After reading Hawk Wings Five favourite time-saving Leopard Tips, I decided to write my own six cool Leopard items. These are small features, but nice none the less.

Smarter Renaming of Files

When changing a file name in Leopard, the OS selects just the file name and not the extension. Vary handy for those that want to keep the extension intact.

Spotlight Selects The Top Hit

In 10.4 Spotlight would suggest search results and then default to Show All. In 10.5, Spotlight by default selects the Top Hit. This is a very welcome feature and, with the new Spotlight search speed, I haven’t had to launch Quicksilver.

Spotlight Dictionary

Spotlight not only does math, but it also defines words. Put in any word and one of the results will be the definition as found in Apple’s Dictionary application.

New Screen Savers & iTunes Visualizers

Apple has a knack of creating cool screen savers and visualizers and have added some new offerings in 10.5. Shell and Arabesque make up the new screen savers and fit in nicely with Flurry. Lathe, Jelly (shown below) and Sitx make up the new iTunes visualizers.

Lots Of New Icons

We all know that the system preferences and folders were re-worked for Leopard, but so were a lot of other icons. Images have a nice white border around them, HTML files happen to be black and text files have a cleaner look to them also.

Expose and Spaces Applications

Spaces and Expose are features built into OSX and, in the past, features didn’t have a dock icon for the most part. Now they do. Just click on the icons to invoke the features. It actually quite handy as you don’t need to remember yet another keyboard shortcut.

Sure, the features I mentioned above are smaller ones, but it’s those smaller ones that you’ll interact with on a daily basis. I do have Time Machine but have yet to start it up as I don’t have an external drive. The updated Spotlight functionality has already come in quite handy.

What cool little Leopard features have you found?