Filed under: Leopard
24 Hours of Leopard: Hot Spots
Feature: Hot Spots
How it works: Man, this is one big feature I've been looking forward to--and I have yet to hear any final confirmation apart from the 300 New Features page that it made the final cut. This new Universal Access ability allows you to monitor a spot on your screen and automate what happens when that spot changes. You can monitor up to 10 different spots--no that's not a joke about leopards--and get alerts when anything happens there.
Who will use it: Anyone into automation, who's waiting for a file to finish downloading, for a batch job to finish, or for a friend to come online. All of these state changes can be grabbed via the visual screen feedback they produce.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
matthew said 9:12PM on 10-25-2007
Finally...a Leopard feature that's actually news to anyone who hasn't been on an island for 6 months. Pretty nifty feature, too.
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Phil said 9:17PM on 10-25-2007
Interesting, I never knew about this feature.
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Chris said 9:27PM on 10-25-2007
Does anyone know if the DVD program will now support HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback? This was speculated about a year ago, but nothing has been said since. Seeing if it would be worth it for the 360 drive.
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Cycomachead said 9:27PM on 10-25-2007
Neat! It's odd: Apple's 300 list. There a like 5 new screen saves listed as 5 different features (which should be 1) and yet there are other like this a resolution independence that aren't on that list. (Unless Apple axed these at the last second)
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Woody_OZ said 9:31PM on 10-25-2007
HEY Very excited... TNT have just delivered my official copy of osx 10.5 Leopard !!!! Brisbane Australia :)
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Carlos said 9:48PM on 10-25-2007
Who will use it? I WILL!!!
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Athtart said 10:19PM on 10-25-2007
Just plain cool.
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Simon Arch said 10:56PM on 10-25-2007
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but I don't see any mention of it in Universal Access, and the system help and System Preferences don't come up with anything under hot spots. I think this one might have gotten the axe, unless I'm looking in the wrong places (which I freely admit is a distinct possibility).
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Alan Yeung said 11:31PM on 10-25-2007
Resolution independence is in the shipping build. There's no user-exposed UI for turning it on (but it's easy enough for geeks and tweakers to turn on) so it's not listed in the end-user features list, but it is mentioned on Apple's developer pages.
I agree, this is one of the big advancements in accessibility, especially for aging users. Not exposing it to the user, at least initially, gives developers to update their apps for resolution independence. Apparently most work, but some apps have issues with fixed-size raster graphics.
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Andrew said 11:33PM on 10-25-2007
@Simon:
On the 300 features pages, It's under "Universal Access," second column at the bottom. I can't imagine Apple would be advertising it if they axed it.
Maybe check the fancy-dancy new help system - it might say something about it.
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Brent Anderson said 11:44PM on 10-25-2007
On Resolution Independent UI, it just works - you don't need to adjust it to get it to work (I'm on the Leopard Beta). The icons, for instance, run at 512 px squared so you can read the text on the TextEdit pad.
As for hot spots, I hate to say this but I can't find it anywhere. It may have been axed :(
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Jay Riether said 11:46PM on 10-25-2007
I'm not a developer, but I have a GREAT idea for such an OS-level feature. But doesn't 10 spots seem to be rather arbitrary? Why can't I define 100 spots if the display is capable?
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Simon Arch said 12:38AM on 10-26-2007
@Andrew: Sorry, I wasn't clear. I checked in the UA control panel (yes, in Leopard, I'm naughty). Also checked the system-wide help as well as the System Preferences help and found nothing.
It'd be too bad if this got the axe. It seems like it might be a useful tool.
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Adam Turetzky said 4:23PM on 10-26-2007
This feature was cut from this release.
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to chris said 12:20PM on 10-27-2007
chris, what part of "Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry" was unclear. ask those questions on a normal leopard general question board, or find articles relevant to your question if you want them answered
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ubrgeek said 6:44PM on 10-29-2007
So did this make it into the release version or not?
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Ted said 9:33PM on 10-31-2007
no seriously..did it get the axe?
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