How Twitter makes it real

So I wasn't in the ballroom when the keynote address by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went awry under the less-than-forensic questioning of technology journalist Sarah Lacy.

I didn't see the crowd start to get restless and heckle Zuckerberg about the deeply-unpopular Beacon advertising system, or get a chance to grab the microphone and ask questions when Lacy threw the conversation open to the floor.

And yet I was there in another way, listening to and even interacting with some of my friends in the audience, picking up on the vibe in the room and even tuning in later as Sarah Lacy loudly defended herself.

I was there because I was plugged into Twitter, the instant messaging service that lets users send short text messages to anyone who cares to tune in, online or on their mobile phone.

As I sat at my desk a constant stream of 'tweets', as they are called, was being supplied by many of the people in the room and I was able to reply directly and feel that I too was participating.

One of the reasons for its success is that it is very open, with a clean and well-defined way for programmers to use the service through an application program interface

Of course following short messages on a screen is not the same as being physically there, just as watching a nature show on TV doesn't mean you can claim to have visited the Serengeti.

But the sense of presence that can be achieved is remarkable, especially when you're sitting at your computer working, connected to the internet and with a Twitter client running on your computer so that tweets appear as they are posted. It's rather like reading a novel, where you stop seeing the words on paper and find yourself immersed in a world created for you by the author.

After a certain point Twitter becomes part of the background to life.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the caf of my favourite bookshop with my partner. She was reading about the Habsburgs, Hitler and Weimar while I was writing a talk about the future of publishing.

But I was also engaged in a distributed dialogue with a bunch of friends around the world,

BrightMeadow was cold and complaining, so I sympathised. Luke invited me to look at the first release of his new site, while sambrook was happy to discuss media futures and help me with my talk.

I was there in the cafe but also in this liminal space with everyone else, reading lovemaus's comments on Casablanca, sympathising with technokitten stuck at Madrid airport and wondering whether Jeff went for his run on a chilly New York morning.

Thanks to Twitter I carry my online networks with me as I wander through town, and more and more I see the world through the lens of our shared experience.

Sanjukta is in a cafe in Delhi and here with me; I am wondering what Documentally is filming in Rugby; I know that Yuko42 is lying in bed listening to the Tokyo rain.

Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey while working for San Francisco based podcast company Odeo, and it launched in August 2006, growing by word of mouth until last year's SXSW conference when it emerged from nowhere as the way for attendees to keep track of what was going on and share their thoughts with friends.

One of the reasons for its success is that it is very open, with a clean and well-defined way for programmers to use the service through an application program interface (API).

The developers have gone out of their way to encourage people to write clients for Twitter users, and seem to be both flexible and understanding.

For example clients are limited to 70 requests for data per hour, in order to keep the load on the system manageable and deter spamming.

But they also say 'If you are developing an application that requires more frequent requests please contact us and we'll see what we can do'.

Most of my friends seem to twitter from the web or a client called Twitterific. I prefer Twhirl, which works nicely on my Mac, but thanks to the open API there's a lot of choice.

When I'm out I can even get Twitter on my iPod Touch thanks to Hahlo, which offers a particularly clean and usable interface.

And when I want to follow a particular topic, like SXSW, I use the Tweet Scan website, which searches public updates.

You can choose to keep your tweets private, of course, though there is something about telling the world just what you're up to in 140 characters or less that becomes strangely compelling after a while.

Like many fast-growing services Twitter is far from perfect. The site sometimes creaks and falls over under the load, the interface can be confusing and sometime tweets don't get through.

It is also a dangerous distraction from work, encouraging micro-conversations and followups and witty rejoinders when articles have to be edited, code checked and projects planned.

But as I sit here writing this I feel connected to a community of people, feel that we share a space that none of the social network sites can conjure up, a space that is both here and not here, somewhere between offline and online.

And I feel that I have a foretaste of what tomorrow's network world will bring, when the boundaries have dissolved completely and we can experience the network directly through augmented reality contact lenses or direct neural connections or whatever other technologies make it out of the lab and into the streets in the next decade.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.

Mardell's Europe Day in pictures Moon marvel

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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A light bulb moment

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Even the most cheerless environmental activist would find it hard not to register the faintest trace of a smile at seeing Christmas lights shimmering in the murk of a December evening.

