Apple's Leopard so hip Part II is a must

In our last Practical Mac column, Glenn Fleishman and I introduced Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, the latest major version of Apple's operating system ("Apple's latest cool cat," Oct. 27). Leopard makes changes to all areas of the system, and because our editor rightfully didn't want to overwhelm the entire Business section, we had room to only touch on Leopard's major features.

Lots of other improvements and changes abound in Leopard, some practical, some obscure. After running Leopard full time, I want to share some of the little things I've discovered that I'm either taking advantage of almost daily or that are simply cool.

Application compatibility. The first "feature" to address isn't really a feature at all but one you'll run into immediately: How do your current applications work under Leopard?

As expected, third-party developers are testing and updating their software for compatibility. (Apple didn't make the final version available to developers until the day after Leopard shipped, and several things changed between the last developer beta and the final version.)

Microsoft, for example, issued a fix for Office 2004 for Mac this week that fixed a crashing bug in Word; run the Microsoft AutoUpdate utility to make sure you're running the latest version.

In my experience, however, my MacBook Pro has been solid. That includes running Adobe InDesign CS3 and Photoshop CS3 heavily on a book project, Microsoft Office for writing articles and tracking finances, and slightly-creaking-but-still-chugging-along Eudora 6.2.4 for e-mail (with a few small glitches, but no showstoppers).

Absolutely check the Web sites of companies whose software you use regularly to see if Leopard updates are available, before you update if possible.

Apple Data Detectors. One of Apple's old technologies has made a reappearance in Leopard's Mail application. If a message contains a data format that Mail recognizes, such as a phone number, address, time, or name, hovering your mouse pointer over it displays a little pop-up menu.

Click that and you're given options such as Create New iCal Event or Create New Contact. Choose Large Type for an address or phone number to fill the screen, helpful for when you need to punch in a phone number and the message's font size is tiny.

The feature seems limited to Mail for now; I'm hoping Apple will enable it in Safari and other applications, too.

Quick Look. I initially wrote off this feature as a gimmick. In the Finder, select any file and press the space bar to view a preview of its contents. Peeking at images and movies is the first obvious use for Quick Look, but really, is that much different from just double-clicking the file to open it in Preview or another application?

Turns out that, yes, it is different. It's enormously convenient. When my mother sends me an e-mail with seven photos attached, each of which are named something like 100_1719.jpg, I can select them all in the Finder, press the space bar, and view them one by one, in a grid displaying all of them, or in a full-screen slide show mode.

If they're photos I want to keep, I can click an icon and add them to iPhoto directly.

But Quick Look shines when I'm looking for a PDF or Word file, two formats it recognizes. Without opening Word or Acrobat, I can view the entire file — formatted. I even used it to find video footage in old iMovie projects stored on an external hard drive attached to my old PowerBook G4 on my network.

Combine Quick Look with Spotlight and searching for old documents becomes much easier and faster. I'm using it all the time.

More on Screen Sharing. I'm also using Screen Sharing frequently at home to control either the PowerBook (which acts as a backup and media server) and my wife's MacBook when she has technical questions. The MacBook is downstairs, but the PowerBook is 6 feet behind me in my office. Call me lazy, but often it's so much easier to open a window to the computer and fiddle with something than to get up.

The other side of Screen Sharing is the Back to My Mac feature, which lets you access a Mac remotely over the Internet.

This is actually one of the main reasons I upgraded to Leopard (and why I've encouraged my mom and mother-in-law to upgrade for easier family tech support), but Back to My Mac is spotty. Apple has acknowledged that it is working on the situation (which involves the .Mac service), so I'm hoping a future update will fix it.

Once again, I reach the end of my allotted space with more to discuss — fodder for future columns. Do you have features you're especially interested in? Email me at carlsoncolumn@mac.com.

Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman write the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to carlsoncolumn@mac.com. More Practical Mac columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.