It’s now been a couple of days since I got my hands on Apple’s latest rendition of OS X, Leopard, so I thought I might share some of the things I’ve discovered as well as some of the things that are slightly frustrating. To commemorate the occasion, I’ve uploaded a new header pic that shows off the fancy new default Leopard background (albeit edited slightly).
The Good
- Stacks - I have to say that overall, stacks are quite a useful feature. My Downloads stack has already saved me numerous clicks through the Finder so I’m quite happy with that little addition.
- Cover Flow - Now this one I was thinking was just going to be another one of those “pretty features” but I have found myself using Cover Flow view a couple of times already. It’s particularly useful when bounding through folders of images trying to find the one you’re after.
- Quick Look - It sorta goes hand in hand with Cover Flow and it’s another one that I’ve quickly started using. It’s particularly good with video files, in fact I’ve even started watching TV shows from quick look because it’s faster than loading VLC. Just don’t click out of the window… the sky will fall on your head if you do!
- Address Book - It now has Google Maps natively (out goes my old plug-in) and finally has a little date selector for birthdays. That one used to drive me nuts.
- Spotlight - Spotlight now selects the first item by default which makes it much faster to launch apps. I’m one of those serial “Run command” people so I love to launch apps this way. The added calculator functionality is also a nice little trick.
- iChat Effects - The new video effects are really fun. I can’t see myself using them all that often but they keep giving me a good laugh. If only Apple left the hologram effect in the final build.
- System Preferences - Apple seem to have done a huge tidy up around system preferences and it has certainly addressed a number of issues. The old system used to be cluttered and some of the preferences were categorised under very unusual tabs (Firewall was under Sharing for instance and now it’s under Security). It just seems more logical now and the Networking tab, where I seem to spend a lot of time, is particularly friendly.
The Bad
- iCal - iCal would have made it into the good list but it has one serious flaw that is frustrating me somewhat; there’s now like 3-4 clicks involved in editing an event. The only workaround I’ve found is to select an event and press Cmd+E but that’s hardly a solution. I’d like to be able to edit my events more easily like I could with the drawer.
- Mail - The random To-do/Notes functionality that has appeared in Mail seems to do nothing but mimic functionality that already exists in Stickies and iCal. This leads me to the question, why have it there at all?
- Spaces - This is one of those features that I can actually see myself using. I often have a lot of windows minimised while I’m not using them and shifting them off to other spaces seems like it’d make sense to me. The only problem is, I can’t figure this thing out. I can drag an app from one space (that is, if it has a window - Dreamweaver and Photoshop don’t seem all that easy to move around) to another only to find when I click on it, it comes back to the space I’m working on instead of changing to that space. I can set an app to appear on all spaces but it only appears on one. I can lose several windows from the same app over different spaces. In fact, I can do pretty much anything that is counter productive and doesn’t seem to behave how Apple say it should. Perhaps it’s just my set up, I don’t know. I’m hoping an update will address these ones.
- Apache 2 - Ick! What was going on here? It seems that Apple have upgraded to Apache 2 in Leopard and it wreaked havoc on my off-line web development environment. Not only did it kill my virtual hosts, it also stuffed MySQL and it took me quite a while of Googling and calling in for backup (enter Richard) to get it back to normal. If you need help with this one, head over to Remy Sharp’s Blog for some tips.
The Ugly
- Dashboard - Dashboard seemed to go all nasty towards a good 60% of my existing widgets. Some have font problems, others have alignment issues and some just don’t work at all. It’s a shame that widget developers are having to play catch up to get these simple things working again.
- The Dock - or should I call it the ridiculously shiny piece of metal at the bottom of my screen. I really don’t like the new dock. It is overpowering to look at on my glossy iMac screen (it doesn’t look so bad on my MacBook Pro) and so it had to go. Luckily it’s an easy fix with the following command:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock - The Menubar - My next gripe is with the transparent menu bar. I can understand the logic behind making it transparent, but I don’t understand why I’m being forced to look at it. I haven’t found a way to disable that one yet, so I’m currently using a black background under the menu to mask the transparent parts.
I haven’t had a chance to test Time Machine yet. I need to go spend some more cash on an external HDD or two. I’m sure I’ll post more as I delve deeper into the OS. Overall, I’d say that I’m pretty happy with Leopard. 75% is how it used to be, just cleaner and looking a lot better. Another 20% is new and perhaps has a few teething issues and the other 5% is just wrong, missing or poorly implemented. But hey, compare it to Windows Vista (any edition for that matter) and it’s still light years ahead. Microsoft, I think it’s time to get a bigger photocopier.