Leopard: Wait, there’s more.

By now most us have heard about some of the most popular features of Mac OS X Leopard. But wait, there’s more. If you haven’t noticed yet, Apple has posted its list of 300+ new features that that will be included in Leopard. Last night, I printed out the list and read through it. Here’s some of the perhaps lesser known features I’m looking forward to:

Automator and AppleScript

While I love to have programmer skills, I just don’t have the time to learn. But over the last year I’ve created some time saving actions and simple scripts by using these two programs. In Leopard, Automator and AppleScript will include new or improved features for creating folder actions and workflows that you can develop without any background knowledge about xcodes and other technical language. Personally, I think computer coding should be a required foreign language course for young people, but at least Apple has paved a way for us to customize what we need to get done while working on our computer.

Dashboard

I’m not a big movie goer these days, but the Dashboard will include Movies Widget whereby you can watch movie trailers and then click to buy tickets. I know that feature exist on the web, but to have it in Dashboard could be time saver in my view. It means I don’t have to wade through lots of ads on some Web site in order to get the same thing done.

Fonts

Leopard will have a feature called Language Collections in which Apple says you will be able to quickly access “the fonts you use most often.” I hope this means that instead of having to scroll through 150-200 fonts in an application like Photoshop or Pages, I can simply call up the 5-10 fonts I use most often. There’s gotta be a way for this to occur. I’ve seriously thought about turning off two-thirds of my collected fonts in my Font Book simply because I rarely access or use most of them.

Graphics

New core image filters. The details Apple provides is not great on this topic, but as photographer, all improvements in this area are highly anticipated by me.

Mail

When I first get Leopard installed, I’ll immediately start using the well know stationary templates features, but I’m also looking forward to the Data Detector feature, which will detect “text fragments like appointments and addresses, and let’s you choose smart actions with a click: create a new contact, map an address, or create an iCal event.” Again, these all sound like time savers.

Browse iPhoto library through Mail. Sweet time saver!

Parent Control

In addition to improved features to monitor your kids’ activities on the Internet, you can also set up time limits for computer usage. This might something worth looking into. But my daughter probably think it’s sucks.

Preview

Improved features here. I’ve actually used Preview to make image adjustments to photos. In many cases it has worked really well. Improvements and pluses welcomed.

Screen Savers

Word of the Day Screen Save. “Each day the screen saver will offer up five new words for you to learn.” Cute. Might be useful.

Spotlight

Improved search features here. Will it do what Google Desktop can do? We’ll have to see.

Preferences

Mouse Controls for Expose. “Control Exposé with any button on your mouse. Specify the mouse controls in the Exposé and Spaces pain in System Preferences.” For us heavy mouse users, this might be useful.

Text Edit

Text Edit—Print page numbers, the date, and the document title on each of a TextEdit document.” Nothing new, but it’s about time to get it in TextEdit!

There’s much, much in Leopard, but the above items are just a few small but significant features that pop out for me. What lesser known Leopard features are you looking forward to?