A visitor looks at the Capitol Christmas Tree after the lighting ceremony on Capitol Hill. This year's tree is decorated with strands of energy-efficient LED (Light Emitting Diodes) lights.

Any lingering sense of 'green guilt' about the environmental cost of a billion festive bulbs being switched on should quickly dissipate in the bursts of electric color festooning our streets and houses.

But if that isn't enough to placate an ardent green activist there is, thankfully, environmentally-friendly light at the end of the tunnel.

Steps to make our Christmas' greener are already being made. Christmas trees all over the world, including the one on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. are being decorated with highly efficient LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes).

Nobel Prize winning former Vice President Al Gore has, up until now, experienced inconveniently high electricity bills at his Tennessee mansion. But he has recently completed a number of improvements making his home more energy efficient - right down to the lights on the family's Christmas tree.

Moreover, it is expected that the lights will go out on one of the world's most ground-breaking inventions -- the incandescent bulb -- consigning its environmental profligacy of the past.

Thomas Edison's long lasting filament bulb -- patented in 1879 and updated with a tungsten filament by William Coolidge in 1910 -- which has been the blueprint for decades will be completely phased out in Australia and the UK by 2010 and 2011 respectively. California has also made plans to implement a bulb ban.

Alternatives, as any energy-conscious consumer will know, are already widely available on the high street. Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) -- have been around since the 1980's and use only 20 percent of the energy required by incandescent bulbs and last 12 times longer.

And according to Greenpeace, halogen bulbs -- which on average last twice as long as regular bulbs -- account for about seven percent of light bulb sales in the UK.

But these impressive energy savings for the home will, researchers think, eventually be trumped by LEDs.

LEDs are semi-conductors that convert electricity into light. They are an incredibly green source of illumination boasting long life (up to 100,000 hours), energy efficiency (up to 90 percent less energy used) and are non-toxic, unlike their fluorescent cousins which contain mercury. They also come in a variety of colors and because they have no moving parts they are extremely durable.

LED's have been found in all sorts of electrical goods for many years -- standby buttons on computers and televisions are good examples. In more recent times they've been applied in consumer electrical staples like the mobile phone and back lights for flat screen televisions.

They are also being used on our roads, in traffic and car brake lights. Because they take just 20 milliseconds to light up -- over ten times faster than incandescent lights -- they allow for an extra 24 feet of stopping distance at 50 mph, thus saving lives.

The application of LEDs to such a wide range of products owes much, if not all, to the work of Professor Shuji Nakamura who in 1993 astonished the scientific community by creating the first successful blue light-emitting diode. A green LED followed, then a white one.

His work, which won him the Millennium Prize in 2006, paved the way for what had been something of a holy grail for scientists over the years -- to find an LED which can provide white light that is suitable for use in our homes.

White LED light is created by putting a coating of phosphor over a blue LED light. The phosphor absorbs most of the blue light but, at the moment still gives off quite a cold light, which remains unsuitable for the home.

Although 'white light' is already in the marketplace, researchers worldwide are still refining its glow, with the aim of replicating the warmer light of the sun.

The Lighting Research Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York is the world's leading university-based research and education organization devoted to lighting. CNN spoke to its Director of Research Professor Nadarajah Narendran about some of the current LED applications and its prospects of lighting up our homes.

"LED technology is different to the light sources we have had in the past," Professor Narendran told CNN. "And at the Lighting Research Center we try to educate the public in how best to use this new light technology.

"The issues with LEDs are no longer technical," Professor Narendran said, "they are about cost. But even that has been coming down rapidly in the past few years."

Professor Narendran described the work of the Center as more system based than technical, i.e. looking at how best to implement LED lighting in a given environment rather than researching the LED chip materials that create the light. Although recently they have developed a new white light that has a warmer glow to it.

In recent years the center had helped Boeing with the interior lighting on the new Dreamliner aircraft, looking at how lighting fits into the limited space of the fuselage and how different light hues affect the comfort of passengers.

A more down to earth LED application has been to replace the lighting in supermarket freezers. "LEDs perform better in the cold than traditional fluorescent lamps," Professor Narendran said.

