Opinion

Leopard "Preview" Gallery - Part I (Finder, Dock, System Preferences)

UPDATE (8/16/2006): There is now an additional screenshot of the Show View Options palette while viewing a window in List view.

As promised, and without further ado:

Here we have the customary screenshot of the "About this Mac" window. You will already notice Leopard-only features. In this screenshot, you can see that when I pressed Command-Option-4-then-Space to take this screenshot, only and exactly the window appeared in the screenshot and not any bits of surrounding windows or wallpaper. I have been waiting for this forever and you will notice this in subsequent screenshots as well.

The Finder

Arguably the most important part of the User Interface. Has received no major changes yet, is still Carbon, but has got lots of minor tweaks.

This is how the standard desktop looks. No different from Tiger.


Finally, the contextual menu can Arrange by nearly any criterion you like. There is also a "Create disc image from <folder>" option that should be useful for some people.


When you rename an item in the Finder by hitting Return while a file or folder is selected, the text selection is placed only around the "name" part of the file name and not the extension. This is so handy that I'm already in love with it.

The new Trash window sports a Spotlight-look and has a convenient Empty button.

There is a net total of one new preference in the Finder Preferences and it is the last one in the list shown above.

The Battery Menu Bar icon has got some unnecessary new options. Incidentally, clicking More Info will take you into Apple System Profiler's Battery section, while clicking "Purchase spare battery" takes you to the Apple Store.


In the sixth major release of Mac OS X, you will finally be able to change the Grid Spacing for Finder windows. This feature is currently not implemented as well as it could be and the file icons look ugly when the Grid Spacing is reduced.


Another screenshot of the Show View Options palette with the "Arrange by" menu open.

Someone in the comments wanted to know what this palette now looked like and here it is.

The Dock

Again, at first, there are next to no visible changes, but after a bit of digging, I found a few welcome changes in the Dock.


The Dock gets Spring-Loaded Folders! I can already hear some of you saying "Finally!"


he Finder Dock menu got a few new options, but, more importantly, the minimized windows can now be restored by right-clicking on them choosing Open - a feature that should have been added in Panther (when the Close option was added). Non-Finder windows still don't have a Close option in their miniaturized forms though but I think that that's for a good reason. My bad regarding this; it's basically the same in 10.4.7 although I won't vouch for 10.4.0 (eh, my impression was that something was missing), although the dock menus are technically different because, for example, it just says "Open" or "Close" in Tiger while it says "Open " and "Close " in Leopard.

System Preferences

System Preferences is a lot more boring than the others (this screenshot obviously contains some third-party Preference Panes that I have installed). Hardly any changes. I'm just going to put up the screenshots of new or "apparently changed" Preference Panes.

Possibly the only noteworthy feature is in the Screen Savers PrefPane which now lets you overlay a digital clock over your screen saver. Yay! Also, Leopard fixes a Tiger anomaly wherein you couldn't set an iPhoto Album to the "Change picture every x minutes/hours/days" setting while you could set a folder or a pre-loaded Apple album. Weird, but now fixed.

But anyway. there's still a lot more to cover. I shall keep snapping screenshots of Leopard, so stay tuned.
 

Comments (13) Posted on at  

  • » just wondering...this is on an iBook right?
  • » Sahil: Battery symbol + Core Duo 1.83 Ghz = MacBook base model.

    I didnt exactly understand what Core Animation is. Please could you describe it a little.
  • » So you've installed it on the Macbook instead. Well spring loaded dock folders are "finally" here, and so is grid spacing. Yay!
  • » @abhishek:
    whoops! me kinda missed seeing the core duo part :)
  • » Just double checking... in the Finder when you change from icon to list view are there other columns available than the usual - size, kind,etc? I was hoping that leopard had more support for file metadata - like id3 tags in mp3s. So if you went into list view you could alphabetize a folder view by artist or album. (I know that Tiger sees some of this info - it's in the "get info" box.) Would also be handy for tagged images, etc.
  • » I'll check that, and, if there's anything to report, I'll add it at the end of the entry.
  • » I don't understand how Leopard's Command-Shift-4 + Space screenshot taking is different from Tiger's. Can you explain?
  • » RE:
    "Possibly the only noteworthy feature is in the Screen Savers PrefPane which now lets you overlay a digital clock over your screen saver. Yay! Also, Leopard fixes a Tiger anomaly wherein you couldn't set an iPhoto Album to the "Change picture every x minutes/hours/days" setting while you could set a folder or a pre-loaded Apple album. Weird, but now fixed."


    http://www.macworld.com/2006/06/secrets/julymac911/index.php
    Second tip from the top might help.
  • » Hey, thanks for the tip. Although I didn't know this workaround, it's not like I really use that feature a lot but I was just mentioning that a bug existed and that it was fixed in Leopard. If I wanted to have some pictures in that mode, I could just export them from iPhoto put them in a folder and choose that, and it would work, and that is far simpler, I believe than doing the hacking these guys have done.
  • » Why did you show a screen capture of Dashboard's Dock icon? The contextual menu choices are exactly the same as 10.4.7

    Similarly, you can already right-click on a minimized Finder window and choose Open (again, Tiger 10.4.7)
  • » Hey eddie: I don't use the contextual menu for Dashboard much, so my hunch was that there was some change. Guess I was wrong.

    As for the Dock menu, I guess Leopard introduces more of a "technical" change rather than a real one. It lists the name of the window, which Tiger doesn't.
  • » The Command-Shift-4 + Space screenshot taking has been here for a looong time.
  • » Hmm, I see I might not have been crystal clear on that. I'm perfectly aware that the keyboard shortcut has existed for a while. In Leopard, it now works perfectly. First of all, it gives you exactly the window (plus its shadow) - no more and no less. So, with the help of an alpha channel, a window with a round border and a shadow maintains a round border and a shadow. You can see this from the screenshots I've posted. Additionally, when you invoke this keyboard shortcut, menus and other UI elements stop responding to mouseover events and so everything "stays still" while you take your picture. Screenshot-taking has improved a whole lot in Leopard.

    Refer to this entry for more.

News