Quick look sounds very interesting. Does it mean that I can view excel files without excel? Can anyone view a Keynote presentation I send them even if they don’t have Keynote? That could be really big for me.

I’m really looking forward to screen sharing in iChat. If I can make presentations without actually traveling that improves my productivity quite a bit.

We haven’t seen the new versions of iLife and iWork. Based on what I’ve seen Steve use in his presentations it should be good.

Core animation sounds promising. I won’t be able to tell until I can start using it. I wonder if it will change the way my documents will appear?

Doesn’t Microsoft themselves have a different UI for Office than the standard? Anyway, I agree that software for Windows should behave like Windows software. Apple did this with iTunes at the beginning too, didn’t they?

Here are my comments about Leopard and I’m going to try to focus on productivity:

OS X has always had transparency, and I think transparency in a user interface is just stupid. At least it’s just the menu bar and not every single Finder window. Hopefully, we can turn it off. If not, I look forward to buying a product from Rosyna.

And I hate the Dock background being perspective. None of the screenshots of Leopard on Apple’s site shows a window up against the Dock. The reason is because it’s not going to look good. Right now, in Tiger, I have a Safari browser window going right down to the edge of the Dock. The Dock has a straight background that comes across and this separates the icons in the Dock with the documents around the Dock and even under the Dock.

Having that Dock background only halfway up with the icons being bare at the top is a bad idea and it will make it a bit harder to distinguish these icons, in my opinion.

A small improvement with the Dock, though, is the grey bubble-like background on the pop-up labels for the Dock icons as you mouse over. In Tiger, the label just has a drop shadow and no background so it’s harder to see, especially over white documents.

A few of the new things in Leopard are hard to judge until I actually use them - Stacks, Spaces and Quick Look being three of them for me.

I guess Stacks is a beefed up version of dragging a folder to the Dock. This basically is becoming what Pop-up folders were in OS 9 with the ability to drag things to it and it closes automatically.

I currently have folder shortcuts in the side pane in the Finder. This works well for me. I switch to the Finder and a window comes up with the side pane and then I can access very quickly my folder shortcuts. Obviously, just clicking on a Stack would be quicker, but I’ll have to see how it works. It would be cool, I suppose, if it opened up over whatever I’m in without switching to the Finder. We’ll see. This could be a nice productivity feature. But I have around 20 in my side pane now. It’s not practical to put 20 Stacks on my Dock.

I don’t get Quick Look. Right now, if I want to see a PDF or a JPEG really quickly, I just double-click on them and they open up in Preview. Preview actually has some minor editing abilities, like rotating (which I actually use sometimes). I don’t know why pressing the SPACE BAR and bringing it up into Quick Look is more productive. I’m told this is faster. Preview is pretty fast.

And OS X multitasks really, really well, so I don’t see why all-of-a-sudden there is this push to not open files in the appropriate application. Isn’t that what applications are for?

If I have a PDF open in Preview, I can switch easily back and forth to it. I’m guessing that if I’m using Quick Look and I switch to Safari, the Quick Look preview disappears. This would be annoying. But again, I’ll have to use this feature…

One thing I did see is Quick Look is it is pervasive. For example, if you watch the Time Machine demo, you’ll see how Quick Look lets you preview the Time Machine results easily. It just pops up and then gets out of the way. I wonder if they are going to utilize this in Mail. That would be cool. So instead of leaving Mail to preview an attachment, it just zooms up big in Quick Look. This could be very cool. So SPACE BAR would be Quick Look and double-click would launch it into my specified application (Preview, Photoshop, whatever).

Spaces - I seriously doubt I’ll use this feature, but I’m starting to view it as something like Workspaces in Adobe’s software. Workspaces allows you to save arrangements of your palettes, tools, and windows in Adobe applications. So, for example, if you need certain palettes up for when you are doing Web buttons in Photoshop, you bring up the “Web” workspace and only the palettes and tools (and keyboard shortcuts) that apply to Web work come up. If you want to start color correction on a large photo, you bring up the “Photo” workspace. This is all helpful in applications that have more palettes and windows than will fit on your monitor. Some people have multiple monitors to have all the palettes visible at once.

Spaces could be like Workspaces where you easily switch between sets of documents for various tasks. I’ll have to check it out to see if I like it and see how it works. It could actually replace Exposé because with Spaces you may not need to bring a document up front among many.

