aryayush
Aspiring Novelist
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Mac OS X Leopard “better and faster than Vista”
“I’ve been testing Leopard,” reports Walter Mossberg (Wall Street Journal) and, “I believe it builds on Apple’s quality advantage over Windows. In my view, Leopard is better and faster than Vista, with a set of new features that make Macs even easier to use.” Among the more than 300 new features available in Leopard, Mossberg singles out as “marquee features” Time Machine, Cover Flow, and Quick Look.” And he was impressed that “every piece of software and hardware I tried on two Leopard-equipped Macs—a loaned laptop from Apple and my own upgraded iMac—worked fine, exhibiting none of the compatibility problems that continue to plague Vista.”
Leopard “hits all the right spots”
“With Leopard, Apple’s operating system widens its lead aesthetically and technologically,” states Ed Baig (usatoday.com). Baig “migrated to Leopard” from Tiger “without pain on a MacBook laptop and my own iMac desktop; there’s mercifully none of the software driver and other hassles associated with a Windows operating system upgrade.” Calling Leopard “one cool cat,” Baig praises Time Machine with its automatic backup and effortless file retrieval; the new videoconferencing features in iChat Theater; stationery, notes and To Do options in Mail; Cover Flow, Spaces, Stacks, and the ability to “highlight and copy any portion of a Web page inside the Safari browser and turn it into a live Dashboard widget.”
Leopard unleashed
Writing for the Telegraph, Claudine Beaumont tells us that “Leopard is slick, shiny” and offers any number of features that deliver the “wow factor.” Like CoverFlow, which in Leopard allows “you to whiz through files and documents, with the album covers replaced by mini-thumbnails showing the front page of documents. You can hover over these thumbnails to scroll through multi-page documents; if it’s a movie file, you can even play the film clip in Finder.” Stacks “another useful addition to Leopard, is a virtual ‘stack’ of documents that lives in the dock area, giving you one-click access to files.” “For me,” Beaumont states, “the stand-out feature is Time Machine,” but she’s also impressed that with Boot Camp built-in, Leopard becomes “the first Apple operating system that will also allow you to install a Windows operating system alongside it.”
Lots of “new goodies in Leopard”
Mac OS X “Leopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises, and very few disappointments, lie around every corner. This Leopard has more than 300 new spots — and most of them are bright ones,” declares David Pogue (New York Times). He points, for example, to two “routine-changing” features. Time Machine, which offers “the shortest setup of any backup system in history.” And Quick Look, which lets you “view the contents of a document’s icon at full size, right at the desktop, without having to open the program that created it.” Pogue says “it’s fantastic.”
“Great”
That’s the one-word assessment Rob Griffiths (macworld.com) offers for Time Machine. “Perfect for nearly everyone,” Griffiths points out that “Time Machine attempts to turn the complex and sometimes confusing world of backup and restore into a simple, visual operation. Backing up is simple: attach a drive of sufficient capacity.” And when the fateful day arrives and you need to rescue documents from oblivion, “ you launch the Time Machine application—Apple has added a Time Machine icon to Leopard’s Dock—and simply move backward through time to find the files or folders you wish to restore.”
Mac OS X Leopard “fast and sleek”
After putting Leopard through its paces, Dean Takahashi (San Jose Mercury News) finds it is aptly named—”It’s fast and sleek”—and concludes that the latest version of Mac OS X “gives Apple [an] advantage over Microsoft.” It offers “more than 300 new features, making it the biggest upgrade in a long time,” and “a lot of the features allow you to do things more quickly and more easily.” That includes iChat, which, he says, “got a good makeover. Besides doing video chats with the built-in Webcams on Macs, you can now use them to share any kind of file with the person you’re chatting with. You can also take over that friend’s desktop in case you’re diagnosing the machine from afar.”
“Using the computer more pleasurable” with Mac OS X Leopard
“The grace of Leopard’s interface enhancements makes productivity more pleasurable with a Mac, as more than 300 functional and fun features top off this update,” reports Elsa Wenzel (cnet.com). Awarding it an “Excellent 8 out of 10,” Wenzel maintains that Leopard not only “makes Macs more enticing than Tiger did,” but that it “makes it far easier to find documents and applications than Windows Vista. Leopard’s interface niceties made the daily mechanics of using the computer more pleasurable. Mundane chores, such as finding files and backing up data, become a visual treat.”
