Apple should soon show of what the next version of Mac OS X, named Leopard, will show in improvements. As usual, there are plenty of rumors and fake screen-captures circulating on the internet. One web site, took the idea further, and organized a contest of fake Leopard screenshots. The winners have now been selected and I must say I like the ideas of the winner a lot.

The main area of improvement is Mac OS X’s file browser, the Finder. This application has been criticized a lot, it is slow, not very consistent and in general the weak point of OS X. I can’t say I love the finder, but the truth is, I increasingly do my file-system navigation from the command-line, switching back and forth with drag-and-drop and the open command. The proposed improvements include tabs, the possibility to use large icons / preview in the last column of the column mode (the mode inherited from Next I use most) and the possibility to filter by file-type (in a way that is similar to what search does in Mail.app). I’m not so convinced by the capacity to preview many file-types within the file-system browser, Konkeror offers this option, but I’m not convinced.