More universal light sources -- like office spaces -- will have to wait a little bit longer for LEDs says Professor Narendran. "Replacing fluorescent office lamps is probably the wrong LED application right now. But in two years time the story might be completely different," he said.

"Currently, spotlights are a perfect application for LEDs, because you can direct the beam very well, and you have less wasted light," he said.

Although, like an incandescent bulb, LEDs create heat, a far greater proportion of the energy is converted into light. "In a traditional bulb only 5-6 percent is converted into light, the rest is infrared radiation," Professor Narendran said.

Not too far in the future we will be utilizing LEDs, not just to light our homes, but to radically alter the mood and appearance of public spaces and buildings. "We can change LED colors very easily and cheaply," said Narendran. Architects will be sharpening their pencils in anticipation of the aesthetic possibilities.

With all these benefits, the LED light will be an unequivocally positive environmental step towards reducing carbon emissions.

Source from: edition.cnn.com

Read More..

A light bulb moment

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Even the most cheerless environmental activist would find it hard not to register the faintest trace of a smile at seeing Christmas lights shimmering in the murk of a December evening.

A visitor looks at the Capitol Christmas Tree after the lighting ceremony on Capitol Hill. This year's tree is decorated with strands of energy-efficient LED (Light Emitting Diodes) lights.

Any lingering sense of 'green guilt' about the environmental cost of a billion festive bulbs being switched on should quickly dissipate in the bursts of electric color festooning our streets and houses.

But if that isn't enough to placate an ardent green activist there is, thankfully, environmentally-friendly light at the end of the tunnel.

Steps to make our Christmas' greener are already being made. Christmas trees all over the world, including the one on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. are being decorated with highly efficient LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes).

Nobel Prize winning former Vice President Al Gore has, up until now, experienced inconveniently high electricity bills at his Tennessee mansion. But he has recently completed a number of improvements making his home more energy efficient - right down to the lights on the family's Christmas tree.

Moreover, it is expected that the lights will go out on one of the world's most ground-breaking inventions -- the incandescent bulb -- consigning its environmental profligacy of the past.

Thomas Edison's long lasting filament bulb -- patented in 1879 and updated with a tungsten filament by William Coolidge in 1910 -- which has been the blueprint for decades will be completely phased out in Australia and the UK by 2010 and 2011 respectively. California has also made plans to implement a bulb ban.

Alternatives, as any energy-conscious consumer will know, are already widely available on the high street. Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) -- have been around since the 1980's and use only 20 percent of the energy required by incandescent bulbs and last 12 times longer.

And according to Greenpeace, halogen bulbs -- which on average last twice as long as regular bulbs -- account for about seven percent of light bulb sales in the UK.

But these impressive energy savings for the home will, researchers think, eventually be trumped by LEDs.

LEDs are semi-conductors that convert electricity into light. They are an incredibly green source of illumination boasting long life (up to 100,000 hours), energy efficiency (up to 90 percent less energy used) and are non-toxic, unlike their fluorescent cousins which contain mercury. They also come in a variety of colors and because they have no moving parts they are extremely durable.

LED's have been found in all sorts of electrical goods for many years -- standby buttons on computers and televisions are good examples. In more recent times they've been applied in consumer electrical staples like the mobile phone and back lights for flat screen televisions.

They are also being used on our roads, in traffic and car brake lights. Because they take just 20 milliseconds to light up -- over ten times faster than incandescent lights -- they allow for an extra 24 feet of stopping distance at 50 mph, thus saving lives.

The application of LEDs to such a wide range of products owes much, if not all, to the work of Professor Shuji Nakamura who in 1993 astonished the scientific community by creating the first successful blue light-emitting diode. A green LED followed, then a white one.

His work, which won him the Millennium Prize in 2006, paved the way for what had been something of a holy grail for scientists over the years -- to find an LED which can provide white light that is suitable for use in our homes.

White LED light is created by putting a coating of phosphor over a blue LED light. The phosphor absorbs most of the blue light but, at the moment still gives off quite a cold light, which remains unsuitable for the home.

Although 'white light' is already in the marketplace, researchers worldwide are still refining its glow, with the aim of replicating the warmer light of the sun.

