The 300+ changes in Leopard

I have been going through the Apple‘s 300+ New Features page and quite a few made me feel excited and much more eagerly waiting for Leopard than before. Here‘s a quick run-down of what I like on that list:

AppleScript: Full Unicode Support for AppleScript.
Finally. With the rest of Mac OS being so much pro-Unicode, Applescript‘s (and its editor‘s) disabilities in that area, the need to hack a Unicode string to be processed and/or displayed correctly… The only thing better than that in AS would be better/stronger dictionaries into iTunes and iWork apps!
Automator: UI Recording and Playback
This is what should theoretically be possible in AppleScript (but I have never ever been able to record anything), would be a great pluas for Automator, maybe it would finally help it to become a much more useful tool.
Dictionary: Wikipedia in Dictionary
Very handy, I suppose.
DVD Player: Chapter Thumbnails
Nice addition, as I‘ve been more frequently using VLC lately, due to it‘s ability to skip all the legal crap front matter. This is not the same – but at least a nice addition.
Finder: Back to My Mac
I still need to see exactly how this will work. And a bit concerned of (potential) security issues around this.
Imaging: Network Scanning Support
I‘ve got this HP PSC (printer/scanner/copier) device that is hooked to AirPort Express for printing. But I can’t use it as a scanner this way. I wonder it this feature would allow me to?
International: Russian Localization
I wonder if that, coupled with “New Fonts” feature will finally give me a few more fonts to choose from and a bit better appearance of Cyrillic pages in Safari? Or does this only cover translations of interface elements?
Mail: To Do and Notes
Very nice productivity enhancement.
Safari: Movable Tabs and Merge All Windows
Ok, for these I don‘t have to wait till Leopard – I can have them no in Safari 3.0 and these are cool and useful. The former I can do in FireFox, but the latter is, actually, much more useful.
Security
A whole host of features there that look quite promising.
Terminal: Improved International Support, Tabs, Workspaces
Borrowing from iTerm and screen(1) 🙂

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