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Much has been made of the new features of Leopard and countless pages have already been posted with in depth analysis of Time Machine, Spaces, the 3D Dock. What you may not have spotted is an article covering some of the not so obvious new additions to Leopard. From my use over the last couple of days these are the ones I have come across so far.

1. Spotlight Now Performs As Well As Dedicated Application Launchers

Spotlight has never been the quickest of search engines for OS X and it has until now been too slow to use as a keyboard based application launcher. This has enabled applications such as Butler, LaunchBar and Quicksilver to establish a market as the preferred means of quickly firing up apps that are not sat on your Dock. Leopard changes all that and it is now quick and easy to use as a replacement for these third party apps. When searching Spotlight automatically highlights any matching apps at the top of the list pre-highlighted so all that is required is to hit return and the matching app is launched. The performance is much improved over Tiger. Obviously it does not replace the other functionality of apps such as Quicksilver, but if all you need is a quick application launcher Spotlight fits the bill straight out of the box now.

2. QuickLook Is QuickListen As Well.

Quicklook is a superb way of quickly displaying documents and images as you browse folders using the superb new Finder. What you may not have realised is that if you highlight an Mp3 or other audio file and press the QuickLook icon it will starting playing the audio file.

3. All Macs Are Now FrontRow Enabled.

Until Leopard the only official way to get FrontRow on your Mac was to buy a new Intel based Mac. With Leopard FrontRow is installed on all Macs. It is also nicely updated since Tiger and includes the ability to stream music and videos from other Macs on your network.

4. The Dock Is Resizable Without Loading Dock Preferences

If you hover over the divider between your applications and the Stacks icon and click the left mouse button while you move the mouse up and down the screen, the Dock will resize without having to load Dock Preferences and set the Dock size there.

5. Text To Speech Voice Much Improved… Listen To Alex !

If you ever tried listening to the rather robotic sounding Voices in Tigers text to speech engine you will probably have tired pretty quickly of the stilted nature of the speech. In Leopard a new speaker called Alex has been introduced that is a vast improvement and is extremely easy on the ears. It may change the way I read news on my Mac in the evenings and certainly represents an opportunity for software such as RSS readers, imagine highlighting one of your news feeds and clicking a Listen button and have your news read to you ( BTW, this feature may well already exist, if it does please let me know which app does this ).

6. PhotoBooth Now Has Added Effects From iChat

You will probably have seen the Alpha channel demos of iChat where the background of the speaker is replaced with a still image or moving video. What you may not have realised is that the filters from iChat are also available in PhotoBooth. This should breathe a few more hours of fun for your kids out of PhotoBooth.

These are just the few little gems I have noticed so far. I am sure there will turn out to be many more over the coming days. If you have spotted anything I haven’t mentioned here feel free to drop me a comment.

Cheers