Feature-rich Leopard will wow Mac users

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Less spectactular, but still impressive
The rest of Leopard’s new or improved features are less spectacular on the surface but no less impressive in making this great operating system even greater. Several applications have gained new features. Most notable is Mail, which gets a number of catch-all additions, including an RSS reader for scanning text feeds, and easy to use stationary to quickly create attractive emails of summer vacation pictures or party invitations.

One incredibly helpful feature in Mail is called Data Detectors, which recognizes information such as addresses, phone numbers and invitation dates and makes it easy to do things with said data bits.

For instance, the system recognizes a friend’s new address and with a click, the information can be added to an existing contact card or used to create a new one, with no more copying and pasting from the e-mail to the contact fields. Ditto for phone numbers and email addresses. Street addresses can also be mapped to the web with a simple right click.

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What’s more, the Data Detector feature is smart enough to interpret a line like “Let’s have lunch at New Wave this Friday at noon” and, with a click, send it to iCal as an appointment for noon on Friday. It’s worth mentioning that iCal benefits from improvements that finally make it a more businesslike scheduling tool, including much-needed interface improvements, and group calendaring based on the CalDAV standard used for workgroup scheduling.

Also added to Mail are To Dos and Notes; though the latter looks like the iPhone’s Notes, the two cannot be synced.

Other improvements include: a more powerful iChat that offers goofy effects to make it look like you’re video-chatting underwater, and an easy way to share your screen with a friend; a facelift to Front Row mimics Apple TV by making it easy to use a Mac remote to point and click through music, videos, DVDS, TV shows and photos from across the room; and more flexibility when searching with OS X’s excellent system-wide search tool, Spotlight.

OS has some glitches
The installation process on a MacBook Pro went without a hitch when I chose the Upgrade option. Oddly, though, a “clean” install on a MacBook’s freshly formatted hard disk ran into a few hiccups. For one, Intego’s VirusBarrier would not launch after installing it anew, while the existing version on the upgraded MacBook Pro ran fine.

Also, the freshly Leopard-ized MacBook frequently has problems emptying the trash; sometimes it empties without a hitch, other times it does so very slowly or stops, requiring a restart. The upgraded MacBook Pro has no trouble emptying the trash, but it did lock up so completely that a forced power key shut down had no effect. I could only turn it off by removing the battery and unplugging the power cord. It restarted and is working fine.

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Is Leopard worth its $129 price of admission? It depends. Some of Leopard’s new features, such as Spaces and Time Machine, can be had in one form or another with third-party add-ons. Even so, having those new features and the many smaller but significant improvements to Mail, iCal, the Finder and other programs are reason enough for many to justify the $129 price of admission.

The users who will be most impressed with Leopard are those new buyers saying goodbye to Windows and hello to Mac for the first time. For the rest of us, Leopard’s sum of parts adds up to an even better experience with an already excellent operating system.

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