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For a few months now, I’ve been wondering when Cupertino is going to put out a new version of Apple Remote Dekstop (ARD).  Partly because I want new features, mostly because I’m tired of looking at the Aqua Blue desktop background on the application’s icon.

I was bored tonight and decided to take care of that last part myself.  I present to you, my second ever OS X icon, ARD Leopard!  I took the binoculars from the current ARD icon and combined them with Leopard’s desktop sidebar icon.  The imperfections of my horrible Photoshop skills are barely noticeable and I think it looks pretty good.  Feel free to download, and if you like and use it, please leave a comment.

[Download]

Here’s a little discussed feature of Time Machine in OS X Leopard.  It works directly with some applications!

If you open Mail.app for example, and launch Time Machine from its menubar item you can directly access and recover individual email messages.  The alternative would be using Time Machine to recover your entire ~/Library/Mail folder, which isn’t very practical.  I’ve tested several other applications and so far I’ve found that this also works for Address Book to recover contacts and groups, and iPhoto to recover photos and albums.

One caveat I’ve found is that you need to use the menubar item to launch Time Machine, otherwise a Finder window opens and it doesn’t activate properly.  Other than that, this seems to be an excellent use of Time Machine!  Please feel free to leave a comment if you discover any more applications this works with.

UPDATE:  As of OS X Leopard version 10.5.2, Apple includes a menu bar item to provide this same quick access to Time Machine.  Keeping the same sense of simplicity I try to apply to my Dock, I think I’ll keep this out of the menu bar and save on some of that limited screen real estate.

I try to keep my dock as simple as possible, and reserve it only for applications I frequently use. By default, Leopard adds Time Machine to the dock, which I find to be just a bit of showing off what’s new to those unfamiliar with Leopard’s features.

Since Time Machine works behind the scenes to backup your data, you’ll hopefully never have to touch it until you need to recover something, therefore making it pointless to keep in the dock.

I keep an alias to Time Machine.app in my Time Machine drive. That way, if and whenever I ever need to fly through deep space to recover a file, I need only open my Time Machine drive in a Finder window.