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Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard - Finder

Part 1 - the new look'n'feel

It'll find other documents, but not these. Why the restriction? And why can't I opt to have Filename searches as the default rather than Contents? I probably can by hacking, but you should be able to do this through the UI. By the way, the Contents option in Finder-window searches means we no longer have to visit the now-unhighlighted Spotlight icon in the top right of the screen, though that icon works as it did before.

You can now adjust the icon spacing directly - a feature that's been missing from Mac OS X until now - and that makes folder icon views much more readable. List views now have Mac OS 9's alternating blue and white background, which makes them easier to read too. The new, iTunes-supplied Cover Flow view is cute with photos but not much else. But at least, unlike so many other parts of the Leopard UI, it's not compulsory.

Leopard icon spacing
Big, Tiger-style wide icon spacing...

Leopard icon spacing
...or as tight as you like

Quick View is far more useful, and a real gain for Leopard users. Where Tiger could do a slideshow of photos, Leopard will present almost any document for inspection, allowing you to get not only a better view of pictures, but also multi-page PDFs, Word documents, Excel files, TIFs, Photoshop documents, QuickTime movies and so on. Software developers will have to provide view applets, of course, but even now it's a very handy way of (very) quickly referring to a document without opening up an application. I can't praise this enough.

Leopard Quick View
At last - instant, readable document previews, even of multi-page PDFs

Ditto the decision to ditch the brushed metal window look, which Apple took to its heart and implement way beyond its own interface guidelines. It was supposed to be limited to windows that replicate the functionality of a consumer electronics device, and so it was until Tiger used it for Finder windows, and then everyone had to use them. Now, they're gone, replaced with a more sedate grey look, again taken from iTunes. You see a pattern here?

Like main menus, contextual menus sport rounded corners, but all additional entries - added by dropping plug-ins into your Library's Contextual Menu Items folder - now appear in a sub-menu, More. This makes the initial menu tidier, but if you do use More items, the menu can quickly become a mess of sub-menus and sub-sub-menus. Neither approach - nested menus or an all-in-one menu - are ideal, and I'd like to see some UI innovation here. Single-size menu with a scroll-bar, anyone?

Leopard contextual menus
Contextual menus: time for a new look

Mac OS X already extends the Get Info and Inspector windows - the latter a NeXT-sourced and, for me, much used version of the former that is able to handle multiple items. It's about time Apple merged these, or at least - again - let you choose which one appears as the default with Command-I key-presses.

Next page: Verdict

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