Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard sports new features such as Time Machine and Spaces. There are updated versions of Safari, the Finder, Spotlight and Mail.

General Requirements: Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster) processor. 512MB of memory. DVD drive for installation. 9GB of available disk space. Run Disk Utility’s First Aid and perform a backup of the hard drive.

Appearance Features: There is a gray Apple instead of a blue one. Translucent menu bar can be made opaque. Go to Desktop System Preferences. Uncheck the box for Translucent Menu Bar. Dock on the bottom has a reflection and a drop shadow. Position dock on the side to avoid the three dimensional appearance.

How to add a Get Info button to the finder window: View > Customize toolbar… Add a Quick Look button while you are adding buttons. Show folder path in status bar. View > Show path bar. View files as icons, lists, columns and cover flow. Stacks are a new way to look at folders stored in the dock. The Dock needs to be on the bottom for the Stack view.

Time Machine: An intuitive and entertaining way of presenting data backups. 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 location. Choose Yes and Time Machine takes care of everything else, automatically in the background. You won't have to worry about backing up again. Time Machine does an initial complete backup and hourly backups of changed files. As the external drive fills up, older files are deleted to make room for new ones. Time Machine also lets you restore your files in the event of major data loss. Start up the Mac from the OS X install DVD, and there is an option to restore your files from the Time Machine backup.

Disk Utility in Leopard lets you partition a drive without erasing it first. This is a function brought over from Boot Camp. Since Time Machine will fill your external drive eventually, it may be wise to partition the external drive. Keep a bootable clone on one partition, and let Time Machine handle the hourly incremental backups.

Spaces: Separate workspaces that contain their own programs and windows. Enable Spaces in the Expose and Spaces pane of System Preferences.

Mail 3: New features include Notes, To Do’s, RSS Feeds and Stationery. To Do’s let you set a due date, an alarm and a priority. To Do’s created in Mail also are added to iCal. Stationary creates an HTML email message that is easily read by Windows recipients.

iChat 4: Video Effects lets you change the backdrops. iChat theater lets you both view files. iChat Screen Sharing is easier than the Finder’s Screen Sharing. Especially when the two computer users can run iChat.

Installation: Before you begin, double-check your backup, and run Disk First Aid. Select a destination drive, click Options, and choose Archive and install even if you are only upgrading an earlier OS X version. When it is done there will be a folder called Previous Systems holding the old System folder. Keep this around for a few days to make sure everything got moved over. Then delete this folder to free up some space.

Safari 3: The Find command in Safari works great. Hit Command F for a search field. Type a work and Safari highlights the occurrences of this word on the web page. Arrow through the instances and click Done when complete. This feature is a great time saver.

Spotlight: Now it actually produces useful results. Use quotation marks around words to find exact phrases. Hit the spacebar to use Quick Look to view a search result.

Printing: Expand the Print Dialog Box to get the familiar choices.

Preview 4: Reorganize PDF pages and merge PDF documents with this new version. Open the sidebar in Preview. Drag pages within a document, and add pages by dragging from one sidebar to another.

Conclusions: Leopard contains over 300 new features. The entire OS is written in 64 bit code, so it takes full advantage of multi-core Intel processors. It is fully UNIX-compliant. It provides a safe and secure computing experience. Leopard is the most impressive Mac OS X version yet.

Get an overview of some of these new features watch the tutorial for Leopard on Apples website:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/guidedtour/