Odds & Ends: Today's Interesting Reads

Around the Mac Web for November 7, 2007, superior technology edition:

Computer World: Leopard Beats Vista

Macs Cheaper than PC's

OS X 10.5.1 Nearing Release

Apple Better than Microsoft to Make Tablet

Odds & Ends: Today's Interesting Reads

Around the Mac Web, Greatest Invention of the Year (TM) Edition:

Time: Invention of the Year

Invention of Year Embarrassment

Big UK iPhone Sales Expected

Apple's Having Problems with Dot Mac 

EEK! A Virus!

Mossberg Hates Gateway (Surprise! Not!) 

Must Read: Apple Needs a Nikon

Odds & Ends: Today's Interesting Reads

Here's today's interesting reads, smug OS X Leopard user bashing Vista edition (oh, we kid, microsoft!):

Anderson's Razor

Lifehacker's 20 Useful OS X downloads

Visa Sales Down

Six Leopard Hidden Gems

Well, I've been up most of the night poking around Leopard and have come across some hidden gems: 

DASHBOARD MOVIE WIDGET: what the hell was Apple thinking holding this back? It is awesome, and I hardly ever use widgets. Be sure to check it out.

PREVIEW: Good Lord, has preview been beefed up. Try this: take a picture of someone and save it as a jpg. Then open it in preview and use the Extract Shape tool to "carve them out" of the background. Preview is like the cheap person's photoshop now. You can play with the color levels, put text over pictures, crop, flip and adjust. Oh yeah, it does some cool things with PDF's too.

TEXT EDIT: A free word processor. It checks grammar and spelling. It does bullets and outlines. You can make up styles. For 80% of the world, its as good as M$ Word.

WEB CLIP: I check the lottery numbers web page ever day. No more. That strange box next to the reload button in safari, just click it and then "Clip out" a section of an web page that you want you check and is often updated. Ta Da! instant, updating Dashboard widget, no need to launch in the web page browser, just hit F12.

DICTIONARY: Not sexy, but useful. The dictionary has been beefed up with Oxford American Dictionary, a thesaurus and wikipedia. Just highlight a word, control-click and chose dictionary.

ALEX: The new leopard voice is so good its scary sometimes. I have had my mac speak the time since OS X 10.1 but when Alex did it tonight, I thought for sure someone else was in my house at 2 a.m.

There's a ton of other cool things (print preview is very cool now, back to my mac makes the $99 dot mac worth the cost, quick look is very handy, spotlight searching is beefed up and faster, there's a ton of hi-resolution pictures of mac hardware hidden in one of the library folders) but these are 6 things that I had either forgotten about or didn't know about. Let me know if you find any other hidden gems.