David Pogue Uncovers Leopard's Hidden Goodies

by , 3:20 PM EDT, October 26th, 2007

David Pogue, at the New York Times, has found some interesting goodies embedded in Leopard that aren't to be found in the routine descriptions of Leopard's new features.

On Thursday, David Pogue published his review of Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. Leave it to Mr. Pogue to find some hidden treasures after continued experimenting with the new OS.

• Find the Menu. "You're floundering in some program. You're sure there's a Page Numbering command in those menus somewhere. But there are 11 menus and 143 submenus, and you're losing patience."

Leopard has a help menu that works in all programs that will allow the user to search for a command. Leopard will open the menu to the right point, highlight it, and display a big arrow pointing to the command.

• Application Launcher. In Tiger, Apple touted the ability to use Spotlight as an application launcher. However, it could be too slow to respond.

"But Spotlight has been rejiggered in Leopard. Now it displays the names of matching programs instantaneously, before Spotlight has built the rest of the menu of results. And a simple Enter is all that's necessary to open the first listed result (not Command-Enter). In all, finding and opening a certain program takes under one second," Mr. Pogue discovered.

• Dictionary Lookups in Spotlight. "If you type, for example, 'schadenfreude' into the Spotlight box, the beginning of the actual definition appears right there in the menu."

• Time machine built into apps. Three of Leopards apps have Time Machine built in: iPhoto, Mail, and Address Book. Thanks to that interface, the user can recover deleted photos, deleted mail and accidentally deleted contacts. Mr. Pogue described the process: "...each time you click the Jump Back arrow, the window before you changes to reveal the way it looked the last time your photo library, address book file, or e-mail stash changed. You can also drag through the timeline on the right if you remember the date when things went wrong."

There are many more such sweet discoveries in Mr. Pogue's column. Each is a delightful morsel not to be found in the run-of-the-mill overviews of Leopard's new features.