Well you may or may not agree with me here but I think one of the single best features of Leopard is one that most people won’t even notice, and if you do you’ll think ‘that’s handy’ and then move on to carry on with your daily business.

Remember how file names are still pretty much bound by the archaic 8.3 format? Sure, we have long filenames now, but we still use .3 extensions to denote file type. If you’re like me and sometimes have to rename a lot of files, whether they be a batch of photos or word documents, you’ll find that it’s a real pain to have to hit enter to rename, then select the section before the extension, then type the new name, then hit enter to complete. It can become quite tedious after the 50th file.... So then some years ago some bright spark came up with the idea of hiding the extensions for known file types, well whoop di doo! it half solves the problem, but sometimes you still need to know what the file type is, sometimes you just want to know, personally I hate hiding extensions, its really hard to tell the difference between 3 identical images in bitmap, jpeg, and PNG when the extension is hidden!

The feature I am slowly rambling my way to describing is simple, in Leopard, when you hit enter to rename a file, it auto selects the section before the extension! It’s such a simple thing but it saves so much time and is so much more intuitive and natural to the whole procedure of renaming files and I love Apple for doing it, it’s almost worth upgrading just for that in my books!

It’s good to see Apple sticking to their philosophies of sensible, productivity enhancing, intuitive operation rather than just chucking eye-candy (although there is a fair amount in Leopard) and features at the OS that don’t often serve any other purpose than to be different to the previous version.