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" No. 1 Favorite: Quick Look It takes a certain kind of user to care about Quick Look, which lets you preview one or more files by selecting them and then hitting the space bar. Instead of opening each corresponding application, such as Word for text documents, Photoshop for images and Acrobat for PDFs, Quick Look pops up a window with a slightly zoomed-out view. You can switch to a full-screen mode, which bumps up the size of the previewed files, and you can scroll through each file (if there are multiple pages), cycle through them as a slideshow or look at a contact sheet-style index of the entire collection. If you work with duplicate or even triplicate versions of the same files, or are trying to quickly find every file related to a given project, Quick Look make a lot of sense. It&amp;#039;s also useful for large image files, slow computers and incredibly impatient users.    No. 2 Favorite: Spaces We covered the Spaces feature in our review, but it bears repeating: Spaces is cool. Previous versions of OS X have included Expos\u00E9, a love-it-or-hate-it feature that lets you deal with general window clutter by hitting specific keyboard buttons or mousing over to different corners of the screen. Expos\u00E9 lets you zoom out look at every open Window at once, or temporarily shove them out of sight, for a better look at the desktop. Spaces builds on this principle by essentially adding extra desktops. So instead of splaying out your open windows, you can splay out two or six or even twelve versions of your desktop, each with its own array of active windows. So one Space could be devoted to various work-related applications, while another is plastered with eBay searches, Netflix queues and other endeavors you actually care about.  Spaces is great for stealthy workplace slacking, as well as legitimate desktop organization. But like Expos\u00E9, it requires some practice--and patience--since you&amp;#039;re bound to inadvertently fly out of a Space mid-operation, or lose track of which Space a specific window is in. And if you&amp;#039;re the deliberate, methodical type, perhaps you don&amp;#039;t like having more than three windows open, so why bother with potentially bewildering layers of desktop organization? But like all of Leopard&amp;#039;s best features, Spaces feels like the future, and the future of user interfaces--like it or not--is a whirling constellation of organized clutter. There are more customizable and possibly more useful versions of what Spaces is doing, but this feature is exactly as complicated as it needs to be, for now.    Favorite No. 3: Dashboard Web Clip This feature should not work as well as it does. When you&amp;#039;re using Safari, you can highlight a given area on a Web page, and turn that scrap of online content into a Dashboard Widget. This basically lets you invent a host of customized Widgets without being the slightest bit geeky. Okay, maybe a little bit geeky, since you have to pick the part of the Web page that will be regularly updated, or else you&amp;#039;ve just created a static shred of info that doesn&amp;#039;t do anything. For example, I&amp;#039;m not content with daily weather forecasts. In borderline obsessive-compulsive fashion, I need to see hourly tallies of temperatures and likely weather conditions, including the arcane &amp;quot;Feels Like&amp;quot; temperature. So I selected a full day&amp;#039;s worth of hourly forecasts from weather.com, and turned it into a Web Clip. Now, that Widget automatically updates every hour, and at the tap of a key, I&amp;#039;m happily over-informed. Granted, I could have simply hit the bookmark in my browser that takes me to very same hourly forecast page, but the Widget is a millisecond quicker to get to. And shaving milliseconds is what operating systems are supposed to do.    Favorite No.4: Dashcode If Web Clip is an intro to Widget-programming, the Dashcode application, which is one of the optional installs for Leopard, is a full-fledged Widget developer&amp;#039;s kit. But it&amp;#039;s also refreshingly simple--using the provided library of templates and code, I was able to create a Widget that displays my Netflix queue. It&amp;#039;s rough around the edges, and could use a designer&amp;#039;s touch (the icon is particularly sad-looking), but with a truly rudimentary knowledge of HTML, it took me just ten minutes.  Similar to HTML editors such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage, Dashcode offers intuitive controls, and shoves the more intimidating stuff (i.e. the code itself) into the background. It also includes templates of completed Widgets, which can be fully customized from the inside out, or simply dissected for research purposes. But the most impressive thing about Dashcode is not what it does, but that it come with Leopard, with no additional downloads required.    Favorite No. 5 Safari In the frantic bloodsport that is browser development, the Web surfer that comes with your operating system rarely stays on top for long. Despite attempts at major overhauls, Microsoft&amp;#039;s Internet Explorer is constantly blown out of the water by the likes of Firefox, in terms of speed, features and security. Safari has also consistently fallen behind Firefox, due in large part to mystifying crashes. So consider this a temporary pick, but at this moment, Safari is excellent. Aside from useful ways to reorganize your tabbed windows and what feels like a bump in page-load speeds, the Find function is Safari&amp;#039;s most noticeable improvement. When you search a specific Web page for a word or phrase, instead of simply highlighting the text, Safari also grays out the rest of the page. So as you scroll down the page, every instance is impossible to miss. Combined with the ability to quickly search through the text of pages you&amp;#039;ve visited days or even weeks ago, this is a welcome breakthrough in idiot-proof, search-centric browsing.    