Give The Cat Claws: Tip And Tricks To Supercharge Leopard
Mac OS X Leopard has been out for two weeks now and, while there have been reports of some problems, for most people, the upgrade seems to have been worth the effort. But while Leopard brings some worthy new features to the table, this was without a doubt one of the bumpiest upgrades for many Mac users.
With that in mind I thought I’d round up a few tips and tricks I’ve run across that can help supercharge your Leopard install and perhaps mitigate some frustrations.
The first and foremost tip would be to hunt down updates for your favorite apps. A number of application-related problems were solved when I updated to the latest version, even if, in some cases, that version wasn’t specifically advertised as “Leopard ready.”
For interface tweaks, such as getting rid of the 3-D dock, eliminating the menu bar transparency or replacing the Dock’s hard-to-see Glowing Blue Dots check out our how-to: Tweak Mac OS X Leopard’s User Interface.
Here’s some smaller, but welcome features you may not know about:
Front Row in 10.5 introduces support for VIDEO_TS folders (ripped DVDs). No need for 3rd party add-ons, just put your ripped movies somewhere that Front Row can access (~/Movies/ works well).
Spotlight received a major overhaul and is much more useful. For instance you can look up words in the dictionary and perform calculations right in the search bar — try activating Spotlight and type 2+2. Along the same lines, Apple’s Dictionary received a very nice makeover you may not have noticed yet, in addition to dictionary and thesaurus functionality, Wikipedia is now integrated (provided you have network access).
By default the language for Dictionary’s Wikipedia access is English, but you can change that without too much trouble, there’s an oft overlooked setting in Dictionary’s preferences panel.
Some other random tips from Mac OS X Hints:
- Leopard sandbox’s download applications and offers a very Vista-like warning the first time you open an app. But here’s a tip to get rid of the nag.
- Quick Look is awesome, just hit spacebar and see your document right in the Finder. Unfortunately it doesn’t work for every file type (CSS files don’t work for instance). Don’t worry, it isn’t to hard to add support for most text-file extensions.
- How to connect to a Windows server or share. SMB volumes seem to have some issues in Leopard, but this will get you started.
If you’ve got more tips and tricks, post them in the comments below.
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