Filed under: Surveys and Polls, Leopard
Reader Survey: Leopard the (good) little things
Okay, we've all had a chance to play around with Leopard for a while, so I thought it was now a good time to take a step back and ask: what are the little things that you really like about Leopard? I'm not talking about the headline new features: Time Machine, Quick Look, etc. Rather, I'm interested in the little features that make Leopard a bit better than Tiger.I want to focus on the good for this post. We'll get to the niggling Leopard annoyances in a separate post. To get us started I thought I'd throw out a few of my favorites. Remember these are not the best or most important new features in Leopard, just little things that make me glad I upgraded.
- The Finder permissions editor. The permissions editing interface is updated and improved.
- The Print sheet. The full print sheet with integrated preview is nicer than Tiger's
- The network mount bug seems finally to be fixed. It used to be the case that if you lost connection to a network mount OS X could freeze up. Leopard handles this problem much more graciously.
- The spotlight calculator. Need to do a quick calculation? Just invoke Spotlight and type in the equation.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
ars_workerbee said 12:09PM on 11-11-2007
"The Finder permissions editor. It's now possible to edit file permissions just by selecting Show Info on a selected file in the Finder."
That's in Tiger.
Take a look:
http://i16.tinypic.com/6o4unw1.png
Reply
Tim said 12:10PM on 11-11-2007
1: Non Active Scrollable Windows!!
2: iCal icon displaying the correct date always
3: Mail - ability to intelligently add ical dates from within emails
4: Many more little things that I can't think of :)
Reply
Mykal Bloom said 12:13PM on 11-11-2007
Grid spacing in the finder, now my icons aren't ridiculously spaced out.
Reply
Will said 12:15PM on 11-11-2007
Command-I to get info of selected item in spotlight results.
Though I'd be happier if they added Quick Look.
Reply
Pollibus said 12:19PM on 11-11-2007
I love the Expose feature for shutting down my iMac screen. I've been waiting for about 2 Years...
Reply
nimro said 12:21PM on 11-11-2007
What's the menu item in the top left of your menubar?
Reply
Tony said 12:22PM on 11-11-2007
These aren't "little" things but, they aren't really advertised all that much.
- Apache 2
- Ruby on Rails
Reply
Tony said 12:24PM on 11-11-2007
Little thing: Mail status shown by default and without a separate window.
Also, not having to know the google server settings to use gmail. Just know the username and password.
Reply
Larson said 12:28PM on 11-11-2007
The get info window has a scroll bar now. I'm pretty sure it didn't in Tiger.
The tool to screenshot part of the screen (cmd+shift+4) has a coordinates.
Option+click on Bluetooth or Airport menubar icons for extra info.
Show all windows (F10) while in Spaces view
There's way too many of these little tweaks to remember so I guess I'm done.
Reply
Connor said 12:31PM on 11-11-2007
Rounded menu corners
Gradients in the menus
Showing which wireless networks are encrypted
iChat chats grouped into one window
New folder icons
Gigantic application icons (you can zoom WAY in)
Unified interface
New help menus (actually useful now)
Clean spotlight icon
Space theme
Shiny black apple icon in the corner
Glowy blue dots in the dock (I'm sorry, I like them)
Way improved dictionary
Slick new terminal
Reply
Mat Lu said 12:34PM on 11-11-2007
@1: oops, post updated.
@6: That's MenuMeters network interface meter
Reply
hessi said 12:36PM on 11-11-2007
- a much, much faster synchronisation of IMAP servers with Mail.app
- the network mount bug you mentioned above
- no more "file in use" error messages while trying to move/copy a file from a folder when already moving/copying a file
- Safari returns to the last viewed tab if you close a tab
- Finder: "Always open in list view"
And a lot, lot more... the .4->.5 step is bigger and better than .2->.3 or .3->.4 - which I'd never had thought.
Reply
dagamer34 said 12:39PM on 11-11-2007
12. Spotlight searches your web caches so if I'm looking for a page I opened last week, Spotlight finds it for me. I don't remember Tiger doing that.
Reply
Zeromaru said 12:39PM on 11-11-2007
1) Renaming a file will select the entire filename without selecting the file extension (ripped from Vista, can't argue a good thing)
2) The new 2D dock (obtained using the Terminal command). The white light indicators are much nicer than the triangles, and the white border makes it actually feel like something docked to the bottom of the screen, rather than just sitting there.
3) No rounded corners in the menu bar. Again, it actually feels like it's just part of the interface rather than lying on the desktop.
4) Increased contrast between active and inactive windows.
5) Tabbed terminal and bash v.3. I had no idea how much I missed gnome-terminal but this is doing a pretty sweet job.
Reply
stefan said 12:45PM on 11-11-2007
preview.app now allows you to add pictures/pdfs to pdf-documents and change the order of the pages within.
Reply
brandon said 12:52PM on 11-11-2007
to elaborate on #15, preview is great now, after 5 years on mac i'm finally using it as my default pdf viewer. NO MORE DRAWER!!! YAY
Reply
carson said 12:51PM on 11-11-2007
I've only had Leopard installed for one day because I was in the middle of a project at work however... Ejecting a partitioned hard drive will ask you if you'd like to eject individual volumes. Tiger would just eject them all.
check the pic
Reply
AlanH said 12:56PM on 11-11-2007
Did Mail do this in Tiger?
Right click a mail item in the spam folder to delete it. It doesn't display in the preview pane of the Mail window. So there's no risk of a web linked image in the mail "phoning home" to the spammer.
Reply
Eloise Pasteur said 12:56PM on 11-11-2007
The think I like most was one I didn't think I would. I find I flick between cover-flow and column view having hardly every used anything other than column view since it became an option (and a mac user for longer than I care to admit!).
That plus quick-look has become invaluable, incredibly quickly for me.
Reply
C. said 12:59PM on 11-11-2007
OoPs!! I've only had Leopard installed for one day because I was in the middle of a project at work however... Ejecting a partitioned hard drive will ask you if you'd like to eject individual volumes. Tiger would just eject them all.
check the pic
http://clients.fonsecafoto.com/pics/pic3.png
Reply