My brand new copy of Apple's latest OS, Leopard, arrived on Friday. I chose to upgrade, and in less than an hour, I was back up and running. Now that I've had some time to explore, here are my favorite 5 and 1/2 new features about Leopard.

1. All the web developer tools (that I use anyways) ship standard and up to date. Apache, PHP, Ruby, and MySQL all setup and ready to go.

It did take some tweaking to get MySQL to work again with some apps and phpMyAdmin (thanks to Angry-Fly for the fix.)

2. Spaces! Who needs multiple monitors when you can have multiple desktops? Spaces allows you to quickly and easily switch between desktops, and features the ability to control which "space" an application should launch in by default. Sure, most Linux distros have been doing this for a while, but it is a great feature to finally make it to the Mac.

3. Quick Look No more waiting for Adobe Reader to launch, simply select the file and tap the spacebar. So far it's worked out great for looking at PDFs and other documents, although it loses some formatting when looking at office documents.

4. Tabs in Terminal.app Sure, it's not a jaw-dropping, main feature addition - but like Spaces, this has been long overdue. In addition to tabs in Terminal.app, you can now create and save color customizations and each tabbed terminal window can have it's own "theme". Very useful for having a visual indication for the different uses of Terminal.app

5. Time Machine This is a great feature to keep routine backups of your data and to restore folders and files from any point in time. Well, not any point - it just depends on how much space your Time Machine storage medium has available. Microsoft fanboys will tell you that Vista already does this, and did it first with "Shadow Copy" - but what good is a backup system that keeps your backups on the same drive and is only accessible on Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions ($299 and up).

...And a 1/2. Not really a feature on this one, just a comical statement of the obvious. When connected to a network, nearby computers are displayed in the left column of any given Finder window. This is the icon that Leopard uses to represent a Windows server/share. Yup, the infamous "Blue Screen of Death". (This was also pointed out by Jason at 37signals.com)