I upgraded to Leopard a few days after it came out. Overall, it’s cool. I didn’t find many of the interface look and feel stuff that drastic. People are freaking out because the dock or menu bar looks different. OMG. For me, meh, whatever.
But the one feature that keeps growing on me is Quick Look. This is way more useful than I ever imagined. Open a Finder window, click on a file, press the space bar, you see the file. Click a button, it’s in full screen. So cool for finding a Word document, or PDF you are looking for without having to open it. It even works with files on the desktop. Also, once you have the Quick Look window open, you can use the arrow keys to scroll through other files in the same directory and preview all of them.
Even better than that, it works out of the box for ActionScript, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and probably many other text-based source code files.
It’s also a great way to view pictures and even movies and listen to music. Navigate to just about any type of video file, even on the network, and press space. You’re watching a movie. Go full screen, pause, play, scrub, etc. Same for most music / sound files.
Quick Look is even integrated into Mail. Get an email with an attachment, you have a Quick Look button in your email that lets you view the attachment.
One annoyance is the number of file types it doesn’t handle. XML and CSS for example. Come on. These are simple text files. I can’t believe it knows how to handle .as but not .xml. I did find an XML plugin which works great – ColorXML. There are also solutions out there for FLV and ZIP which I am checking into now.
The biggest thing I’d like to see now is a SWF plugin. Anybody up for creating one?