Give your files the rock star treatment.

Imagine if browsing the files on your Mac was as easy as browsing music in iTunes. That's the idea behind the new Finder in Leopard. Now you can access everything on your system from an iTunes-style sidebar and flip through your files using Cover Flow.

Leopard brings new power to your old friend, the sidebar. Now items are grouped into categories: places, devices, shared computers, and searches--just like the Source list in iTunes. So with a single click, you're on your way to finding what you need.

See what you seek.

Bring your files to life with Cover Flow in the Finder. Just as you use Cover Flow to flip through album art in iTunes, now you can use it to flip through your files. Cover Flow displays each file as a large preview of its first page. And you can page through multipage documents or play movies.
Search party.

Stop looking and start finding with Cover Flow and Spotlight. Click a prebuilt search like "yesterday" or "all images" in the sidebar and Cover Flow displays your search results in the perfect at-a-glance format. Leopard comes with a number of helpful prebuilt searches, but it's easy to create your own customised searches as well.

Closer connections.

With shared computers automatically displayed in the sidebar, it's far easier to find or access files on any computer in your house, whether Mac or PC. All it takes is a click. But here's where things get really interesting. By clicking on a connected Mac, you can see and control that computer (if authorised, of course) as if you were sitting in front of it. You can even search all the computers in the house to find what you're looking for.

And now, back to my Mac.

Ever need something on your Mac when you were thousands of miles from home? With Back to My Mac and a .Mac account, you can connect to any of your Macs at home from any Mac on the Internet. Your home computers will appear in the shared section of the sidebar just as they do when you're in the living room.

Look deeper.

From the Finder or the menu bar, Spotlight in Leopard lets you search for more specific sets of things. Use Boolean logic to narrow search results by entering "AND," "OR," or "NOT" into a search request. You can also search for exact phrases (using quotation marks), dates, ranges (using greater than [>] and less than [<] symbols), absolute dates, and simple calculations.

Quick Look. Look before you launch.

Using Quick Look in Leopard, you can view the contents of a file without even opening it. Flip through multiple-page documents. Watch full-screen video. See entire Keynote presentations. With a single click.

Opening files is so 2006.

So you're flipping through files in the Finder. But you're looking for something specific and you don't have time to open lots of files to find it. Enter Quick Look. It gives you a sneak peek of entire files--even multiple-page documents and video--without opening them.

See everything.

Quick Look works with nearly every file on your system, including images, text files, PDFs, movies, Keynote presentations, and Microsoft Word and Excel files. Click the Quick Look icon or tap the Space bar to see a file in Quick Look. Then click the arrow icon to see the same file full screen--even video as it plays.

Time Machine. A giant leap backward.

More than a mere backup, Time Machine makes an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac--digital photos, music, movies, TV shows, and documents--so you can go back in time to recover anything.

Set it, then forget it.

You can start using Time Machine in seconds. The first time you attach an external drive to your Mac, Time Machine asks if you'd like to use that drive as your backup. Say yes and Time Machine takes care of everything else. Automatically. In the background. You'll never have to worry about backing up again.

Back up everything.

Time Machine keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac. That includes system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, and documents. But what makes Time Machine different from other backup applications is that it not only keeps a spare copy of every file, it remembers how your system looked on any given day--so you can revisit your Mac as it appeared in the past.

Go back in time to restore any file on your system.

Go back in time.

Enter the Time Machine browser in search of your long-lost files and you see exactly how your computer looked on the dates you're browsing. Select a specific date, let Time Machine find your most recent changes, or do a Spotlight search to find exactly what you're looking for. Once you do, click Restore and Time Machine brings it back to the present. Time Machine restores individual files, complete folders, or your entire computer--putting everything back the way it was and where it should be.

Effortless meets wireless.

With a hard disk connected to your AirPort Extreme Base Station, AirPort all the Macs in your house can use Time Machine to back up wirelessly. Simply select your AirPort Disk as the backup disk for each computer and the whole family can enjoy the benefits of Time Machine.

Preferential treatment.

Customize Time Machine by modifying the following behaviors in System Preferences:

Backup disk. Change the drive or volume you're backing up to. Or back up to a Mac OS X Server computer.
Do not back up. By default, Time Machine backs up your entire system. But you can also select items you'd rather not back up.
Encrypt backup data. Turn on encryption to store your backup securely.
Backup storage time limits. Manage older backups so your backup drive doesn't fill up.


Drag windows to different workspaces and unclutter your Mac.   

Spaces. Room for everything.

You do a lot on your Mac. So what happens when projects pile up? Easy. Use Spaces to group your windows and banish clutter completely. Leopard gives you a Space for everything and puts everything in its Space.

Rearrange the rooms.

Create a Space for work. Create a Space for play. organise each Space the way you want it just by dragging in windows. Keep all your work projects in one Space and that fun flick you made in iMovie in another. Create a communication Space for iChat and Mail. You can even rearrange your Spaces with drag-and-drop ease--shift a Space and every window in it comes along for the ride.

Make yourself at home.

