When you’re zoomed out to the “all spaces” view, you can drag and drop windows from one space to another to rearrange things. Here’s some keyboard shortcuts to improve upon this feature:

If you hold down the “Command” key while dragging a window, you will move every window of that application within the current space at the same time. (e.g. Every Safari window in the current space will move together, but Safari windows in other spaces with not)

If you do so while holding down the “Shift” key, the window you drag will move to the same location on the screen within the new space. (Especially handy for full-screen windows)

The two keyboard shortcuts can be combined to move all windows of an application to the same location in a new space.

You can also scroll through spaces using your scroll wheel or your two-finger-trackpad-skills while in the all spaces view.

As with all the zoomy eye-candy features of MacOS X, if you hold the shift key down while switching spaces or viewing all spaces, it will do so in slow motion. Oooh!

In Leopard, iDisk syncing creates a sparse disk image for the sync instead of a standard read/write image. This has the huge advantage that your iDisk sync file doesn’t have to be 10 GB in size, but is instead only as large as it needs to be in order to hold all the files on your iDisk. Very nice.

Having faster and more powerful saved searches is great, but I wish they worked a little more consistently.

In the Finder, they show up in the sidebar. That’s great, they’re easy to find and access. However, they’re difficult to browse because they only show up in list or icon view. No column/browser view (my preferred way to quickly navigate folders).

As cool as stacks are for some folders, they are a real step backwards for most folders. When you add a folder to the dock, it displays nothing except a stack of documents, which are often identical to those in other dock-bound folders. Your custom icons to view your folders are gone, in favor of generic nonsense.

With any luck, Apple will pull their collective head out of their collective ass and make folders in the dock work better, but until then, you have Badge Leopard Stacks to bring back custom folder icons to your dock stacks.

This is a simple AppleScript that fits nicely on your Finder windows’ toolbar. When opened, it creates an alias of the currently open folder inside that folder and names it so that it will always be on top when sorted by name. The result of this is that when you view a folder on your dock as a “stack,” it will actually display the icon of the folder first, rather than a collection of meaningless documents.

As an added bonus, clicking on this alias will open the folder, which may make it easier to open the folder from the stack.

This doesn’t work well at all for stacks that are sorted by anything other than “name.” So it goes.

You can do complex boolean searches in spotlight’s search field by including parenthesis, AND, and OR statements. Unfortunately, a lot of metadata is not available via Spotlight’s keyword searches, but is available via the Finder’s search window as “Other” criteria. Luckily, you can add boolean operators using the Find window and an undocumented trick.

In the Leopard dock, any folders become annoying “stacks.” If you want to open the folder, you need to either open the stack and click the “open in Finder” button, cmd+click it and then open the now-selected folder in the Finder, or right click and select “open in Finder.” Any ability to get to a folder with just one click has been removed.

To get around this, you can make an alias of any folder and put that alias on the dock. The alias will now open with just one click.

MD Softworks has a fabulous little utility called LeoColorBar which fixes the transparent menu “feature” in Leopard. It’s pretty simple, and simply puts a stripe (in a color of your choice) at the top of any picture you choose, and then sets that picture as your desktop background.

It doesn’t modify the original image, but rather stores a copy in your Pictures folder called “LeoColorBarDesktopPicture.jpg” with the appropriate crop settings, etc.

MD Softworks

My current backup setup consists of a 160GB external hard drive hooked up to a G4/400 Cube. I’m using a combination of ChronoSync and some shell scripts to create a nice archival backup of my home folder. (I don’t bother with apps and stuff because I’m too cheap to get a larger drive.)

Now there’s Time Machine in Leopard, and I’d really rather use it. It’s fully supported, so there’s no need for scripts and hacks, plus it has some nice features with iPhoto, etc.

[Appleinsider reports that Leopard won’t ship until October.]((http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/04/12/apple_delays_leopard_release_until_october.html) The reason? The iPhone stole the time of too many developers.

Those of us who were concerned that Apple might be devoting more time to iPods that Macs appear to have some further justification for these concerns…