First Look: Picking our favorite Leopard features
Jonathan Seff
My strategy: I went with features that simplify tiresome, costly, or annoying things in the OS. For me it’s all about faster and easier ways to do common tasks.
My picks:
Partitioning is a great way to install another OS (think Boot Camp), to back up files, or to make a scratch disk for Photoshop or for video capture. The big problem is that in order to change your partitions to reallocate space to one or another, you always had to delete everything from your hard drive and start over again. With live resizing, you’ll be able to adjust the space given to each partition without harming your data. This feature promises to be a huge time and energy saver for those of us who like to play around with partitions.
For casual users, the $299 Apple Remote Desktop 3 software is overkill for controlling the screen of another Mac on your local network. In Leopard, Apple has added built-in screen sharing, which lets you control a Mac mini that has no display attached or create new playlists in iTunes running on your music server, for example—no additional software required. It’s a power-user feature brought to the masses, and integrated into the Finder’s new sidebar.
What I’d never pick: Address Book’s Synchronize with Yahoo feature raises the alarming possibility that there are still people out there using Yahoo for mail. That can’t be true—can it?
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