Mac OS X Leopard

Quick Look

Quick Look, which appears throughout Leopard, is a technology that lets users preview the contents of documents without opening the program that was used to create them. Click on a Microsoft Word file in the Finder and press space, and the entire file will appear before you, ready to be read (but not edited). Select a movie and press space, and the movie will expand and begin to play.

That same Quick Look technology lets you optionally set Finder views to display live previews of documents. Spotlight and the Open and Save dialogue boxes are also Quick Look savvy. And the Finder's new Cover Flow view really wouldn't be possible without this technology, which transforms dull document icons into live previews of each document's contents.

In practice, turning your Finder icons into live document previews isn't always very useful -- text documents end up looking like a wash of grey. But Quick Look itself is an impressive technology, if long-time users can retrain themselves to press space rather than double-clicking on a document to see what's inside.

Righting wrongs and improving features

In addition to the new features introduced in Leopard, this operating system release includes major updates to numerous existing programs that are included with Mac OS X.

The marquee feature of Leopard's predecessor, Tiger, was Spotlight, a desktop search engine that indexed the contents of all your Mac's documents and made them instantly accessible. It made for a great demo, but in everyday use Spotlight was a real letdown. It was slow, couldn't handle sophisticated queries, and failed to support the simplest query of all (namely, searches for a file with a specific name). With Leopard, Apple seems to have addressed most of Spotlight's failings. It's shockingly faster than it was in Tiger, and Spotlight now supports Boolean operators (and, or, and not). There's also better support for saved searches and for searching files on networked Macs.

Mac OS X's built-in calendar program, iCal, is now five years old, but Leopard's iCal 3.0 is the first version that doesn't feel like a toy. The iCal interface is more straightforward and responsive, and the ability to edit entries by double-clicking on them eliminates the unwieldy Get Info pane of previous versions. iCal 3.0 also supports the CalDAV standard for group calendaring, which threatens to turn iCal into a true business tool. Unfortunately, we weren't able to test these features on a CalDAV server (one ships with the server version of Leopard, and since the server is based on an open-source server framework, the streets will likely be littered with CalDAV server implementations before too long).

Apple's iChat IM client has also received an excellent update, addressing almost all of the program's flaws. Audio chat sound quality, which previously lagged sadly behind Skype's, is noticeably better. It's much easier to manage multiple chats via a tabbed chat interface (previously only available in iChat via an add-on such as Chax). And perhaps most importantly, iChat now allows you to log into multiple AIM accounts at once. All that's missing now is support for competing chat services such as those offered by Yahoo and MSN.

Apple Mail 3.0 has also seen numerous improvements, although perhaps the biggest one is the improved speed of Spotlight, which makes searching for messages within Mail much less painful. Mail also now has support for to-do lists and "notes", in which you leave messages to yourself. Mail seems to be an odd place to stow this information, and the to-do interface in Mail is poorer than the one in iCal. Although Mail's notes look a lot like the notes on the iPhone, the two don't sync. Another out-of-place Mail feature addition is support for RSS feeds, which are already supported in Safari and numerous third-party feed-reading programs. But Mail's interface is actually quite conducive to RSS reading, and we found reading RSS feeds in Mail to be enjoyable. It'll never be appropriate for heavy RSS consumers, but for casual RSS users it really hits the spot.

OS X's included Preview utility is probably the most unheralded productivity program in OS X. (By default, it's the tool that opens images and PDF documents when you double-click on them in the Finder.) But it may be harder for Preview to remain a secret now that it's been given a major facelift with Leopard. Preview 4.0 gives Acrobat a run for its money when it comes to basic PDF features, improving support for PDF annotations, improving searches within PDF documents, and providing built-in tools to reorder pages and combine PDFs into a single document. Preview's image manipulation tools have also improved, including the addition of the "Instant Alpha" background-removal tool that Apple first introduced in iWork '08. Numerous other included tools have received major improvements in Leopard, as well. Safari 3, which has been available in beta form since June, offers a dramatically improved Find command and resizable text fields for Web forms. It also includes Web Clip, a tool that allows you to "clip" part of a Web page and turn it into a Dashboard widget. (Despite the addition of this feature and a new movie widget, Dashboard still doesn't seem to be remotely the paradigm shift that Apple suggested it would be when it was introduced with Tiger. We often find ourselves forgetting that it's even there.)