Moving from Space to Space is easy. Get a bird's-eye view and select the Space you want or toggle between Spaces using the arrow keys. Even the Dock is down with Spaces: When you click a Dock icon, Leopard whisks you to the Space (or Spaces) where you have that application open.

Pick your patterns.

Configure your Spaces by visiting the Expose Spaces pane in System Preferences. Add rows and columns until you have all the real estate you need. Arrange your Spaces as you see fit, then choose the function keys you want to control them. You can also assign applications to specific Spaces, so you'll always know where, say, Safari or Keynote is.

Email personalised stationery, write to-dos, and take notes.

Mail. Think outside the inbox.

Leopard transforms email into personalised stationery. Notes you can access anywhere. To-dos that change as your errands do. For everything you do with email--and some things you haven't thought of yet--there's Mail.

Sincerely yours.

Mail for Leopard features more than 30 professionally designed stationery templates that make a virtual keepsake out of every email you send. From invitations to birthday greetings, stationery templates feature coordinated layouts, fonts, colors, and drag-and-drop photo placement--everything to help you get your point across. You can even create personalised templates. And messages created using stationery in Mail use standard HTML that can be read by every popular email program on the market--for both Mac and PC.

Notes and tasks help you stay organised.

Noteworthy indeed.

Ever email yourself a reminder that gets lost in your inbox? Mail lets you write handy notes you can access from anywhere. Brainstorm ideas, jot down meeting notes, scribble a phone number--notes can include graphics, colored text, and attachments. Group notes into folders or create Smart Mailboxes that group them for you. Since your notes folder acts like an email mailbox, you can retrieve notes from any Mac or PC.

Much ado about to-dos.

Forget manually entering a new item to your to-do list every time an email hits your inbox. Simply highlight text in an email, then click the To-do icon to create a to-do from a message. Include a due date, set an alarm, or assign priorities. Every to-do you create includes a link to the original email or note, and to-dos automatically appear in iCal, complete with any edits or additions you make. And since to-dos are stored with your email, you can access them from Mail on any Mac.

Spotlight on Mail.

With smarter relevance ranking in Spotlight, you'll find the right email at the top of the search results list. And everything you create in Leopard Mail--to-dos, notes, and, of course, email messages--appears in a Spotlight search of your system.

Stop the presses.

Subscribe to an RSS feed in Mail and you'll know the moment an article or blog post hits the wire. Even better, you can choose to have new articles emailed to you. Sorting your news is easy, too. Use Smart Mailboxes to organise incoming news articles according to search terms that pique your interest. Mail shares its unread RSS feed count with Safari, so your reading list always stays in sync.

Data, detected.

Say you get an email invitation to dinner. What if Mail recognised the address of the restaurant and let you map directions on the web? Or let you click once to add the date to your iCal calendar? With Leopard, it does. Mail even recognises combinations of data in phrases like "lunch tomorrow at 12 p.m. at 701 Baltic Ave, San Francisco, CA," making it easy to make plans.

Setup made simple.

Now you can set up a new Mail account in one easy step. Just enter your current email address and password and let Mail do the rest. Mail works with the most popular email providers to automatically configure all those cryptic server settings for you.

Add effects to video chats and make remote presentations.

iChat. Not being there is half the fun.

Filled with fun new features, iChat turns any video chat into an event. Video backdrops, Photo Booth effects, photo slideshows, Keynote presentations, even movies on your Mac--you can share it all using iChat.

Transform your video chats using Photo booth effects.

Share your files with friends using iChat Theater.

Chat for effect.

Transform your video chats using new Photo Booth effects. Choose an effect and your image changes instantly--iChat detects your background and adds the effect only to your image. And the reverse is true for iChat backdrops: Drag an Apple-designed backdrop or your own photo or video into the video preview window to create an effect that will fool your buddies into thinking you're chatting from your living room, the beach, or the moon.

Show off (without showing up).

Why wait for a darkened room and a projector to present vacation photos or Keynote slides? Now you can do it all remotely, right in iChat. Put on an entire photo slideshow, click through a Keynote presentation, or play a movie--in full screen, accompanied by a video feed of you hosting--while your buddy looks on. In fact, you can show any file on your system that works with Quick Look.

Chatting for the record.

Now you can save your audio and video chats for posterity with iChat recording. Before recording starts, iChat notifies your buddies and asks for their permission to record. When you're done chatting, iChat stores your audio chats as AAC files and video chats as MPEG-4 files so you can play them in iTunes or QuickTime. Share them with colleagues, friends, and family or sync them to your

Crystal-clear audio.

iChat uses the AAC-LD audio codec to deliver the clearest possible sound during audio chats. A wideband codec that samples a full range of vocal frequencies, AAC-LD sounds great with any voice.Still the best for text.Sure, iChat has a lot to offer for video and audio chats, but text messaging also gets a boost in Leopard, thanks to these additions:

Tabbed chats
Multiple logins
Invisibility
Animated buddy icons
SMS forwarding
Custom buddy list order
File transfer manager
Space-efficient views
AIM to please.

iChat works with AIM. You and your buddies can be either AIM or .Mac users. Text, audio, and video chat whether your buddies use a Mac or PC. Sign in with your AIM account and all your buddies appear in your iChat buddy list.