I installed 10.5 last night when I got in and so far so good. The upgrade process took, maybe, an hour and after that I started thinking of what new feature I wanted to use 1st. The winner was Spaces. This feature lets you split up your screen real estate by saying, “only open these apps in this space”. I set up spaces for dev, design and everything else. The goal is to reduce the clutter and keep your machine visually beautiful.
With that in mind, my next stop was Stacks. These are folders that you add to your dock that can help you keep your dock lean and mean. Case in point, before today I had like 30 apps on my dock – 98% of which I use on a daily basis. Thanks to Stacks I organized those into these main categories:
- Comm (Mail, Chat, Address Book, etc)
- Des (Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc)
- Dev (Flex Builder, Eclipse, Zend Studio, Terminal, etc)
- Tools (Time Machine, Transmit, xScope, etc)
These were in addition to Documents and Downloads, which Apple sets up for you on install. So now my dock is only 8 deep and I feel pretty proud of that (plus it’s cool watching the apps fan out when you click on a Stack). Outside of those, I’ve been hitting Quick Look pretty hard. This let’s you look @ the contents of a file without actually opening the file which is really cool for me since I juggle a lot of files throughout the day.
Last, but not least, Time Machine is pure butter!! Easy, painless backups period. I really could have used this last week as an iPhone sync killed my Address Book. Glad I had a spare thanks to iBackup. Anyways, let me know of any cool ways you use the new OS plus any headaches and I’ll do the same…
