Apple Offers New Goodies in Leopard System

If you're a computer company, what on earth do you add to the sixth annual version of your operating system?

Skip to next paragraph Stuart Goldenberg

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A display from Apple's Mac OS X Leopard operating system, showing the standard desktop view.

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It's not as though there are any glaring holes left. Nobody is still crying out for a better way to organize photos.

That's the challenge that Apple faced in developing Mac OS X 10.5, code-named Leopard, which goes on sale tomorrow after a four-month delay. Price: 0 online, 0 for a family pack, or free on a new Mac. As Steve Jobs points out, for that money, "everyone gets the Ultimate version." (That's a swipe at Microsoft, which sells Windows Vista in at least five versions costing as much as 0 for the Ultimate).

Microsoft had it a little easier with Vista, because everybody knew what Windows needed: better security. Maybe Mac OS X is harder to hack, or maybe the virus writers consider the Mac's 8 percent market share too piddling to bother with. But in its six years, Mac OS X hasn't experienced a single virus outbreak or spyware infestation.

So Apple's mission in Leopard was to make us aware of needs we never knew we had - something Apple is usually good at.

Apple's Web site lists 300 new features in Leopard. They're not all earth-shattering; they include a Braille font, a "Word of the Day" screen saver and a Danish spelling checker. (Settle down, folks.)

Fortunately, others really do make you slap your head and say, "Of course!"

The one Apple extols the most, with reason, is called Time Machine. It's a backup program.

Of course, the world is full of backup programs. But almost nobody uses them. Chances are extremely good that you, at this moment, do not have an automated, regular backup of your entire computer.

Time Machine keeps multiple backups of everything - programs, settings, files, photos, even the operating system itself - on a second hard drive (or another Leopard Mac on the network). The need for a second drive is a drag, but it's a necessary evil. Besides, hard drives are cheap; you can buy an internal 250-gigabyte one for .

When you connect the second drive, Leopard asks if you want to use it for Time Machine. If you click O.K., that's it. One click - that's got to be the shortest setup of any backup system in history.

Time Machine updates its mirror of your main drive every hour, although you can also trigger updates on demand. At day's end, Time Machine replaces those hourly backups with a single daily backup; at the end of the month, those are replaced by a single month-end backup. (Apple assumes that it won't take you a whole month to notice that your hard drive crashed.)

If disaster strikes - sunspots, clueless spouse, overtired self - you enter Time Machine's recovery mode. The sleek, modern-looking Leopard desktop falls away like a curtain, revealing - startlingly - a deep-space starfield. The window that once contained your files remains floating before you, with dozens of iterations of itself, like file cards, receding into the background.

You can now scroll backward through time until the window looks as it did before the unfortunate event. (You can also use the Search box to find missing files.) When you find the files you want and click Restore, the regular desktop slides back up into view. The recovered icons are back in their original window.

Not everyone falls under the spell of that gorgeous animated starfield; critics call it unnecessary eye candy. But making Time Machine attractive - and prominent and effortless - is all part of the mission. The more people who can be persuaded to turn it on, the more will be spared the misery of losing their photos, music and e-mail.

That's not the only routine-changing feature. Quick Look lets you tap the Space bar to view the contents of a document's icon at full size, right at the desktop, without having to open the program that created it. It works with most common file types - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, HTML, Apple's iWork suite, text files, photos, music, movies, fonts and so on - and it's fantastic.

Another is called Spaces, which gives you up to 16 full-size virtual monitors. You can park the windows of a different program, activity or project on each one - e-mail and chat on Screen 1, Photoshop on Screen 2 - and switch among all these "external monitors" at will. An ingenious map view lets you drag these virtual screens around in space, and even drag open windows between screens.

Virtual-screen software isn't new. But having it built in, and with so much polish, makes a huge difference.

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