The Lighting Research Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York is the world's leading university-based research and education organization devoted to lighting. CNN spoke to its Director of Research Professor Nadarajah Narendran about some of the current LED applications and its prospects of lighting up our homes.

"LED technology is different to the light sources we have had in the past," Professor Narendran told CNN. "And at the Lighting Research Center we try to educate the public in how best to use this new light technology.

"The issues with LEDs are no longer technical," Professor Narendran said, "they are about cost. But even that has been coming down rapidly in the past few years."

Professor Narendran described the work of the Center as more system based than technical, i.e. looking at how best to implement LED lighting in a given environment rather than researching the LED chip materials that create the light. Although recently they have developed a new white light that has a warmer glow to it.

In recent years the center had helped Boeing with the interior lighting on the new Dreamliner aircraft, looking at how lighting fits into the limited space of the fuselage and how different light hues affect the comfort of passengers.

A more down to earth LED application has been to replace the lighting in supermarket freezers. "LEDs perform better in the cold than traditional fluorescent lamps," Professor Narendran said.

More universal light sources -- like office spaces -- will have to wait a little bit longer for LEDs says Professor Narendran. "Replacing fluorescent office lamps is probably the wrong LED application right now. But in two years time the story might be completely different," he said.

"Currently, spotlights are a perfect application for LEDs, because you can direct the beam very well, and you have less wasted light," he said.

Although, like an incandescent bulb, LEDs create heat, a far greater proportion of the energy is converted into light. "In a traditional bulb only 5-6 percent is converted into light, the rest is infrared radiation," Professor Narendran said.

Not too far in the future we will be utilizing LEDs, not just to light our homes, but to radically alter the mood and appearance of public spaces and buildings. "We can change LED colors very easily and cheaply," said Narendran. Architects will be sharpening their pencils in anticipation of the aesthetic possibilities.

With all these benefits, the LED light will be an unequivocally positive environmental step towards reducing carbon emissions.

Source from: edition.cnn.com

Read More..

Mac's Leopard an elegant upgrade

(CNET.com) -- Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is Apple's first major operating system upgrade since Tiger more than two years ago. The changes include more than 300 new features, which, while not earth-shattering, further streamline the experience of using a Mac.

Should you pay for Leopard? If you're happy with the way Tiger works, then maybe not. If you need Bootcamp, however, then you must have Leopard. And if you're considering the purchase of a new computer, Leopard makes Macs more enticing than Tiger did.

Plus, Leopard makes it far easier to find documents and applications than Windows Vista. Leopard's interface niceties made the daily mechanics of using the computer more pleasurable. Mundane chores, such as finding files and backing up data, become a visual treat.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard costs $129 out of the box, or $199 for up to five users. Those who bought Macs after October 1 must pay $9.95 to have Leopard shipped to them.

Setup and installation It took us about 40 minutes to install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on an Intel-based MacBook. That's a bit longer than it took to install than Windows Vista, but not by much. However, installation didn't run so smoothly on some systems. Leopard took a painfully long hour or so to install on an iBook G4, the 933 Mhz processor just grazing the minimum requirements.

You should proceed carefully when migrating the files and applications you'll need. Apple steps you through the process, but take your time to avoid overwriting valuable data. Leopard changed the personal desktop image during one migration from Tiger, while leaving the desktop photo alone in other cases. After installing Leopard on MacBook Pro 2.33 Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM, there were problems with various applications, including Parallels and GroupCal.

Leopard ran bug-free on a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook. Some users, however, reported the fabled "blue screen of death" historically associated with Microsoft Windows; Apple addressed the issue.

To run Leopard, you'll need an Intel or PowerPC G5 Mac. A PowerPC-based G4 Mac with an 867MHz or better processor will work, as well. Apple suggests having 512MB of RAM. Additionally, you'll need a USB or FireWire external backup drive (or a file-sharing volume on a network) to use Time Machine. Features on iChat require a Webcam.

Interface The new look and feel of Leopard is different without demanding that you relearn the layout. The Dock organizing applications and files becomes a bit more transparent. Bump it over to one side, and the Dock looks a bit flatter. A drop shadow now highlights the active window, and all windows share a unified visual design.

