Besides a few minor quibbles with Apple’s new OS release (transparent menu bar, wtf!) I have been extremely happy using and getting the feel for Leopard. And in fact, I am finding some of the “fluff” features to be pretty darn handy. Now, I realize there are plenty of reviews out there covering everything from Spaces, to Time Machine, to the new 64bit kernel process addressing — but I don’t feel that I should rehash what other’s have done so well. If you’re looking for a full “killer” review of Leopard from top to bottom then I strongly recommend stopping by John Siracusa’s Ars review. It’s about 30,000 words and it covers pretty much every thing you could ever want to know about Leopard, and probably a lot that you didn’t.

That said, what I haven’t yet seen is a list of the little tweaks that make OS X Leopard (and me for that matter) purr. So here’s a few things I have enjoyed so far.

1. Drag and dropping via command tab — It’s incredibly cool to see that you can now grab a file, hit cmd-tab and then drag it into an application. This is something that Tiger was missing and that I always wanted to use.
2. Item renaming — Now when you rename a document with an extention it automatically doesn’t select the extension. This is great because about 90% of the time I don’t want to change the extension of the document and unselecting it in Tiger was always a pain.
3. Warning dialog options — For the first time I feel like I finally have some control over the warning dialogs that are popping up in finder. For instance, you can now turn off the extension change warning, and you can also turn off the warn before emptying trash dialogue.
4. Grid spacing — Finally grid spacing is back. I hated the annoying default spacing that icon view had up in previous versions of OS X.
5. Exposé in spaces — For those people using spaces it’s a nice touch that exposé works within the spaces master view (F8).
6. Wallpaper folder list — If you’re like me and change your desktop a few times a week this is awesome. In the wallpaper preference pane you can now add a folder with your wallpapers and have it appear next time you come back. No more constantly locating your wallpapers every time you want a change.
7. Print preview — The print window (cmd-p) in a lot of applications now shows a small preview of your document. A nice touch, building a PDF to preview a one page document was a hassle.
8. Spotlight has dictionary and calculator built in — Now when I am curious what “superfluous” means I can type it in spotlight and quickly get the definition. Similarly I am not always invoking dashboard to use the calculator, now I can just do quick math in spotlight.
9. Scroll in inactive windows — If you have a website in the background and need to scroll down to see some content but are in the middle of a big report you don’t have to switch apps to scroll. Now you can just move the mouse over there and do it even if the window isn’t active.

I think that covers most of what I am really excited about. Granted there are probably thousands of small enhancements that have taken place in 10.5 but I have to admit it’s nice to see Apple continuing to care about the little things. That said, I do have some serious qualms with Apple as of late, particularly regarding usability decisions, but I suppose that blog post is for another day.

Cheers, Bruce.