As of today, it has now been a full five weeks since I installed Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook. It is no secret that I gave much more focus to Leopard than I gave to the iPhone during its late-June release, and that is because I am a Mac user and the first new OS X release in two and a half years is much more important to me. That’s why, during the week of the Leopard launch, I counted down to the Leopard release in my own way with my Tiger-to-Leopard series, which attempted to put the time difference between Tiger and Leopard into perspective. Then, for the 30 days of November, I wrote my Leopard Feature Presentation series, which selected one new feature per day from Mac OS X Leopard and reviewed it based on my experiences with that feature. Not only has it given me the chance to express my opinions about what I think of Leopard, doing the Leopard Feature Presentation has forced me to discover some of the other new features in Leopard that I might otherwise have overlooked.

So now that I have dedicated a full 45 (now 46) posts on my blog to covering Mac OS X Leopard, and have been using Leopard earnestly for the past 35 days, I will now make my final review of Mac OS X Leopard and do a final recap of the Leopard Feature Presentations during the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.
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Tags: Apple, features, innovations, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, operating system, recap, release, review

Sorry folks, but try as hard as I might, I was unable to get my hands on an external hard drive or on any friends who have a Leopard laptop with an external hard drive that has Time Machine set up. I even postponed the Leopard Feature Presentation on Time Machine to be the penultimate post for the month of November in the hopes that I could use it before then! Therefore, I have not been able to get my hands on Time Machine, and therefore, I cannot honestly review it. I could regurgitate how it works, but what’s the point of doing that? We ALL know how it works! I want to talk about my opinions based on using it, and how can I do that unless I get a chance to use it.

Therefore, although it’s kind of awkward, this post shall serve as an IOU. I promise, at my earliest possible convenience, to update this post with a full-fledged Leopard Feature Presentation for Time Machine as soon as I have been able to set it up, use it, and feel like I’ve worn out my back up lights. So, whenever that is, I will finish up the last little bit of this blog series. I promise.

Feature Satisfaction Rating: *insert random repetitive excusing explanation here*

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: backup, hard drive, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, portal, Quick Look, restore, review, safety, Time Machine

Automator premiered in Mac OS X Tiger, dubbed as “AppleScript for the rest of us.” Well, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but it hasn’t really seemed to have caught on for me. Maybe it was because some of the aspects of the UI were quirky, or maybe I just don’t do enough repetitive tasks on my computer.

Leopard only brings a few changes to Automator, which mostly acts the same as it did before. Now, one would pretty obviously guess that there’s now new Automator actions out of the box, which is nice, considering that Tiger’s Automator always seemed to leave certain actions out. Automator also now gives you access to variables, so you can easily drag in today’s date, or your short username, or a random number, for example, and these variables will automatically reflect the status when you run the action. And, like practically everything else in Leopard, you have an iLife media browser. (You know, I find it weird that practically all of Leopard has access to your iLife apps, but you STILL have to buy iLife separately!!!)

Probably the most notable new feature in Automator is the ability to record actions. When you click the new Record button in Automator, Automator is hidden and a floating window appears to let you know that Automator is recording. Then, you do your action, and when you’re done doing your action, you hit Stop. Automator creates a new action called Watch Me Do which lists your actions.

However, I repeatedly tried recording different actions, and found Automator to be VERY unreliable. Automator actually records your mouse movements, so when you play back these actions, it actually moves your mouse around. However, Automator doesn’t check to see if the mouse is doing the same thing to the same window, and almost always gets screwed up. (One action that I played back ended up selecting and deleting the text in a document, and then saving it, even though that’s NOT what I told it to do!) And sometimes, Automator completely ignored various actions that I did with my mouse. In short, this feature is horribly unreliable and I wouldn’t trust anything to it.

So Automator has a few new features, but other than for having access to some new actions, Leopard’s Automator is not going to be a reason for Automator-lovers to upgrade. And as for that Record button, Apple’s going to need to order some boxes of bug spray direct from the warehouse.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: actions, AppleScript, Automator, bugs, features, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, recording, review

Preview, Mac OS X’s PDF/image viewer, has always been kind of an iffy subject and its fate has been uncertain. When Panther was released, Preview was hailed as the fastest PDF reader on the market, but it still was a bit clunky, and for me, personally, the relatively recent release of Adobe Reader 8 persuaded me to make that my default PDF reader.

