For those with a Mac, you’ve likely read tons about the newest version of OS X, Leopard – or merely rushed out as soon as it was released and bought it – as I did. After playing around with this new operating system for a few days, I’ve already settled on a few features that will definitely help my blogging efficiency – in fact, I used some to write this post.
Spaces
This is a really great feature that enables multiple desktops, essentially adding a second, third, fourth, or fifth monitor to your computer. You can have up to sixteen spaces. You can switch between them using the control and arrow keys. This is extremely useful when having a web browser in one space, iTunes in another, and a word processing app in a third.
Quick Look and the New Finder
Quick Look is a visual file browser similar to Cover Flow view in iTunes – essentially bringing that visual interaction to the Finder. It shows previews of image, text, and HTML files. With a particular file selected, tapping the space bar brings up a larger preview that lets you quickly peek into a file. In the case of multi-page documents like PDFs or long text files, you can scroll through them using the scroll wheel – without opening an application. I’m thinking this will be useful in many ways, from theme tweaking, trolling through text files containing drafts of blog posts, or sorting through images.
The noticeably faster Mail desktop client now has RSS feed support. It groups posts by day, and manages them like regular mails meaning search works awesome, too. While I use Google Reader as my primary feed reader, this RSS support has me tempted to make a return to the desktop, since open it daily to read my email, anyhow.
Mail also adds Notes and To Do items which will give me yet another way to organize and remind myself of various blog related activities.
Safari Web Clip
Safari 3.0 has a new feature called Web Clip, that lets you select part of a web page and turn it into a desktop widget. Since I blog about technology, I started by grabbing the Top Items area of Techmeme. Using Dashboard, I can just hit F4 any time I want to see what those tech bloggers are buzzing about this hour.
Time Machine
Every blogger should back up their blog and in turn, their computer. Time Machine requires and external hard drive, but once set up, it promises to be automatic and hassle-free.
TextEdit
I sometimes use TextEdit, the text editor that comes with OS X, to write blog posts, and its new features are auto save and grammar check.
All in all, Leopard is a worthy upgrade to the Mac, and doubly so for bloggers – I’m glad I pounced on it!
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