After living with Leopard for a while I thought that it would be worth coming back and posting some additional impressions of the latest Mac operating system.
GUEST ACCOUNT - Last night, I made use of one of the features that I'd quickly looked at and dismissed but found extremely useful the ability to enable a Guest account on your Mac. The great thing about this is that you can allow a visitor who is over to use your computer safely and securely for a short period of time. Basically, its a single use account in that anything done during the session will be cleaned up when the Guest account is logged out or the machine is shutdown. I didn't expect to use this feature but found it extremely handy - have a look.
Here is where you go to activate the Guest Account.
Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts
Select the Guest Account in the sidebar to the left.
Check the checkbox next to Allow guests to log into this computer and configure Parental Controls if you're so inclined.
iChat 4.0 - Over the past few weeks, I've had the opportunity to spend more time using the latest version of iChat and must say that I'm impressed with the improvements that Apple has worked into this version.
- In my opinion the iChat Theatre function is one of the biggest improvements in this release. Basically you're able to drag photos from iPhoto, your desktop or another program and drop them onto the chat window enabling you to show them as a slideshow to the person you're chatting with. In addition, you can also play movies from iMovie or .AVI and .MOV files saved to your desktop (I assume support is broader but I've only tested .MOV and .AVI files). This feature is great if you don't want to be bothered uploading a lot of photos to Flickr or videos to YouTube!
- I've had chats with another user running Leopard so we were both able to experiment with the Computer Sharing functionality that enables another user to take control of your Mac remotely. I must admit this seems like a great option for those not interested in setting up Chicken of the VNC and much easier to administer.
- The new backgrounds in iChat are fun but sensitive to the positioning of the lighting in your environment otherwise the effects don't come off as cleanly as they otherwise should.
