Mac OS X Leopard review There's a new look in Finder called Cover Flow. In addition to making it easier to find your work, interface additions are intended to make multitasking less stressful. Virtual desktops, called Spaces, cluster open windows into categories or boxes. This can cut the number of windows you may otherwise stack around your desktop--especially on tiny monitors. For example, you could move everything you need to edit a vacation video into one space, and in another Space place the files and apps needed to write a dissertation. Spaces were a cinch to set up (such as drawing a chart in a word processor), but a tad awkward for us to master until we learned the keyboard shortcuts. You can also use the mouse to drag items between Spaces, and to drag the Spaces themselves around. If you rarely back up your work because the process is too boring or confusing, Time Machine is likely to change that. The spaced-out interface is about as sexy as backup can get, displaying a dynamic timeline alongside snapshots of selected folders and files throughout their history. To restore a file you lost, just go to an earlier time, click the Restore button, and you'll zoom back to your present Desktop. For a current period of 24 hours, Time Machine backs up automatically every hour. It backs up each day for the past month and each week for content updated earlier than that. Time Machine immediately detected our external hard drive via two USB ports and we started backing up within a few minutes. You can check out the drives of fellow Leopard users with Time Machine, too. iChat lets you and Leopard-using buddies share files and control each others' desktops, expanding the tool's potential professional use. Now you can record iChat sessions as AAC audio or MPEG video files ready for an iPod--great for podcasters. iChat Theater's silly effects let you distort your face, fun-house mirror style. Green screen backgrounds within iChat Theater let your talking head appear in a videoconference front of, say, included images of the moon or your own pictures. Other chat buddies can see these, whether they're using an older iteration of OS X, or even if they're using AIM on a Windows PC. iChat enables you to share files as you gab via video, so you and a friend can watch the same movie clip or flip through the same PowerPoint presentation. Photo Booth integrates with iChat, letting you record videos and show off full-screen slideshows. Mac's new Mail application integrates rich note-taking into email. These notes can serve as scrapbooks containing images. Some 32 email templates enable you to drop in pictures and resize them with a built-in photo browser. Mail's RSS feeds tie in to those in Safari. The email application also detects addresses for mapping via Google, as well as contacts for a quick save. Natural language capabilities, similar to those within Gmail, recognize phrases such as "next Saturday" for scheduling. Changes are synchronized between Mail and iCal. Setting up Mail is less complicated than Outlook, and it works with accounts from 27 services, including Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail. Finally, the Safari browser bakes in tabbed browsing without making you turn on the feature. Safari's new Web Clips tool is cool, letting you turn any snippet from a Web page into a widget for your Dashboard.  Web Clips lets you take a chunk out of any Web site and turn it into a widget to use in OS X's Dashboard. Geotagging is a cool addition to Leopard, enabling you to tie photos to latitude and longitude through built-in GPS on digital cameras, so you can put picture galleries on a map. There are updates to less glamorous elements such as Automator and Dashcode, and Network Preferences is streamlined. There's support for connecting more cameras via cable or Wi-Fi, and for other gadgets via Bluetooth. ColorSync reads EXIF sRGB data from cameras, too. SecurityMore firewall controls are among several security enhancements to Leopard. To fend off Trojans and spoofing attempts, you'll be grilled more when downloading materials. A mechanism called Sandboxing is supposed to prevent potential external threats from hijacking your applications. Parental controls are now featured more prominently in the System and offer content filters, time limits, and Internet activity loggers to keep tabs on young Web surfers.Service and SupportSupport options remain the same as in the Tiger OS. You get 90 days of help free by telephone, as with other products from Apple. Phone support thereafter charges per incident. AppleCare support lasts a year after you buy Leopard. For extra peace of mind, you should consider extended warranties.Apple also tweaked the Help menus within OS 10.5. These are arranged well, although they didn't always provide an instant answer. Many items are better explained on Apple's Web site via message boards, user forums, and a well-organized knowledge base.
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