When it comes to computer operating systems, we’re all looking for something that’s easier to use with more advanced features that make day-to-day living simpler and business more productive. Pacific News Bytes takes a look at two systems that hope to revolutionize computing in both arenas.

Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 — The new Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 has lots to offer with more than 300 new features. Here are a few highlights, courtesy of Apple:

On the desktop: For starters, do you ever get frustrated with a cluttered desktop? One of the new features in Leopard are stacks. A stack is a Dock item that gives you fast access to a folder of files. When you click a stack, the files within spring from the Dock in a fan or a grid, depending on the number of items (or the preference you set). Leopard starts you off with two pre-made stacks: one for downloads and the other for documents. The downloads stack automatically captures files downloaded from Safari, Mail, and iChat, and the documents stack is a great place to keep things like presentations, spreadsheets and word processing files. You can create as many stacks as you wish simply by dragging folders to the right side of your Dock.

Take a Quick Look: Using Quick Look in Leopard, you can view the contents of a file without even opening it. If you’re looking for something specific and you don’t have time to open lots of files to find it, enter Quick Look. It gives you a sneak peek of entire files — even multiple-page documents and video — without opening them. Quick Look works with nearly every file on your system, including images, text files, PDF documents, movies, Keynote presentations, Mail attachments, and Microsoft Word and Excel files. Just tap the Space bar to see a file in Quick Look or click the Quick Look icon in the Finder window (if it’s not there already, add it by selecting Customize Toolbar from the View menu in the Finder). Then click the arrow icon to see the same file full screen — even video as it plays.

The Finder: Browsing files on your Mac is now as easy as browsing music in iTunes. That’s the idea behind the new Finder in Leopard. Now you can actually see your files in the Finder — not just as icons, but as they really look. Using Cover Flow, you can flip through your documents as easily as you flip through album art in iTunes. Cover Flow displays each file as a large preview of its first page, and you can click through multipage documents or play movies.

With shared computers automatically displayed in the sidebar, you can find files on any Mac or PC on your network. You can even use Spotlight and Cover Flow when you search another Mac. When you click a connected Mac, you can use screen sharing (if authorized, of course) — which lets you do anything you could do if you were sitting in front of that computer. Change a system preference, publish an iPhoto album, or add a new playlist to iTunes.

Also from the Finder or the menu bar, Spotlight in Leopard lets you search for more specific sets of things. Use Boolean logic to narrow search results by entering “AND,” “OR”, or “NOT” in a search request. Search for exact phrases using quotation marks, or search for items by dates or ranges using > and < symbols.