Am running the new Mac OS Leopard at the moment. Nik wanted to camp Machines at 6pm on Saturday but we got there late en route to dinner. After playing with it for 24 hours, all I can say is that it hits all the right spots with me. Especially how it affects my work. Features I am crazy about:
Coverflow/Quicklook
Previews almost all files ala iTunes coverflow in good quality thumbnails. Opens a multipage, browsable file (if the file, like a PDF, has more than one page) in Quicklook with a space bar tap. Previews video files. What I am loving about this is that it’s previewing my 100MB files as fast as the 80KB ones. This means I no longer have to wait for the proper app to load it to preview, especially say when I’m working on a 10 page 1GB-sized spread mostly consisting of 100MB TIFFs. It’s taking me so much faster to find things without having to wait for the load, at any one time I have over 1000 image files in my ‘Pending’ directory. I don’t even need to launch Preview now.
Mail
Forget the fun new templates, the highlight is that Quicklook has been integrated into Mail as well, making previewing attachments too easy.
Time Machine
Great for heavy users. Working on 10 magazines me and my team go through a gazillion files a week. Some times we have up to 10 different versions on client work. Everyone has horror stories of overwriting a file by accident, deleting important things without knowing etc - being able to access something saved yesterday, or last hour would be ultra-indispensable. Especially with a network backup utility, if we set this up in the office it means we will never lose any work again. Not just our files but the entire state of the machine, including mail. Time Machine is nuts. It’s great how Apple is encouraging backup.
Spaces/Expose
Have been previously using Desktop Manager, which is essentially the exact same thing as Spaces with a different UI. Can’t live without Desktop Manager, and now that Spaces is OS integrated, can’t live without it either. I’m likely to have Mail, Safari, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, Adium, iTunes, Word, Excel, Transmit and a bunch of finder windows open at the same time. If I didn’t have Expose and virtual desktops it would kill me to find anything. Expose works with Spaces as well, the drag and drop utility is too awesome.
iChat is pretty awesome, especially how you can take over someone’s screen and work remotely. Don’t foresee me using this much though when the need arises it is definitely handy. Spotlight has been reworked as well. The best part is that my Mac is running faster now post-Leopard. Unbelievable.
What my desktop now looks like:
Yes, I really don’t have anything on there :)