As many of you know Leopard came out on Friday and well, I have it (if you didn’t figure that out from my last post, I’ll have to make it clearer next time a situation like this arises). I do like Leopard a lot, many of the features are great but some of them aren’t that great.
I’ll start off by mentioning the 5 things that I said were my most anticipated features (read this post if you need to catch up), then I’m going to list the things that surprised me about Leopard.
First off is Web Clip, which is really nice to have, but I haven’t actually used it yet other than to just try something out to see how it worked, which was nice. The practical application for Web Clips doesn’t really seem to be there, not just because to look at widgets you have to go into Dashboard land (and if you are anything like me I enjoy spending my time staring at a Firefox window) but also because I can’t think of any reason I really would use it, with the use of RSS readers and widgets that are already available I guess I just can’t find the value in building a widget from a section of a web page.
Next we have Stacks which I believe are one of the number one reasons to buy OS X Leopard, you wouldn’t believe how much I love this feature. It is so handy to have my downloads just sitting in my dock waiting for me to deal with them. I currently have 3 stacks sitting in my dock, the downloads stack which I mentioned above, a stack of the Documents folder, and last I have a stack that is filled with aliases to applications that I use often but not often enough to have their own spot on the dock itself (super handy).
Let’s move on to Frontrow. I really love the new look of Frontrow and I’m amazed at how much faster it is than Frontrow from Tiger, which might have been the slowest application in the world. The only thing that I don’t like about the new version of Frontrow is the movie trailers section, in the first version of Frontrow you could see the movie poster of all of the movie trailers tiled on your screen, which made it very easy to figure out what movie is what, with the new version of Frontrow it is just a list with a single picture on the left side, which is a picture of the movie you are currently highlighting, this doesn’t make finding a specific trailer easy when you can’t really place the name of the movie with what it actually is and vice versa.
We’re almost done with the first five, Quick Look. I don’t use quick look and I’ll tell you why, I actually name my documents well enough so that I can actually find what I’m looking for, I do know some people who aren’t as good at naming documents as I am and I think that Quick Look would work very well for them but for me it isn’t really useful. I guess if I often looked through folders of pictures Quick Look would actually be useful, but I have a little application called iPhoto that works just fine for me.