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) 🙂