the new high-quality Speech synthesis voice called “Alex”.

Many thanks to Dave for a fine presentation!

For more information, please refer to Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard. Many of the features have their own page in Wikipedia as well.



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