Apart from the new look to Leopard, Apple have also introduced some new features with the latest instalment of their OS. The big ones are Stacks, Spaces and Time Machine.
Stacks are a new way to browse folders that are saved in the Dock. Instead of opening in a Finder window, the folder contents are displayed as either a fan, (for folders with less than 8 items), or as a grid, (for items with more than 8 items).
If you come from a *nix background you’ll be familiar with the concept of workspaces and virtual desktops. Apple have incorporated this idea into Leopard. You can now group your applications into their own virtual desktops. Spaces also allows you to specify which desktop an application should always open in. So if for example you want your email client to open on another desktop, then you can do so in the Spaces preferences.
By default Spaces is turned off, so if you want to use it, you’ll have to enable it in System Preferences -> Expose and Spaces. The initial configuration allows for 4 Spaces, but this can be increased up to a maximum of 16.
And then there’s Time Machine. Everyone is talking about Apples new backup program. It’s proving to be the killer application for Leopard and it’s easy to see why. Time Machine has turned a chore into something that’s almost fun. Time Machine does nothing more than make incremental backups of your Mac – hourly, daily and weekly snapshots are taken – and it does it very well.
In order to use Time Machine a large external hard drive is required. The disk also needs to be formatted with the Mac OS Extended File System. Once you attach the drive to your Mac, you’ll be prompted to use it as your backup disk:
From there it’s just a matter of letting Time Machine do it’s thing. If you need to restore a backup, then starting the Time Machine application opens a new window that allows you to browse all the previous backups. It really is something to behold. Unfortunately I can’t show you a screenshot, but you can get an idea of what it looks like here.