Click on an icon on the Dock and related items fan out in the order you last accessed them. New Stacks help to unclutter your desktop by showing icons of items in the order they were last accessed. This is especially helpful for keeping downloads in one place, although you can't resize the icons. If the Stack is packed with items, you can display them as a grid.

The souped-up Finder introduces a sidebar that allows you to rearrange items in the Places section, while Search For submenus can locate files based on type and when you last worked on them. Click on Today, for instance, and you'll see everything you've touched lately in chronological order. If you work on a network, checking out another person's desktop starts with the simple Share Screen option.

Spotlight scours through files in shared folders on a network, as well as within Safari's Web History (which you should regularly dump to fend off snoops). It gets smarter, reading "Not" and "Or," dates and phrases, and even serving as a calculator for trig equations.

Many new design elements reflect what you've already seen in iTunes and iPhone. Cover Flow, for instance, shuffles through folders as you hold down an arrow key. This makes perfect sense for browsing files. Plus, you can peek at most documents instantly. Quick Look provides previews that can pop up files from iWork, iLife, Microsoft Office, PDFs, as well as popular image and video formats. In each instance appear relevant options, such as Full Screen view or Add to iPhoto. Select several files, double-click them, and you've got a custom slide show.

In addition to making it easier to find your work, interface additions are intended to make multitasking less stressful. Virtual desktops, called Spaces, cluster open windows into categories or boxes.

This can cut the number of windows you may otherwise stack around your desktop, especially helpful for tiny monitors. For example, you could move everything you need to edit a vacation video into one space, and in another Space place the files and apps needed to write a dissertation. Spaces were a cinch to set up (such as drawing a chart in a word processor), but a tad awkward for us to master until we learned the keyboard shortcuts. You can also use the mouse to drag items between Spaces, and to drag the Spaces themselves around.

If you rarely back up your work because the process is too boring or confusing, Time Machine is likely to change that.

The spaced-out interface is about as sexy as backup can get, displaying a dynamic timeline alongside snapshots of selected folders and files throughout their history.

To restore a file you lost, just go to an earlier time, click the Restore button, and you'll zoom back to your present Desktop. For a current period of 24 hours, Time Machine backs up automatically every hour. It backs up each day for the past month and each week for content updated earlier than that.

Time Machine immediately detected our external hard drive via two USB ports and we started backing up within a few minutes. You cannot back up to your Mac's hard drive.

You can check out the drives of fellow Leopard users with Time Machine, too. However, Apple doesn't offer password-protection and encryption options upfront showing you how to lock that drive from curious outsiders. Only longtime Mac users are likely to know to explore such options within Leopard's Security settings.

iChat lets you and Leopard-using buddies share files and control each others' desktops, expanding the tool's potential professional use. And you can record iChat sessions as AAC audio or MPEG video files ready for an iPod, which is a great feature for podcasters.

iChat Theater's silly effects can distort your face like you're looking in a fun-house mirror. Green-screen backgrounds within iChat Theater let your talking head appear in a video conference in front of, say, included images of the moon or your own pictures. (We still wish the "Star Wars R2D2" theme were included.)

Other chat buddies can see these, whether they're using an older iteration of OS X or they're using AIM on a Windows PC. iChat enables you to share files as you gab via video, so you and a friend can watch the same movie clip or flip through the same PowerPoint presentation. Photo Booth integrates with iChat, letting you record videos and show off full-screen slide shows.

Mac's new Mail application integrates rich note-taking into e-mail. These notes can serve as scrapbooks containing images. Some 32 e-mail templates enable you to drop in pictures and resize them with a built-in photo browser. Mail's RSS feeds tie into those in Safari.

The e-mail application also detects addresses for mapping via Google, as well as contacts for a quick save. Natural language capabilities, similar to those within Gmail, recognize phrases such as "next Saturday" for scheduling. Changes are synchronized between Mail and iCal. Setting up Mail is less complicated than Outlook, and it works with accounts from 27 services, including Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail.

However, we wish we could access RSS feeds from Mail without signing into our e-mail account. We encountered delays with several different Gmail accounts. In one case, the most current Gmail message that loaded in Mail--15 minutes after we had logged in--was from December 2006. We kept leaning on the Get Mail button for an unsatisfactory, slow and incomplete refresh.