When I first saw Cover Flow in the Finder, I thought it was retarded, just like Vista’s Flip3D. I think recreating the limits of the real world in the virtual world is stupid. The whole point of a computer is to break free from real world limitations (on a real table’s desktop, things cover up each other and I have to manually move them around to get to what I want) and recreating a rolodex on the computer doesn’t make me more productive. Imagine using iPhoto and instead of seeing 50 photos all at once as thumbnails that you can scale in real time, you had a rolodex. Seeing them one at a time is less productive, isn’t it? That’s what Cover Flow is in the Finder. But after viewing the demonstrations of it, I realized that Cover Flow is List View but with a built-in preview pane that is interactive and synced to the List View. That is going to be nice. So instead of using List View, I’ll probably just use Cover Flow View and utilize that List View below the preview and interact with the live previews above (click through pages of PDFs, play movies and audio tracks...) I doubt I will ever scroll through the rolodex as I feel just switching to Icon View and seeing them all at once is more productive for this.

I see that Icon View in Leopard shows previews of PDFs (and others) now. That’s great. What about QT movies? I don’t know.

I’m already using Safari 3 via the beta and I like it a lot. It’s noticeably faster than 2 on my system. It’s more compatible with more sites that won’t work in 2. I really have been wanting a Find feature that makes the results very obvious and Safari 3 hits the nail on the head in this regard. I like how you can stretch out the form comments dialog like the one I’m typing in right now. No longer do I need to type my post in TextEdit and then copy and paste it into the post dialog box. I can just stretch out the box really big! Very nice. OmniWeb has a great, great, great feature that I wish Safari had - site preferences. Maybe version 4 will bring that.

I’ve been critical of Time Machine in the past because I think the space user interface is “Fisher Price”. Specifically, the productivity of having to manually browse through my backed up files with big arrows is less than if I could just use Spotlight. I’m glad to see that Time Machine is integrated with Spotlight. Yeah!

I actually could have used Time Machine just yesterday. I was working in Photoshop and I overwrote a file accidentally and I didn’t realize it until later. It would have been cool to just bring up the version I wanted and restored it quickly. Traditional backup software would not have worked because it was an hour later, before a traditional backup had taken place.

Apple is starting to integrate project management (To Do, Notes) with Mail. I always liked having the mail, events and calendar integrated in one application. Outlook for Windows is nice, in my opinion. Having it all separate (Mail, Address Book, iCal) isn’t optimal, in my opinion. I think they are all related and it’s nice having the integration. Mail in Leopard improves on this with the To Do and Notes additions.

Mail in Leopard does some really cool things that help my productivity. First, I really, really, really like how I can click on a sig in an email and Mail interprets it and can add it to my Address Book without me manually going back and forth between Mail and Address Book to copy and paste each line of the contact info. This is great.

Another feature along those lines is the event date feature where you can click on a date in an email (date of a birthday party, for example) and add it as an event in iCal. Sweet.

The contact info and event info is just plain text in an email, not a special attachment. This is very cool and saves me lots of time.

The other enhancements in Leopard with the other utilities and applications don’t make enough of an impact on me to even comment. There might be some great stuff there, but I just don’t care about them right now.

What’s missing? Well, there are still a lot of unanswered questions or missing features for me, most of them dealing with the Finder.

Does the Leopard Finder’s List View finally let me have more columns to sort by other than Date, Kind, Size, Label...? I’m able to easily create Smart Folders that utilize that metadata, but it would be nice to see it in normal views now.

Can I finally set all folders to the same view with the click of a button?

Does the Save dialog have a way to apply key words to files I create? Spotlight would be used a lot more if I could easily add key words to files as I create them in various applications. Default Folder is a nice utility for the file dialogs and the current version has a key word feature that applies key words to the Comment field. It’s nice, but Apple could do a better job, IMHO.

What I want is the ability to create key words and then have a palette with buttons for each key word phrase; select a file or multiple files; then click on the buttons that I want applied to the file. This is in iPhoto. Why not have something like that built into the Finder?

Those are my comments so far. I think Leopard is going to be a great improvement on my computing productivity. It’s a no-brainer, for me, at $129 for the Ultimate version.