I can’t wait for Leopard

Okay, so that’s a bit of a lie: I actually can wait for Leopard. In fact, I’m not going to get the new version of the Mac OS until the end of November when I’m back in town and can buy the iMac I’ve been promising myself.

That aside, I have to admit that Mac OS 10.5 was made for people like me. Sure, there are tons of Mac enthusiasts out there that are bemoaning the fact that there is no one ‘killer’ improvement in Leopard, or that the dock looks funny, or that we’ve all waited too long for such a small update, but for regular-but-not-hardcore Mac users like me, the list of 300+ new features is quite impressive.

So considering the fact that I’m sitting in front of the Apple Store right now and using their wireless connection to surf the web, it’s only fair that I write a bit about my most anticipated features from next week’s release of Leopard. Oh, and there are over 300 new features, so my apologies if I leave a few out or don’t go into much detail on my picks.

Address Book
I’ll admit that I sometimes neglect my address book, and that I need to seriously organize all the information that is in there right now, but Leopard now gives me reason to do just that: built-in Google Maps.

Dictionary
I might seem like a nerd for being excited about this, but really, how can you go wrong with Wikipedia built into your dictionary? That’s just geek-tastic.

Finder
I neglect Finder (and the Dock) because of my use of Quicksilver, but with Coverflow now built into Finder, I might have to give it some more love than I had before.

iCal
I’m a heavy iCal user (no, I haven’t switched to Google Calendar yet) so all the improvements including inline inspectors, the event dropbox, and default alarms make me all giddy.

AirPort
I’ve been using WiFind, and while it is quite handy, it tends to be unresponsive from time to time. The new AirPort menu should solve this problem, I hope.

Spaces
Yes, I know VirtueDesktops does the same thing, but now that this is built into the OS, I won’t have to use even more precious RAM to get my multiple desktops going.

TextEdit
While Pages may now be my word processor of choice, sometimes I feel bad firing up iWork just to open a silly document that some crazy person saved as a .doc instead of just plain .rtf or .txt. The new changes to TextEdit will make it much more robust for simple text editing.

Time Machine
Clearly my most anticipated improvement to the OS, Time Machine will help me do the one thing that I am absolutely horrible at doing: system backups. Sure, I’ve done manual backups, but they’re not frequent enough. And to be honest, all this talk about remote volumes and stuff scares me. I need a one click solution to scheduled backups, and Time Machine is that solution.

So that, in short, is what I’m looking forward to in Leopard. Sadly, I’m not going to get to play with my own copy of the new OS until late November, so in the meantime, let me know what you think of it, okay? Thanks.