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This little ditty is an ammendment to a post I recently made: Coverflow Makes for Great Font Browsing.

You can use ‘Quick Look’ to take an even better look at the fonts in your fonts folder. In cover flow mode in Finder, select the font you wish to preview. Notice the preview in the cover flow window. Cool.

Now, all you have to do is hit the spacebar. ‘Quick Look’ will jump in and give you a preview of the full file!

Not enough? Now try hitting the two arrows near the bottom of the quick look window. This will give you a fullscreen preview of the file. When you’re done previewing simply click the X to close, or the 2 arrows to go back to the main quick look mode.

This doesn’t apply to font files alone. Try this out on any file in any location on your mac! It’s a very handy little shortcut that lets you take a closer look at your files without having to open up any applications!

Thanks to our good friend Dan on this one.

Over the past few days I’ve been so busy over here at Mactropolis that I forgot to post the box shots I took of Leopard! Completely slipped my mind!

You’ll see that I put the box down on the kitchen stove here and quickly began to snap some shots. Was looking for a nice white surface for contrast to the black packaging… I think it did the trick!

Can you feel my excitement? Leopard, in the box.

The back of the OS X Leopard Box. Nice!

The OS X Leopard CD

Completely Un-boxed! Note the Apple stickers at the bottom right

Ok all you developers out there, the Leopard Dev Center is open for business. Looks like there are a lot of juicy resources in there for the seasoned developer and newbie alike.

Inside you will find:

• A huge reference library
• Software seeds
• Leopard technology guides
• Coding snippets to get you started
• All kinds of videos to help you on your way

As usual, you have to be an ADC member to login. If you don’t have a free account already you can sign up here.

Check out the Leopard Development Center >

Important: Some resources do require select and premiere membership.

If you’re like me, and you design a lot of things on your mac (websites, posters… you name it)… You should appreciate this one.

I was fooling around with the coverflow option in finder the other day when I somehow stumbled into the fonts folder. I wondered to myself, ‘geez, will Leopard give me a preview of the fonts in coverflow?’ I had to check it out to see.

What do you know, coverflow DOES show you a preview of your fonts… And it’s very handy to flip through your fonts if you’re looking for something in particular.

If you’re like me, and the font dropdown in Photoshop just isn’t enough (small, small previews of the fonts) then this is a good option. Add a shortcut to your fonts on your desktop or dock, and large font previews are always one-click away!

Since its release on October 26th, the new OS X ‘Leopard’ has sold over 2 million copies! Leopard is already out-pacing the release of Tiger, which was Apple’s most successful OS release to date. Looks like Leopard will take over that crown in due time.

The Aperture 1.5.6 update is now available, and ensures that your version of Aperture is compatible with Leopard. You can update Aperture by running Software Update or by visiting the Aperture download page here.

Apple tells us that this update addresses performance related issues, improves stability, and of course supports compatibility with Leopad (duh!).

Quick note: Make sure you install this update before you open Aperture from Leopard.

T-Mobile is going to offer three rate plans for the iPhone in Germany.

All three plans include unlimited data, visual voicemail and access to the more than 8,000 wireless hotspots in Germany. Cool!

The plans are as follows:

• €49 - ‘Complete M’ - includes 100 minutes and 40 SMS messages.
• €69 - ‘Complete L’ - includes 200 minutes and 150 SMS messages.
• €89 - ‘Complete XL’ - includes 1000 minutes and 300 text messages.

Additional minutes will be billed at €0.39/minute for the ‘Complete L’ and ‘Complete M’ plans, and €0.29/minute for the ‘Complete XL’. Additional text messages will be €0.29.

The iPhone is scheduled for sale in Germany on November 9th and will be sold through Telekom Shops of Deutsche Telekom and the T-Mobile website.

Welcome to the iPhone Germany!

Thankfully, on our end here at Mactropolis the Leopard upgrade went without a hitch. However, that hasn’t been the case for everyone. There have been some nasty installation problems, one of note right here.

To sidestep these issues and put you on the path to ‘Leopard Bliss’ I’ve put together this brief guide to (hopefully) around any potential problems that might arise.

Again, my experience with the upgrade has been flawless, but after some reading and research here are the things you’ll need to keep in mind and do to make sure your data is safe.

Getting Started

Did you backup your data? This isn’t 100% necessary, but how would you feel if you lost all of your important files? Pretty bad huh? If your life would end and crumble should you lose your files, BACKUP your data. End of story.

You can use the Disk Utility, or any other backup software.

Things to Check Before You Start 

• Once you’ve created the backup, check it and double check it again to make sure it is in place.
• Will your current software work with Leopard? Check vendor websites to ensure all of your software will work after the OS upgrade.

Installation

Installing OS X Leopard is actually a walk in the park. Follow the instructions given to you by the installer. It will walk you through the process. In 1.5 to 2 hours your OS X should be shiny and new and have leopard spots all over it (ok, maybe there won’t be any leopard spots, but you know what I mean).

Step 1: Select a Destination: Choose the drive where you want to install Leopard, and click ‘Options’. From here you can choose the install method (upgrade, archive and install, or erase and install).

Step 2: Select What NOT to Install. You may want to leave some items out of the install to save on hard drive space. Some items you may want to leave out of the installation:

• Fonts can be a huge space hog. If you don’t need the fonts listed simply deselect them.
• Language Translations. If you’re going to run OS X in english-only, you can deselect this item. Or open it up to deselect individual languages.
• Printer Drivers. Open this up and deselect all but the brand of printer you own.

When Installation is Complete

With a little luck, once installation is done you should be good to go. The first thing I did was check to make sure my programs were functioning properly. Thankfully they all were and I was ‘good to go’. Again, if a program isn’t working properly check with the vendor to see what the issue might be, and how to resolve it. You will also want to make sure that all of your data transferred properly. If you used ‘archive and install’ go to the /previous systems/previous system 1 folder and look through the subfolders to check that everything was transferred.

Getting Back to Business

Hopefully the process was a smooth and easy one for you. If so, just pick up where you left off! If you’re still having issues feel free to contact me (mayor AT mactropolis.com) for support. There are also numerous other guides and forums out there to help with issues. So if you’re stuck there are more than a few resources out there to tap into!

Without knowing of this new addition to Mail, I stumbled upon this one the other day. I had an appointment time and location emailed to me, and when I happened to run the mouse over this information, I noticed a drop-down… ‘What’s this?’ I thought… Then I smiled… Cause I think I had already figured it out.

As expected, Apple has built-in a handy new feature that I’m loving so far. They are calling this new feature ‘data detection’. Basically, when Mail notices an appointment, contact or location, it gives you the option of adding an appointment to your iCal,  adding a contact to your Address Book, or mapping the location on Google Maps.

I’ve already found this to be quite handy for keeping on top of appointments. This feature makes adding to your iCal so easy, it’s almost a no-brainer to use.

Two big thumbs up on this one.

This is a handy little feature in OS X Leopard.

Ever wish there was a quick way to pull up a map of an address in your address book? Well, now there is.

First, open up Address Book and select the contact you need a map for. For this example, I’ll select Apple Computer Canada.

Then, with your pointer on top of the actual address, control-click. When the dropdown appears, select ‘Map Of’…

Now, your browser will open Google Maps with the map of the address right there on your screen! Fantastic