I have officially extended the week of Leopard into this week, and I would like to anounce another giveaway.

This giveaway will be for 5 licenses of Comic Life Deluxe Household Edition. It is a great app for making cool comics with photos of friends and family. To enter, post a comment telling us your favourite part of the new finder in Leopard. The five winners will receive the Household Edition of Comic Life Deluxe .

Make sure to include your valid email address in the email address field of the comments.

Rules:
1 entry per person
iAppblog has the right to disqualify anyone, for any reason
We can change the rules at any time, before, after or during the contest
We can change the prize at any time, before, after or during the contest

If you agree to all these rules, tell us what you most like about the new finder. This giveaway ends this Friday with the others.

Rating: 4.5/5

I’ve tried several implementations of virtual desktops on multiple platforms. While Spaces is not the slickest looking, it doesn’t utilize superfluous effects over usability. Spaces also is also vastly better than other virtual desktop solutions because it’s supported and included in more machines.

Spaces has some key features that make it truly great. One, Spaces is tightly integrated with Exposé. Activating All Windows will show only the windows in the current space. Additionally, if all spaces are shown in a bird’s eye view, it will show all windows in all spaces. The second major feature of Spaces is application binding, called “Application Assignments.� The crux of virtual desktops is having certain application windows appearing in specific spaces automatically, and this is what Application Assignments does. These automatic assignments take away most of the work of moving windows to specific spaces. The last major feature of Spaces is the one most virtual desktop implementations lack: a bird’s eye view of all spaces. This view not only allows you to see which window is where, but also move windows effortlessly between spaces.

Spaces has some other convenient ways of moving windows to other spaces. You can drag windows to the edge of the screen nearest the other space. For example, to move a Safari window to the space to the left of it, drag it to the left edge and hold it there for a few seconds. Spaces shows a nice bezel-like window which displays which space you just switched to. Spaces also has numerous ways of switching to other spaces: keyboard shortcuts, a menu bar item, a Dock icon, and more.

Spaces is not without its problems though. Individual spaces can only have a non-descriptive number for a name, rather than a name like Communications or Web Browsing. Spaces also has a minor bug where windows appear in the wrong space. I’ve encountered this only once in about a week of owning Leopard. It happened when I activated iCal’s preference window and it appeared in the space above the current one.

Virtual desktops are great for organizing a large quantity of windows —therefore providing a less distracting interface. Despite some minor deficiencies, Spaces is simply the best implementation of virtual desktops I’ve ever used.

Price: included with Leopard, $129 or £85

Site: http://www.apple.com/

Make sure too digg this article as well! http://digg.com/apple/Review_of_Spaces_on_iAppblog/

In the first weekend of selling leopard, Apple has sold over 2 million copies. This is the fastest they have ever sold an opperation system, ever! Leopard is the sixth release of Mac OS X, and definatly the biggest, withover 300 new features. iAppblog is running the “Week of Leopard” in honour of its release. There are many giveaways, so stay tuned at iAppblog.com.

As we count down the hours till Apple officially releases Mac OS Leopard 10.5, we would like to let the iAppblog readers know of something special we are planning. With Leopard, users will have over 300 new features, and we plan on sharing them with all of you. Get ready for a non stop blogging spree. As we show you the new features (with screencasts of some). If there are any features in particular you would like to see, post a comment here. Among the over 300+ new features, the most notiable are an improved Finder, colmplete with cover-flow, new mail, ichat, and safari. There is also some brand new features, Time Machine, for looking back on our system files, Spaces, workspaces for different apps, and QuickLook for getting a preview of almost any file in the Finder. You can check out all 300+ new features by visiting http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html

So stay tooned to see what we have in store for you, and keep your eyes open for some great giveaways.

Yes, as you all thought, its going to be the 26th! As soon as iAppblog gets a copy you can be sure we’ll review it.

Apple have also updated the Leopard website to detail all the new features of Leopard, you can see that site here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/

Leopard will see the introduction of Time Machine, an app that backs up your Mac and allows you to retrieve files from a previous backup. It also sees the introduction of improvements on the Desktop and Finder, which includes Cover Flow for finder. Two more of the major changes are the introduction of Spaces, which allows you to use multiple desktops on your Mac at one time, and Quick Look, which allows you to view, play and read files without opening them.

Posted on MacUser:

I was greatly distressed by today’s news that Leopard will keep us waiting until the fall, but after the original wave of rage and denial passed over me, I began to wonder what this implied. One particular issue that struck me is when — or if — we’ll see new versions of iLife and iWork. I don’t know about you, but January 2006 seems like very long ago… remember those very first Intel Macs, full of mysteries? How you couldn’t get used to the name “MacBook Pro”? Yeah, then. Well, that was also when we saw iLife ‘06 with full-screen editing in iPhoto, podcasting in GarageBand, and the shiny new iWeb (plus one slide with iWork’s new features

Posted on Engadget:

Sad news, kids: Apple is pushing back its Mac OS X Leopard release date from WWDC in June (now they tell us!) to October. Apple is blaming it all on the iPhone, saying that “iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team.” Apple will still be showing up at WWDC with a beta version to hand out to developers, since apparently the OS will be feature-complete by then, just not bug-free. We suppose we should be grateful to Apple for being cautious and avoiding the various and often severe quality assurance issues that has plagued it recently, but this whole passing the buck thing is little lame. “Life often presents tradeoffs,” says Apple, “and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.” Thanks for that little nugget of wisdom, now get back to work!

I think this guy has got something. What does everyone think? Original post: http://www.appleology.com/2006/12/10/leopards-illuminating-graphical-user-interface-illuminous/

Mac OS X’s Aqua has matured very slowly over the last few years. It seems like many OS X users are tired of Aqua and ready for a new revolutionary GUI to compliment and enhance the experience of using a Mac. An increasingly popular theme for Apple’s latest applications have been smooth unified metal and dark glass. With each major update to one of Apple’s applications, its seems like the days with blue gel scroll-bars and candy bar progress bars are ending.