Just started going through Apple's newly updated Leopard page and noticed a couple of new things that weren't mentioned before and/or doesn't seem to get the big look-at-me treatment but I thought were Leopards hidden surprises.
Back to my Mac
Didn't seem like they made such a big deal out of this one (I could be wrong) but I thought it's one of the new Finder's best features. As a designer, I have a thousands of files on my main Mac. Stuff like fonts (hundreds), templates, Flash files (a bunch), PDFs and all that jazz. Problem is my main Mac is an iMac which means if I'm out on the road with my laptop, most of that stuff on my iMac is unavailable to me. With this new feature I can supposedly - with a .Mac membership - be able to see my iMac as a network computer when I'm out on the road letting me access all my files that are in there. I think there are other solutions that might be similar/different from this one that I can use now but I think having it default on your OS just makes it so much simpler.
Time Machine through shared hard drive
I sort of found it odd when they came out with the new Airport Extreme with built-in support for connecting an external hard drive to share. Although, it is a great idea for sharing files but isn't that what those public folders are already there for? And yes you could make a case against public folders being unreliable, I still found it a bit of a surprise that it's there. Well anyway, Apple just let out of the bag one of the big reasons, the feature's there: For backing up files for everyone in the home's computer through Time Machine. I thought that was a big help for anyone such as myself administering multiple computers in the house. With this, I can have every computer in the house automatically backing up without the need to spend time and money on multiple external hard drives/DVDs.
Data detection in Mail
This one is kind of like the "look up in dictionary" floating box in Tiger. Leopard can detect data items such as addresses, telephone numbers and give you the option of saving it as a new contact in Address Book. No more selecting each line of text, copying, opening Address Book, creating a new contact, well... you know what I mean.
Saved video and audio chats
This one might be a boon to people who do interviews and the like. You can now save video and audio chats in iChat. To me, this is kind of like the Photobooth of audio and video. Imagine, instead of being able to just make those candid photos for posterity, you can also do video!
So far those are just the few that stuck to my mind. I'm hoping to grab a copy this Friday and test it out.
