Other obvious differences are the Dock (analogous to - but miles better than - the Windows Task Bar) which now has a 3D look when pegged to the bottom of the screen.
Finder menus now ape iTunes 7. Apple has cleared out the confused look introduced by previous Mac OS X updates - metallic, shiny plastic, etc - in favour of a simpler, cleaner, unified look. We're not yet convinced by the look of the new folder icons. Tiger's shiny Aqua folders have been replaced by flat blue versions.
You can see how the changes look on our desktop in pictures 5 and 6.
Next we'll be looking at one of the much-vaunted new features: Quick Look
Quick Look and Cover Flow
1.40pm - Quick Look is a new feature of the Mac OS X Finder than enables you to look at the contents of a file without actually having to open it in an application. This is handy if the file has an obscure name and you want to have a look at its contents. Or you can use it to find a photo you're looking for without having to boot up iPhoto, Aperture or Photoshop, and so on. Select multiple files and you can see all of their contents. You can even scroll through individual pages of a PDF without having to open Mac OS X's native PDF viewer Preview or Adobe Acrobat. To invoke Quick Look, just select the file you want to see and then press the space bar.
You can also use Quick Look in conjunction with Cover Flow - another rip from iTunes 7. This time instead of enabling you to flick through album art, Cover Flow in the Finder enables you to scroll through views of individual files - again handy for finding stuff quickly. We're not quite sure whether it's our Power Mac's fault, but the big, scrollable thumbnails in Cover Flow are very pixellated now. We suspect it's more to do with Spotlight and the fact that it hasn't finished indexing yet.
2.21pm - before we move on to Spaces... we think we've just hit our second glitch. It's relatively minor and it's to do with iCal synchronisation. Don't worry, we'll wake you up when it's all over. It looks like not doing a clean install is causing some conflicts between what iCal thinks should be in our calendar, and what our Mac does or even .mac does. There are 378 conflicts and clicking on 'resolve all similar conflicts using iCal' doesn't seem to work. That means we'll have to do them manually. Crap.
Spaces
2.41pm - We're now looking at Spaces - Leopard's virtual desktop system. This enables you to hive off separate parts of your life into different desktops so you don't get distracted by other applications, and can keep your desktop relatively clutter-free.
Of course, virtual desktops are nothing new, and there have even been versions available for the Mac and Windows before. So why now include it in Leopard?
Frankly on our old 17-inch Apple Studio Display it's easy to see why. There simply isn't enough screen real estate to go around all the apps we want open. By default Leopard enables you to create four different spaces, so you could use one for organising your life - pop open Mail, ICal and Safari, for example. Then pop open another for your music and movies, a third for work stuff - using Word, Excel ,etc - and a fourth for playing games.
The trick when you're busy is to remember which part of your digital life you've compartmentalised where. Once you've turned on Spaces in Leopard's System Preferences, all you need to do is Press F8 to invoke it, then the Up and Down keys or the mouse to pick the one you want. You can even drag applications and documents between spaces. Handy for when multi-tasking like this befuddles the brain.
