It is the little changes I noticed in Leopard after playing with it for a few days that make me love it so much. (I stood in line at the apple store for half an hour to get my copy ASAP, more for the fun of standing in line than anything else).
I can’t show you a screen shot of this one, but when you hit Command-Shift-4 to take a screen shot of a portion of the screen the mouse cursor now tells you the size of your selection. Very cool.
Safari now lets you select the version of the feed for a site that you want to subscribe, nice when subscribing to a site in an external feed reader.
The iCal icon now always shows the correct date, even when not open. My Grandmother would love this.
Mail now supports use of the IMAP IDLE command. The IDLE command keeps on open connection between the client (in this Mail) and your IMAP server. When new mail comes in, your server simply pushes a notification down this open connection, removing the need for the client to poll for new messages. (OK, so maybe that is a bit simplified, but you get the idea.)
Photobooth now has three modes, single frame, burst (four frames), and movie. It is really the burst mode that impresses me. It is one of those little details that you would never think of wanting, but could prove very useful down the road. Say, when someone blinks at the flash a lot.
In Tiger, if you wanted to run an X11 application out of Terminal, you had to ensure that X11 was running and that your $DISPLAY was set correctly. Now, $DISPLAY is set by default and if you run an application that wants X11, it opens on its own. You can try this by opening Terminal and typing xterm followed by the return key. The X server and an xterm window should open. I could be wrong about the state of this feature in Tiger, but it is still very cool.
But, there are still a few things I am missing:
- An easy install of Fink
- GrowlMail
- Growling in iChat (provided by Chax in Tiger)
- Hmm, that list seems really short…
I have, in case you are interested, already turned off the mirrored dock. But the translucent menu bar doesn’t bother me as much.
Also, thanks for LifeHacker for the tip on how to make KeePassX work under Leopard. I had tried compiling it from source, but wasn’t able to successfully do so.
