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Mac OS X Leopard Part 4: Spaces

By Nick, November 5, 2007

I’m in a good mood today. I have a job interview later this week, the California Golden Bears football team won over the weekend, and I get to write another section of our Leopard review! This is certainly going to end up being the longest article series we’ve written; we’re currently planning for nine or ten sections, so there’s a lot more to cover.

This part covers a feature brand new to Leopard: Spaces.

Here’s the traditional note regarding the score: the score you see at the bottom of this page is for the features discussed in this section only. When all is said and done, we will give Leopard an all-around score.

Anyway, let’s get this party started!

Through space and time

The idea behind Spaces is not new. Spaces is a direct descendant of virtual desktops, which has been a mainstay of UNIX and Linux GUIs (KDE, etc…) for years. If you’re reading this review, I would assume that you at least have an idea of what virtual desktops are, so I won’t describe the concept behind them.

There have been implementations of virtual desktops for Mac OS X before Spaces; in fact, both Pilky and Jay have…
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Mac OS X Leopard Part 3: Stacks

By Nick, November 2, 2007

Ah yes, our Leopard review keeps on marching along! This is the third installment of our Mac OS X Leopard review. For those keeping score at home, here’s what has been covered so far:

Part 1: The Leopard UI
Leopard screenshots
Part 2: Spotlight and the Finder
This part will cover one new Leopard feature that has been the focus of controversy in some circles: stacks. And as usual, the score at the bottom of this page pertains to this section only. We will give Leopard a cumulative score when the review is complete.

Before we get to actually discussing stacks, let’s go back in time…

A brief history lesson
The Dock itself has its roots in NEXTSTEP, where it served as an application launcher and worked much like the Dock in Mac OS X. The idea behind stacks, at least as far as I know, has its roots in an old Mac OS feature: tabbed folders. The idea behind tabbed folders was simple: open a folder in the Finder and drag its window to the bottom of the screen. The window’s titlebar would then become a tab anchored to the bottom of the screen, thus making the folder’s contents…
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Mac OS X Leopard Part 2: Spotlight and the Finder [UPDATED]

By Nick, November 1, 2007

Welcome to Part 2 of Deep Thought’s review of Mac OS X Leopard, the latest version of Apple’s venerable operating system. In Part 1 we discussed the user interface changes in Leopard; for the most it is an improvement but there are some areas that could be implemented better.

Like the first part, this section has a score at the end of the article. Again, note that this score pertains only to this section and not to the review as a whole. When our review is complete we will assign a cumulative score.

This second part will cover Spotlight and the Finder. I am reviewing both in the same article because Spotlight and Finder are tightly integrated in Leopard. No longer is there a fundamental difference between a Spotlight search and a Finder search; the only things you don’t get in the Finder that you get in the Spotlight search menu are calculations and word definitions. I’ll explain this more in a moment. For now, let’s take a quick look back in time.

A spotlight on Spotlight

Spotlight: the early days

Spotlight was hyped as one of the main features in Tiger, and it was an improvement over pervious search…
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Mac trojan horse targets porn viewers

By Nick, October 31, 2007

If you’re a Mac user, you may want to think twice before visiting that porn site, especially if you’re, uhm, unprotected.

Today Intego released a security alert regarding the discovery of a trojan horse affecting Mac OS X. The trojan horse targets visitors of pornography sites, and poses as a message advising users to upgrade to the newest version of a QuickTime codec.

Unlike some previous trojan horses on OS X this one is not just a proof-of-concept; it is actually malicious. From Intego’s warning:

This Trojan horse, a form of DNSChanger, uses a sophisticated method, via the scutil command, to change the Mac’s DNS server (the server that is used to look up the correspondences between domain names and IP addresses for web sites and other Internet services). When this new, malicious, DNS server is active, it hijacks some web requests, leading users to phishing web sites (for sites such as Ebay, PayPal and some banks), or simply to web pages displaying ads for other pornographic web sites. In the first case, users may think they are on legitimate sites and enter a user name and password, a credit card, or an account number, which will then be hijacked.…
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More cool tricks, random weirdness, and other Leopard observations [UPDATED]

By Nick, October 31, 2007

So the first part of our Leopard review is up; my thanks to those who read it and left their comments. The second part will cover the Finder and Spotlight, and should be posted tomorrow (November 1). To hold you over until then, though, here are some more observations on some of the smaller changes made to Leopard.

It brought up the right card!!

Here’s an awesome little touch. Mail in Leopard has a feature called data detectors that recognizes various sorts of information like phone numbers and addresses. My brother had moved, and a few days back I emailed him asking for his new address. He replied yesterday with his new address. It was a perfect time to test out data detectors. I moused over the address he had given me; as expected, Mail recognized the address and put an outline around it, along with a down-pointing arrow indicating a pop-up menu. I clicked the arrow and selected “Add to Existing Contact...”. I fully expected to be presented with a dialog box or something asking me to pick a contact, but Mail saw that it was my brother and pulled up his address card automatically, giving a preview of…
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