waffle

Things I like about Leopard:

• No more renegade printing apps. Previously, the rule about printing was that everything was in System Preferences, except if it wasn’t. Now that’s not the case - nearly everything is easily reachable from the Print & Fax panel.

• Printing on the whole sucks way less. In a move about 5 years late, Page Setup is no more. It has ceased to be and gone to meet the great new Print panel in the sky, where it joins reasonable presets and an active preview with page flipping. Bravo.

• No more Internet Connect either - it too is in the System Preferences network panel.

• The technology behind Mail’s “Junk Mail” filter, Latent Semantic Mapping, is an openly available framework to classify text as being of a specific type.

• Scripting Bridge, which is a collection of OSA/AppleScript bridges to make writing “AppleScripts” in Objective-C, Ruby or Python.

• The Cocoa bridges, of course.

• NSOperation and NSOperationQueue. Like thread pools with dependencies.

• DocSets in Xcode enables third-party documentation in the documentation browser, including symbol search and updates over Atom feeds. (Please do not make up a buzzword ending in ‘cast’ for this.)

• Xcode quick debugging - whenever you hit, or are poised to hit, a breakpoint, gdb is attached automatically and you get a tiny toolbar with step in/out/over, continue, pause and a thread popup. Also, variable value tooltips. Why was this not in Xcode 1.0?

• Media browsing in the Open panels.

• Screen sharing with easy setup and reliable security. Pinch me.

• Time Machine. Time Machine rocks.

• Help Menu search. Bacon-savingly good.

• Tabs in Terminal.

• Command+Shift+4 + space screenshots (window screenshots) now contain the surrounding shadow. Wonderful.