Finally, the Safari browser default is tabbed without making you turn on the feature. Safari's cool new Web Clips tool lets you turn any snippet from a Web page into a widget for your Dashboard. Potential plug-ins from third parties that would be nice to have already include the Web Clips feature for the popular Mozilla Firefox browser.

Leopard offers many tie-ins to Web-based content (see the Webware video). Among them is Wikipedia as a new companion to the Dictionary. Although you can access the open-source encyclopedia from the Desktop, no entries are saved locally.

Geotagging is a cool addition to Leopard, enabling you to tie photos to latitude and longitude through built-in GPS on digital cameras so you can put picture galleries on a map.

Leopard offers 17 new features. There's support for Braille output devices as well as contracted and non-contracted Braille. It's the first operating system that can use a Braille display during installation.

VoiceOver makes it easier to jump to sections on a Web page, and its preferences can be transported to other Macs. However, for people with repetitive stress injuries, Leopard supports voice-activated commands only--not dictation.

There are updates to less glamorous elements such as Automator and Dashcode, and Network Preferences has been streamlined. Developers can enjoy full 64-bit support, and get to tinker with fun extras, which we wish were integrated already within iChat Theater.

ColorSync reads EXIF sRGB data from cameras, and there's support for connecting more cameras via cable or Wi-Fi, and for other gadgets via Bluetooth.

Security More firewall controls are among several security enhancements to Leopard. Yet the firewall isn't turned on by default, and we consider it vulnerable to outside threats. To fend off Trojans and spoofing attempts, you'll be grilled more when downloading materials.

A mechanism called Sandboxing is supposed to prevent potential external threats from hijacking your applications. Parental controls are now featured more prominently in the System and offer content filters, time limits, and Internet activity loggers to keep tabs on young Web surfers.

We saw only a 1 percent to 3 percent improvement with Leopard over Tiger on our performance tests. As this falls within our typical margin of error (5 percent), we saw no significant difference with application performance when moving from Tiger to Leopard.

We were unable to complete our Photoshop CS3 test because our automation routine tests, which typically run fine under Tiger, had problems with Leopard.

Adobe's Web site indicates that Photoshop CS3 should be compatible with Leopard--other than the automation snafu, Photoshop CS3 appears to operate normally.

This underlies the point that some applications might not be 100 percent compatible yet with Leopard. For instance, Adobe is rolling out updates to various CS3 image, video and audio editing applications within the next four months.

FileMaker is warning users of FileMaker Pro 9 that there are some compatibility problems with Leopard. However, FileMaker expects to have an update available by November 19.

Service and support Support options remain the same as in the Tiger version. You get 90 days of help free by telephone, as with other products from Apple.

Phone support thereafter costs $49 per incident. AppleCare support lasts a year after you buy Leopard. For extra peace of mind, you should consider extended warranties.

Apple also tweaked the Help menus within OS X 10.5. These are arranged well, although they didn't always provide an instant answer. Many items are better explained on Apple's Web site via message boards, user forums, and a well-organized knowledge base.

Source from: edition.cnn.com

Read More..

Mac's Leopard an elegant upgrade

(CNET.com) -- Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is Apple's first major operating system upgrade since Tiger more than two years ago. The changes include more than 300 new features, which, while not earth-shattering, further streamline the experience of using a Mac.

Should you pay for Leopard? If you're happy with the way Tiger works, then maybe not. If you need Bootcamp, however, then you must have Leopard. And if you're considering the purchase of a new computer, Leopard makes Macs more enticing than Tiger did.

Plus, Leopard makes it far easier to find documents and applications than Windows Vista. Leopard's interface niceties made the daily mechanics of using the computer more pleasurable. Mundane chores, such as finding files and backing up data, become a visual treat.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard costs $129 out of the box, or $199 for up to five users. Those who bought Macs after October 1 must pay $9.95 to have Leopard shipped to them.

Setup and installation It took us about 40 minutes to install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on an Intel-based MacBook. That's a bit longer than it took to install than Windows Vista, but not by much. However, installation didn't run so smoothly on some systems. Leopard took a painfully long hour or so to install on an iBook G4, the 933 Mhz processor just grazing the minimum requirements.