However, Preview in Mac OS X Leopard has been greatly enhanced with a significant number of new and enhanced features which really define it as a serious PDF reader, and also brings a few tricks up its sleeve that formerly have only been available to PDF consumers after the purchase of Adobe Acrobat Pro. So what’s new? Let’s take a look.
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Tags: editing, features, images, iWork, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, PDFs, preview, review, viewing

One of Leopard’s “big new features” is a feature for those .Mac members who got suckered into spending $100/year for Apple’s suite of services which probably are only worth about $50/year, if that much. It has to do with the Finder’s improved sharing features (file sharing, screen sharing, etc.), and it’s called Back to My Mac.
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Tags: Back to My Mac, file sharing, Finder, iDisk, internet, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, network, review, Screen Sharing

On Apple’s 300+ Leopard Features List, iChat earns the recognition of having the most new features in the list–24 to be exact. Although iChat 4 includes a nice series of new features for the AV crowd and some other new ideas, is the new iChat any better at just plain, old-fashioned text chatting? I spent a couple of weeks with iChat to find out.
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Tags: Adium, AIM, audio, chat, Chax, collaboration, features, Google Talk, iChat, iChat Theater, Jabber, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, preview, Quick Look, recording, review, Screen Sharing, sharing, text, Video

Mac OS X Tiger was the first version of OS X to bring what could be considered a comprehensive set of parental controls to the Mac platform, but at last, Leopard goes all out to provide a wide array of parental controls in order to control what parents can do on the computer. Err, um, I mean to control what kids can do on the computer.
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Tags: accounts, feature, Leopard Feature Presentation, limits, Mac OS X Leopard, Parental Controls, review, System Preferences, users

One of the smaller-but-still-useful new features in Leopard is the ability to create a Guest Account. Have you ever had a friend that wanted to quickly use your computer, but you were hesitant to let them have access to your account with all of your files on it? When you turn on Guest Account from the Accounts pane of System Preferences, a new account is created (with the obvious name, Guest Account) that does not have a password. However, every time someone logs into the guest account, a brand new, generic Mac OS X Leopard account is created for them on-the-fly, and when they log out of the guest account, all information and files in their home folder are deleted. Nevertheless, this allows them quick access to your computer when they need it, and it keeps all of your files safe from harm. (You can also specify Parental Controls on the Guest Account if you wish; Parental Controls to be reviewed on tomorrow’s Leopard Feature Presentation.)

Now granted, this is a very basic feature, and one that I’ve just described to you in a single paragraph, but my experiences with it have been worth its weight in gold. My younger brother has often wanted to use my MacBook for whatever reason (partly out of jealousy), and being able to have a Guest Account available has made me a lot more comfortable with letting him use it because he won’t have access to any of my other files. This is definitely a must useful new feature to come in Mac OS X Leopard.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: accounts, feature, friends, guest, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, review, System Preferences

In yesterday’s Leopard Feature Presentation, I did my best to review Dashboard, even though it’s one of those features that I haven’t really taken part of. However, Leopard introduces another thing for Dashboard, but this new feature is aimed towards developers. It’s called Dashcode, and it’s an integrated development environment specifically for Dashboard widgets. Although it’s great for anyone who knows all of the JavaScript necessary for making a custom widget, it’s also advertised as being easy enough for anyone to make a widget without writing any lines of code. Yesterday, right after I finished my Leopard Feature Presentation on Dashboard, I opened up Dashcode to give it a whirl. Let’s take a look at how it went.
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Tags: application, Dashboard, Dashcode, development, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, Macworld, review, Software, widgets, XCode

Although Dashboard may have been another one of those “staple” features of Tiger, I kind of stopped using it after a few months. Looking back, I’m not sure why. It could have been that Dashboard started to seem less and less useful, or it could have been that every time I started up my computer, Dashboard would take so long to load all of the widgets, or because I kept hitting F12 accidentally when I wanted to hit the Delete key, but I haven’t actually used Dashboard in a few months. I might try it out again sometime, although I haven’t gotten there quite yet.

However, one of the new Dashboard features in Leopard is something called Web Clip. Although Web Clip is considered a “widget”, and even appears in the “Dashboard Dock”, you actually activate it from Safari by clicking the Web Clip button in the toolbar. This gives you a way to select a section of a web page, and then by clicking Add, that portion of the web page will open as a widget in Dashboard. (By flipping the widget over via the customary “i” icon, you can choose a “theme” for the widget.) Although I don’t have too many comments on Web Clip, I’ve tried it out a few times, and it works quite well and is actually very flexible. As Apple has indicated in its demonstrations of Web Clip, this can be very useful for many scenarios when a user wants to have a way to easily track an auction, see the latest issue of a comic strip, grab a webcam, or do anything else quickly and easily.

However, I was a little disappointed to not see very much more added to Dashboard. In fact, one of the things that I might recommend for Dashboard would perhaps be a Dashboard implementation of Spaces. After all, if I can have virtual desktops for me to navigate around groups of windows, wouldn’t it be great to be able to move around just as easily within Dashboard? That would probably allow me to solve one of my issues of not being able to fit enough widgets on one screen as I have open. This would also allow a way to easily group widgets together so that I could have a group of widgets that I just look at briefly, versus another group of widgets that I might spend more time in. All I’m saying is that I’d kind of like Dashboard to be a little bit more accessible, and am disappointed that other than Web Clip, Apple hasn’t done any tweaking of the Dashboard user experience.

However, for those of you (unlike me) who use Dashboard and have made it a regular part of your habit, Web Clip will probably give you a nice range of new widget options, and it couldn’t be easier to use.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: Dashboard, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, review, Safari, Spaces, Web Clip, widgets