How to make Apple's Tiger OS roar like a Leopard

Computerworld - "Another six months?!" You could hear the wails from Macintosh users last month when Apple Inc. announced that Mac OS X 10.5, known as Leopard, would not ship until October 2007, rather than this spring as originally promised.

Apple had announced Leopard at its Worldwide Developers Conference in August 2006, touting a number of new and improved features, including the following:

• Spaces, a system that will allow users to group applications into different virtual desktops and easily switch among them
• Time Machine, an easy-to-use backup application with a radical 3-D interface
• A revision of Mac OS X's Dashboard that will make it easier to create and manage widgets
• A new version of iChat AV with support for piping presentations and real-time screenshots to others, along with a number of visual effects that can be added to video chats
• A new version of the Spotlight search tool with a technology called Quick Look that gives full-size previews of any document without opening it

These announcements were enough to get eager Mac users drooling, so the delay hit them hard. But while they will have to wait for Leopard, they don't have to wait to add some Leopard-like features to their Macs. Shareware and commercial tools already make it possible to add many of these features (or something similar) to the current Mac OS X 10.4, known as Tiger.

Tricking out Tiger Getting the jump on Dashboard Spaces: So what's new? Presenting iChat special effects Better search, preview and Finder experiences Backup: Don't wait five months

Getting the jump on Dashboard

According to Apple's Leopard Sneak Peek, Dashboard will sport two major new features in Leopard. One is Dashcode, a template-based tool that is supposed to make creating widgets easier. If you want to try it out, you can download the beta version of Dashcode from Apple's developer site.

(As noted on the Dashcode beta page, the beta is currently designed to generate only Tiger-compatible widgets. Leopard-specific features will likely be included in a public release only after Leopard ships.)

Dashboard's other new feature in Leopard will be the ability to create widgets from portions of an existing Web page in Safari. If that sounds like something you want to do right away, check out Amnesty Generator from Mesa Dynamics LLC. Amnesty Generator doesn't allow you to create widgets quite as easily as Safari will in Leopard, but it does enable you to create widgets out of Web content from a number of sites. Google Gadgets, YouTube videos and more can easily be turned into Dashboard widgets without needing to write any code.

Creating a Dashboard widget from existing Web tools using Amnesty Generator.

BitBlasters Software's Virtual Dashboard and JBear Technologies' MultiDash don't add any new features to Dashboard but rather apply the concept of virtual desktops. Both utilities allow you to create multiple sets of widgets in virtual Dashboards and easily switch among them. (Virtual Dashboard also allows you to display widgets on the desktop.)

Both work well and are a huge help if you frequently use a bunch of widgets and want to keep them all activated and available all the time. The shareware Virtual Desktop installs as an application that is managed from the menu bar. MultiDash, on the other hand, is freeware, installs as a Dashboard widget and manages virtual Dashboards from within Dashboard itself.