You should proceed carefully when migrating the files and applications you'll need. Apple steps you through the process, but take your time to avoid overwriting valuable data. Leopard changed the personal desktop image during one migration from Tiger, while leaving the desktop photo alone in other cases. After installing Leopard on MacBook Pro 2.33 Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM, there were problems with various applications, including Parallels and GroupCal.

Leopard ran bug-free on a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook. Some users, however, reported the fabled "blue screen of death" historically associated with Microsoft Windows; Apple addressed the issue.

To run Leopard, you'll need an Intel or PowerPC G5 Mac. A PowerPC-based G4 Mac with an 867MHz or better processor will work, as well. Apple suggests having 512MB of RAM. Additionally, you'll need a USB or FireWire external backup drive (or a file-sharing volume on a network) to use Time Machine. Features on iChat require a Webcam.

Interface The new look and feel of Leopard is different without demanding that you relearn the layout. The Dock organizing applications and files becomes a bit more transparent. Bump it over to one side, and the Dock looks a bit flatter. A drop shadow now highlights the active window, and all windows share a unified visual design.

Click on an icon on the Dock and related items fan out in the order you last accessed them. New Stacks help to unclutter your desktop by showing icons of items in the order they were last accessed. This is especially helpful for keeping downloads in one place, although you can't resize the icons. If the Stack is packed with items, you can display them as a grid.

The souped-up Finder introduces a sidebar that allows you to rearrange items in the Places section, while Search For submenus can locate files based on type and when you last worked on them. Click on Today, for instance, and you'll see everything you've touched lately in chronological order. If you work on a network, checking out another person's desktop starts with the simple Share Screen option.

Spotlight scours through files in shared folders on a network, as well as within Safari's Web History (which you should regularly dump to fend off snoops). It gets smarter, reading "Not" and "Or," dates and phrases, and even serving as a calculator for trig equations.

Many new design elements reflect what you've already seen in iTunes and iPhone. Cover Flow, for instance, shuffles through folders as you hold down an arrow key. This makes perfect sense for browsing files. Plus, you can peek at most documents instantly. Quick Look provides previews that can pop up files from iWork, iLife, Microsoft Office, PDFs, as well as popular image and video formats. In each instance appear relevant options, such as Full Screen view or Add to iPhoto. Select several files, double-click them, and you've got a custom slide show.

In addition to making it easier to find your work, interface additions are intended to make multitasking less stressful. Virtual desktops, called Spaces, cluster open windows into categories or boxes.

This can cut the number of windows you may otherwise stack around your desktop, especially helpful for tiny monitors. For example, you could move everything you need to edit a vacation video into one space, and in another Space place the files and apps needed to write a dissertation. Spaces were a cinch to set up (such as drawing a chart in a word processor), but a tad awkward for us to master until we learned the keyboard shortcuts. You can also use the mouse to drag items between Spaces, and to drag the Spaces themselves around.

If you rarely back up your work because the process is too boring or confusing, Time Machine is likely to change that.

The spaced-out interface is about as sexy as backup can get, displaying a dynamic timeline alongside snapshots of selected folders and files throughout their history.

To restore a file you lost, just go to an earlier time, click the Restore button, and you'll zoom back to your present Desktop. For a current period of 24 hours, Time Machine backs up automatically every hour. It backs up each day for the past month and each week for content updated earlier than that.

Time Machine immediately detected our external hard drive via two USB ports and we started backing up within a few minutes. You cannot back up to your Mac's hard drive.

You can check out the drives of fellow Leopard users with Time Machine, too. However, Apple doesn't offer password-protection and encryption options upfront showing you how to lock that drive from curious outsiders. Only longtime Mac users are likely to know to explore such options within Leopard's Security settings.

iChat lets you and Leopard-using buddies share files and control each others' desktops, expanding the tool's potential professional use. And you can record iChat sessions as AAC audio or MPEG video files ready for an iPod, which is a great feature for podcasters.

iChat Theater's silly effects can distort your face like you're looking in a fun-house mirror. Green-screen backgrounds within iChat Theater let your talking head appear in a video conference in front of, say, included images of the moon or your own pictures. (We still wish the "Star Wars R2D2" theme were included.)

