[MW Forums]

Mac OS X 10.5 boasts some 300 features and enhancements. How to pick out the ones that really stand out? We held a mock draft to select our favorite Leopard features, and our picks may surprise you. more

[aestival]

Unix AutoFS should have been the first pick, if only because that's one of the most annoying features of the current OSX, and a continuous embarrassment when using a Mac in front of Windows/linux people, who marvel at such a stupid flaw.

[fibercut]

My pick is iChat Screen Sharing because when trying to help out new Mac users this will be a real handy tool. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif

[daneb]

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Address Books Synchronize with Yahoo feature raises the alarming possibility that there are still people out there using Yahoo for mail. That cant be truecan it?

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I've often wondered the same thing... Hotmail too?

[PeteVG]

The most potentially annoying new feature has to be stationery in email. I just want to reach out and slap people who waste bandwidth and drive space sending me this cutesy crap. It's as bad as sending me links to other time wasting stuff.

[veggiedude]

No one mentioned the cool Dashboard Widget creation tool - now anyone can easily make their own widget from any website in mere seconds. I was blown away when I saw that demoed at MacWorld.

[RhymingDesigner]

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No one mentioned the cool Dashboard Widget creation tool - now anyone can easily make their own widget from any website in mere seconds. I was blown away when I saw that demoed at MacWorld.

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You mean Dan Miller's No. 1 pick, "Web Clip"? /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[TheBum]

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Unix AutoFS should have been the first pick, if only because that's one of the most annoying features of the current OSX, and a continuous embarrassment when using a Mac in front of Windows/linux people, who marvel at such a stupid flaw.

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Agreed. Here's my top 10:
1. AutoFS - Goodbye network disk timeout beachball, and good riddance!
2. Time Machine - No more guessing to what location to restore a supported app's files.
3. Boot Camp - No good RC aircraft simulators for the Mac.
4. Printing previews - No more launching Preview.app (uses QuickLook?).
5. Back to My Mac - Access to my ripped movie collection from afar.
6. New Finder sidebar - Collapsibility and better organization.
7. Spotlight enhancements - Advanced searches and file name searches.
8. Safari - Movable and reopenable tabs (finally!).
9. Mail - Data detectors and to-dos.
10. Automator UI recording - Hopefully easier scripting of stubborn apps.

[schoonerman]

Jonathan, I actually just created a Yahoo! mail account in early July.
It's not that I "use Yahoo mail" but that I get a second chance--when it works--at hearing our pages on the iPhone, which inexplicably doesn't have the option to make noise periodically when there is an ignored SMS message sitting there.
(I don't use SMS for chatting, either, but for receiving server problem pages.)
As to "email stationery", my initial reaction was "oh, good". Then every mention of the feature said HTML email stationery. I guess I keep using Eudora for my email stationery needs (and for nothing else). HTML email in the hands of most people is evil (Apple actually creates it fairly well in their messages). It helps a lot to set (via defaults write) Mail to "prefer plain text email".

[Dan Miller]

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No one mentioned the cool Dashboard Widget creation tool - now anyone can easily make their own widget from any website in mere seconds. I was blown away when I saw that demoed at MacWorld.

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You mean Dan Miller's No. 1 pick, "Web Clip"? /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

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I am, apparently, chopped liver.
Dan

[chilstrom]

One of the trends in the What Id never pick remarks is the strong preference for practicality and substance over style and panache. Cutting edge design is a central Apple ethic, so deal with it. The emotional appeal of the Mac OS is at least as important as its functionality. With every new release of OS X, a shrieking horde of closet designers opine about the evils of transparency, reflection and other visual elements derogatorily referred to as eye candy. These remarks always seem to be in direct proportion to the speakers dearth of design experience.
I think that Rob G is trying to make Stacks into flat folders rather than what they are, which is a pile of stuff youd otherwise have strewn upon your desktop. Let Stacks be Stacks, and use the Finders superior column view for spelunking the filesystem. Stacks, with their whimsical fans and transparent grids, arent for those who want a powertool to drill through the file system and they may even prove to be less robust than the hierarchical popup menus they replace from Tigers docked folders. In return, they offer a new metaphor that those of us with stacks and piles strewn about our office can immediately relate to.
While I have mixed feelings about Leopard Mails stationery, and am somewhat in harmony with Dan Millers perspective on it, its worth noting that there are other ways of communicating besides verbs and nouns.
From what Ive seen so far, Leopard offers a feast for the heart as well as for the head. I think thats a good thing.

[trip1ex]

Quick Look could really come in handy if it opens Excel and Word files quickly. Right now MS OFFice is slow to open under Rosetta for taking a quick people at schedules/lists done in Excel and Word.
I also like how it's going to be easier to add contacts to your address book.

But my big question is: Will Leopard improve sharing of photos and music and movies between multiple users on the same computer? I've got workarounds, but it would be nice if this just worked without manual input.

[Dan Frakes]

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Here's my top 10:
1. AutoFS - Goodbye network disk timeout beachball, and good riddance!
2. Time Machine - No more guessing to what location to restore a supported app's files.
3. Boot Camp - No good RC aircraft simulators for the Mac.
4. Printing previews - No more launching Preview.app (uses QuickLook?).
5. Back to My Mac - Access to my ripped movie collection from afar.
6. New Finder sidebar - Collapsibility and better organization.
7. Spotlight enhancements - Advanced searches and file name searches.
8. Safari - Movable and reopenable tabs (finally!).
9. Mail - Data detectors and to-dos.
10. Automator UI recording - Hopefully easier scripting of stubborn apps.

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Ah, but see, those are mostly categories; you have to pick the actual, specific feature from Apple's list. There are multiple features listed under most of those /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

[Dan Frakes]

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One of the trends in the What Id never pick remarks is the strong preference for practicality and substance over style and panache. Cutting edge design is a central Apple ethic, so deal with it.

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"Cutting edge design," to me, is something that's both aesthetically pleasing and functional, and that has long been a central Apple ethic. The problem I have with the new Dock, for example, is that it adds lots of distracting eye candy without adding any functionality. In fact, some of the new appearance tweaks actually reduce functionality.

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With every new release of OS X, a shrieking horde of closet designers opine about the evils of transparency, reflection and other visual elements derogatorily referred to as eye candy. These remarks always seem to be in direct proportion to the speakers dearth of design experience.

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That's quite a sweeping generality. Again, to use the new Dock appearance as an example, many of the loudest critics are people with quite a bit of experience in user-interface design.
If you have convincing reasons as to why the new Dock is actually an improvement, both aesthetically and functionally, I'm all ears. But simply trying to discredit the credentials of the critics isn't a convincing position.

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I think that Rob G is trying to make Stacks into flat folders rather than what they are, which is a pile of stuff youd otherwise have strewn upon your desktop.

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What you're describing is how Stacks was originally supposed to work: you could select a bunch of files on the Desktop or in a folder and then drag that "pile of stuff" to the Dock to create a stack. If that were actually how it worked, I'd agree with you. And I hope Apple eventually adds this capability.
What Stacks currently is is simply a new way to view the contents of folders in the Dock; and in at least one significant way -- the lack of a hierarchical menu of a folder's contents -- Stacks offers less functionality than before. I won't have a problem with Stacks if there's a way -- for example, by using a keyboard modifier -- to get the old behavior back; but from what I've seen, that doesn't appear to be the case.

To be clear, there are many great improvements in Leopard. But the Dock is a particular example where the visual changes aren't necessarily improvements; and Stacks is one where unique new features have been added at the expense of useful ones.