“Leopard leaps to new heights”
“What’s new in Leopard? A lot,” say Ken Mingis and Michael DeAgonia (computerworld.com). The pair walk you through a 12-page analysis of the newest version of the Mac OS, spending time on many of the new features introduced in Leopard, including Stacks, Quick Look, Spaces, Time Machine, and numerous others. From Leopard’s “unified interface” to major under-the-hood changes, to wholly new apps, Leopard is a substantial, albeit evolutionary, advance for Mac OS X that builds on a solid foundation and adds a modicum of eye candy to reinforce the notion that this is something new and improved. It’s also fast — especially impressive given the new graphics sprinkled throughout the OS.”
Leopard “a pleasure to use”
Calling Leopard the “apple of my eye,” Dwight Sliverman (Houston Chronicle) tells us that as he’s played with the newest version of Mac OS X, “I’m constantly being surprised by smart, useful and convenient touches. It is a pleasure to use.” For example, he calls Spaces his “favorite Leopard feature, because it instantly multiplies your desktop real estate. Those who use portable computers will particularly appreciate it. On my MacBook it’s a godsend.”
Leopard makes “using a Mac both more productive and more fun”
Troy Dreier (laptopmag.com) gives Leopard 4.5 stars (out of five). Praising Time Machine, he predicts that “Leopard will be remembered as the OS that debuted Time Machine, the backup tool that changes everything.” Equally positive about Cover Flow, Quick Look, Spaces, Mail, Boot Camp, and iChat, Dreier concludes that “Leopard is worth the price for Time Machine alone, but the sheer variety of improvements and innovation inside this OS give you much more than your money’s worth.”
Time Machine: “So simple, there’s no Step 3”
In his in-depth review of Time Machine, Ryan Faas (computerworld.com) does some déjà-vuing of his own, conjuring up an early iMac commercial to illustrate how simple it is for customers to use Time Machine to back up the data on their Macs. Calling it “one of the most compelling new features added to Mac OS X in years,” he praises Apple engineers for creating “a backup technology that requires little or no configuration, performs backups automatically and invisibly, and makes restoring files from those backups as simple and intuitive as humanly possible.”
Leopard “the most polished and easiest to use OS”
In his 4.5-star (out of 5) review of Leopard, Edward Mendelson (pcmag.com) maintains that Leopard is “by far the best operating system ever written for the vast majority of consumers, with dozens of new features that have real practical value.” Mendelson “found Leopard to be startlingly fast, brilliantly streamlined, and packed with conveniences and innovations. Leopard’s rich set of built-in software runs faster than I imagined possible.”
Leopard “something any Mac user will want”
After a “swift and easy” installation, Mark Kellner (Washington Times) found Mac OS X Leopard “something any Mac user will want to have.” “Offering better integration of e-mail with syndicated Internet news updates, a new backup feature likely to decrease the impact of hardware failures, and snazzy display features by the bushel, the $129 Apple Mac OS X Leopard upgrade is more than a reasonable purchase.”
Leopard offers “a better user experience” and “inherent reliability”
Laying “the foundation for the next generation of personal computing,” Leopard “redefines what personal computing looks like,” according to Michael Gartenberg (computerworld.com). And Gartenberg offers a litany of Leopard features by which he’s impressed. “Cover Flow, a feature first used in iTunes, lets you browse files visually and then see a file’s contents without opening it.” He argues that “Apple’s IM client, iChat, runs rings around what’s available for other systems.” He’s always used his “e-mail in-box as a to-do list,” Gartenberg admits, “and Apple’s Mail client makes that really work.”
“Leopard breathes new life into an aging Mac”
“If you own a Mac, you’ll want Leopard,” writes Eric Benderoff (chicagotribune.com). Running Leopard on both an iBook and a MacBook Pro, Benderoff learned first hand “why Apple’s new operating system upgrade, called Leopard, continues to make Mac computers the easiest and most enjoyable to use.” Citing Cover Flow, Spotlight, Spaces, and Stacks to illustrate his point, he concludes, “I can tell you this: for $129, Leopard breathes new life into an aging Mac.”
“Mac OS X Leopard: A perfect 10”
So states Tom Yager (InfoWorld). “People buy Macs,” Yager reports, “because the platform as a whole is perfect, full stop. Leopard is a rung above perfection. It’s taken as rote that the Mac blows away PC users’ expectations. Leopard blows away Mac users’ expectations, and that’s saying a great deal.” Leopard, Yager says “is remarkable; it’s more and better software than anyone should sell for $129.”
The best operating system ever is finally here. Yippee!!
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