Living with Leopard
Posted 10/29/2007 at 11:47pm
| by Rik Myslewski
Screen Sharing, Stacks, & Spotlight. Screen Sharing is a Leopard-only feature. To enjoy this trick in the Finder (it's also available through iChat), turn on Screen Sharing in System Preferences > Sharing, click Computer Settings, choose the configuration with which you're comfortable, and choose to whom you would like to allow access.
If the Mac with which you want to share screens has deemed you allowable, when you highlight it in the Shared list you'll be presented with a Share Screen button; click it, and the Screen Sharing app launches and the shared Mac's desktop appears in a window on your display, where you can either scale the image by dragging a handle in the lower right corner or view it full-size by choosing View > Turn Scaling Off. You now have total control over the Mac whose screen you are sharing.
Don't, however, then have the Mac whose screen you are sharing share your screen, as well – if you do, you’ll drop into a black hole of recursion from which a reboot may be your only recovery.

Here's a photo of how Leopard crashes when you try to have two Macs share each other's screens simultaneously – as if there'd every be a reason to do that other than geeky entertainment…
Whether or not the introduction of Stacks into the Dock is a good thing or a bad thing is simply a matter of taste. I, for one, preferred Tiger's ability to accept folders into the dock that could then be clicked and held to allow you to scroll through them - using hierarchical folders, even, a treat that's gone in Stacks - and pick the item you wanted.
Stacks display their contents by either fanning out in an right-leaning swoop if your Dock is on the bottom of your display, or in a translucent black grid if you have more than a certain number of items in a Stack or if you've positioned your Dock on the right of left edge of your display - the "certain number" varies depending upon the size of your display, with a MacBook, for example, fanning fewer icons than a 30-inch Cinema HD Display (my 20-inch Cinema Display maxes out at 11 fannable items).
Oh, and by the way, if you place your Dock on the left or right, it loses the "reflective tray" clutter of the bottom-placed Dock and becomes, instead, a more-neutral translucent black. Click and hold on a Stack to choose its sort order - although, somewhat perversely, an alphabetical ("Name") sort order sorts from the bottom up in the fan display.
As for Spotlight, you can now use the Spotlight search field for more than just searching for files – it’ll also perform surprisingly sophisticated math; understand Boolean queries using AND, OR, and NOT; and even perform complex searches based on a broad range of metadata attributes. Check out "Specifying criteria in the Spotlight search field" on Apple's website for more info - and a detailed list of all of Spotlight's math functions, or so Apple tells me, will be up on their site Real Soon Now.
Spotlight now lets your search for files using more metadata attributes - but why it thinks the Beatles' top hit was "The End" is a mystery.
Click the Next link below to read on.
Next: Quick Look & Spaces
If you want to skip around, click on one of the links below.
1. Introduction
2. The Finder & the Desktop
3. Screen Sharing, Stacks, & Spotlight
4. Quick Look & Spaces
5. Bugs
6. Time Machine
7. iChat
8. Other Apps (Mail, Safari, Preview)