Mac OS X 10.5 (aka “Leopard”) is due some time this month. If earlier precedent holds, the OS upgrade will cost students $69. While there are dozens of new features in Leopard, here are the ones that jump out at me as being of interest to law students:
Preview will have improved PDF annotation and markup capabilities. Preview has always been one of the most underrated Apple apps, and this update looks extensive.
Spaces is a new variation on the ancient theme of virtual desktops. This looks like yet another excuse to multislack, but it could be quite handy particularly for things like conducting online research, when you have a lot of open windows, documents, browsers, and so on, and you need to keep them all open but sorted.
Quick Look likely won’t unseat Yep for sifting through PDF documents. Its focus seems to be on sifting through visual, rather than textual information. But it’s still an intriguing notion. With CoverFlow in iTunes, Apple seems to have embarked on a new “visual flipping” metaphor for moving through information. Will this be just a fun gimmick, or something we use all the time?
iCal will get more juice. It looks like Apple doing with iCal what it has done with several other software of late. They deliver a nice, well-implemented version 1 with a limited feature set but nice integration with other Apple apps. Then they slowly but steadily add features and broader integration capabilities. The new version of iCal will have an open framework that will allow developers to build services around iCal. I expect to see even more online tools like Basecamp building advanced scheduling capabilities that synch with iCal. The basic iCal interface seems to be improved as well.
Mail is becoming more than just an email client. To-do lists can be created in Mail, and they integrate with iCal. Data detection should mean that Mail will be smart enough to know when to use external apps to act on text in messages. For example, if a classmate sends you an email message with a date, time and address for a study session, Mail should allow you to easily add that info into iCal without cutting and pasting. It will be interesting to see how well this works. It will also receive RSS feeds, and keep them synched with Safari. That is a slick idea indeed. Finally, the new version of Mail will allow for the creation of mail templates. This could be quite handy for certain types of email such as communication with potential employers, faculty members, and so on, assuming nobody gets carried away with HTML email.
It may be that the capabilities of iCal and Mail will constitute a lightweight GTD system that fits the way some (or many) law students operate.
Apple appears to have put a lot of eye candy into Leopard. Here’s hoping they also put a lot of new functionality into it as well.
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