Other chat buddies can see these, whether they're using an older iteration of OS X or they're using AIM on a Windows PC. iChat enables you to share files as you gab via video, so you and a friend can watch the same movie clip or flip through the same PowerPoint presentation. Photo Booth integrates with iChat, letting you record videos and show off full-screen slide shows.

Mac's new Mail application integrates rich note-taking into e-mail. These notes can serve as scrapbooks containing images. Some 32 e-mail templates enable you to drop in pictures and resize them with a built-in photo browser. Mail's RSS feeds tie into those in Safari.

The e-mail application also detects addresses for mapping via Google, as well as contacts for a quick save. Natural language capabilities, similar to those within Gmail, recognize phrases such as "next Saturday" for scheduling. Changes are synchronized between Mail and iCal. Setting up Mail is less complicated than Outlook, and it works with accounts from 27 services, including Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail.

However, we wish we could access RSS feeds from Mail without signing into our e-mail account. We encountered delays with several different Gmail accounts. In one case, the most current Gmail message that loaded in Mail--15 minutes after we had logged in--was from December 2006. We kept leaning on the Get Mail button for an unsatisfactory, slow and incomplete refresh.

Finally, the Safari browser default is tabbed without making you turn on the feature. Safari's cool new Web Clips tool lets you turn any snippet from a Web page into a widget for your Dashboard. Potential plug-ins from third parties that would be nice to have already include the Web Clips feature for the popular Mozilla Firefox browser.

Leopard offers many tie-ins to Web-based content (see the Webware video). Among them is Wikipedia as a new companion to the Dictionary. Although you can access the open-source encyclopedia from the Desktop, no entries are saved locally.

Geotagging is a cool addition to Leopard, enabling you to tie photos to latitude and longitude through built-in GPS on digital cameras so you can put picture galleries on a map.

Leopard offers 17 new features. There's support for Braille output devices as well as contracted and non-contracted Braille. It's the first operating system that can use a Braille display during installation.

VoiceOver makes it easier to jump to sections on a Web page, and its preferences can be transported to other Macs. However, for people with repetitive stress injuries, Leopard supports voice-activated commands only--not dictation.

There are updates to less glamorous elements such as Automator and Dashcode, and Network Preferences has been streamlined. Developers can enjoy full 64-bit support, and get to tinker with fun extras, which we wish were integrated already within iChat Theater.

ColorSync reads EXIF sRGB data from cameras, and there's support for connecting more cameras via cable or Wi-Fi, and for other gadgets via Bluetooth.

Security More firewall controls are among several security enhancements to Leopard. Yet the firewall isn't turned on by default, and we consider it vulnerable to outside threats. To fend off Trojans and spoofing attempts, you'll be grilled more when downloading materials.

A mechanism called Sandboxing is supposed to prevent potential external threats from hijacking your applications. Parental controls are now featured more prominently in the System and offer content filters, time limits, and Internet activity loggers to keep tabs on young Web surfers.

We saw only a 1 percent to 3 percent improvement with Leopard over Tiger on our performance tests. As this falls within our typical margin of error (5 percent), we saw no significant difference with application performance when moving from Tiger to Leopard.

We were unable to complete our Photoshop CS3 test because our automation routine tests, which typically run fine under Tiger, had problems with Leopard.

Adobe's Web site indicates that Photoshop CS3 should be compatible with Leopard--other than the automation snafu, Photoshop CS3 appears to operate normally.

This underlies the point that some applications might not be 100 percent compatible yet with Leopard. For instance, Adobe is rolling out updates to various CS3 image, video and audio editing applications within the next four months.

FileMaker is warning users of FileMaker Pro 9 that there are some compatibility problems with Leopard. However, FileMaker expects to have an update available by November 19.

Service and support Support options remain the same as in the Tiger version. You get 90 days of help free by telephone, as with other products from Apple.

Phone support thereafter costs $49 per incident. AppleCare support lasts a year after you buy Leopard. For extra peace of mind, you should consider extended warranties.

Apple also tweaked the Help menus within OS X 10.5. These are arranged well, although they didn't always provide an instant answer. Many items are better explained on Apple's Web site via message boards, user forums, and a well-organized knowledge base.

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