Least Favorite No. 1: Cover Flow Apple does a great many things in the name of prettiness. The iPod, you could argue, is equal parts pretty and useful. Apple also has a history of cuteness, with application icons that bounce while they&amp;#039;re opening and windows that minimize with a wacky, whooshing animation. But Cover Flow, a feature that lets you view files and folders as a scrolling lineup of icons against a black background, is trying to be cool. It works on the iPhone, where you can sweep through a line of album covers with your finger. And album covers are inherently cool, especially when displayed on a sleek little handheld device. But blue folders aren&amp;#039;t cool, and neither is a long procession of Word files as individual text-filled cover pages. Photos display well in the Cover Flow window, but programs such as Google&amp;#039;s Picasa do a much better job of quickly cycling through images without having to load each one. And if your computer is on the slow side, Cover Flow can take a moment to kick in. A pause in an operating system, however short, better be followed by a payoff. A bit of graphical flourish, with almost zero utility, doesn&amp;#039;t count.    Least Favorite No. 2: Backdrop Effects Sticking a wacky backdrop behind your head during video chats and self-portrait photos isn&amp;#039;t a major priority for most human beings. But here&amp;#039;s a prime example of a feature, however pointless, that Apple should have pulled the plug on. In theory, you can select one of the provided images, such as a view of Paris or Yosemite, or use one of your own photos, step out of the frame while the computer inserts that background, and then step back in for potential zaniness. Photo booths in Japan have done this for years, helping you make your four-year-old niece jealous about your recent vacation with Hello Kitty and Chococat.  Unfortunately, these backdrops range from clumsy, with patches of pixilated noise surrounding your entire head, to utter failures, when the computer can&amp;#039;t figure out that you&amp;#039;re back in the frame. Like a low-rent green screen victim, you sometimes appear partially hollow, as whatever image characteristics are supposed to map to the backdrop show up on your face instead. And the fact that this feature is goofy doesn&amp;#039;t give it a pass. If anything, that makes it worse, since being goofy has never seemed quite so stressful.    Least Favorite No. 3: Download Stacks Maybe this is a minor gripe, but it&amp;#039;s also a step in the wrong direction for Apple. Although the Stacks feature, which lets you stick multiple folders in the Dock, and then fan them out with a mouse click, is handy, Download Stacks are not. When you download files in Safari, they automatically show up in a Stack on the Dock. That makes them easy to open, but that Stack is just a list of aliases. The files themselves are in a special Downloads folder, which isn&amp;#039;t on the Desktop.  So while the goal is to reduce desktop clutter, the result is a Windows-esque folder tucked away behind the desktop. That&amp;#039;s not the Apple way--OS X offers tons of ways to quickly shuffle around files on your computer, particularly ones on your desktop. Forcing users to search through a rapidly filling and slightly buried Downloads folder to reorganize incoming files is a housekeeping task we didn&amp;#039;t need.    Least Favorite No. 4: Spring-Loaded Dock Again, a minor issue, but a vexing one: The so-called Spring-Loaded Dock is one of the least intuitive features in Leopard. By grabbing and hovering a file over an application in your Dock, and then hitting the space bar, you can instantly open that application. But wait, you&amp;#039;ve always been able to simply drag a file onto an application and let go, automatically opening both the program and the file.  What&amp;#039;s happening here, aside from an odd little test of two-fisted mouse-and-keyboard dexterity? This is a feature you never would have come across, and once you try it, you&amp;#039;ll wonder why you--and Apple--bothered.    Least Favorite No. 5: Installation I&amp;#039;m cheating here, since installation isn&amp;#039;t really a feature in Leopard, and on one out of two computers I&amp;#039;ve installed it on, installation was a breeze. But on an iMac G5 (with more than the required tech specs), which had previously been running OS 10.3.9, the transition to Leopard has been disastrous.  From mysterious Software Update recommendations and unexplained crashes to the fact that the wireless Airport card is no longer being recognized, what had been a perfectly functional computer has become almost instantly hobbled. This is the kind of upgrade nightmare you half expect from Microsoft, but not from user-friendly-to-a-fault Apple. It&amp;#039;s possible that updates will solve these problems, or that any problems I&amp;#039;ve had are isolated or hardware-based. But one thing&amp;#039;s for sure: A new operating system should not break a computer, even one that&amp;#039;s three years old.  First Look: Leopard Delivers &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a5536/4229216/>