I enjoyed the Steve Jobs keynote today at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. I listened to the 10 new Leopard features with a photographer's ear, and here are three of my favorites.

One of the best overall Leopard perks, and probably the most highly touted too, is Time Machine. As Apple puts it, "More than a mere backup, Time Machine makes an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac -- digital photos, music, movies, TV shows, and documents -- so you can go back in time to recover anything." Since some of us don't use automated backup, having this function baked right into the operating system is going to save lots of data for many, many people. And for photographers, that should mean never losing another image. After all, not even Aperture's Vault is fully automatic...

My second favorite item was Quick Look. This seems like a real timesaver when searching through images and documents. According to Apple, "Using Quick Look, you can view the contents of a file without even opening it. Flip through multiple-page documents. Watch full-screen video. See entire Keynote presentations. With a single click." I sometimes use Preview for this task, but Quick Look seems faster and more versatile. I don't always want to launch Aperture just to peek at photos on my hard drive.

One other new goodie that I think we'll find useful is the next version of iChat. Not only can we video conference as before, but now with the new "theater" function, we can share slideshows, iPhoto libraries, Keynote presentations, and videos in the iChat interface while meeting with others in remote locations. Our ability to show off our work during live conferencing will be much easier, and nice to look at too. And we should be able to show off our Aperture images too, if not directly, then through iPhoto using Aperture's previews.

Leopard has tons of good stuff under the hood, but I'm already looking forward to testing some of these new consumer-oriented features.