Leopard’s pretty good
Word on the street has it that Leopard is “Evolutionary, not Revolutionary,” and that pretty much sums it up. There are a few compelling new features, and a lot of miscellaneous polish applied throughout the entire operating system, but the transition from Tiger to Leopard is not a very dramatic one.
Out with the old
First of all, Leopard is one mature-looking operating system. Sleek, businesslike gradients replace what remained of the pinstripes, and all the windows in the system now have one solitary unified look, though it isn’t The Unified Look. Most of the icons have been updated to correspond with their modern hardware equivalents; for example, the Displays icon in System preferences now shows a new Apple Cinema Display rather than the goofy-looking old Studio Display.
In fact, the whole “Hardware” row perfectly illustrates Apple’s newest aesthetic: a few simple colors but bold, vibrant contrast between them rather than the muted, understated effects Tiger ushered in. The Bluetooth icon’s blue is bright and shiny, and the CD looks to be shinier as well. Energy Saver’s light bulb is less washed out and provides a better contrast with the background–and notice the absence of pinstripes. Print & Fax’s icon is simpler and more contrasty, and Sound’s icon follows suit with deeper shadows in its recesses.
As has been noted before, it’s these little touches that establish Apple as the king of design, but also make it seem a little silly for the sheer arbitrariness of its decisions. I mean, the new icons are really nice, but the old ones were quite nice too. Oh well, out with the old.
Speaking of that, Leopard takes the opportunity to give the Dock and the menubar new visual styles as well. Much ado has already been made about the idiosyncrasies of their broken or nonsensical visual metaphors, so I won’t repeat them. However, while that’s all true, neither are particularly garish or distracting. The 3D Dock actually looks okay on the bottom of the screen, and it switches to a much sparer affair if you reposition it to be vertically aligned.
The Leopard Dock also redefines what happens when you stick a folder in it. Now, the folder becomes a “Stack,” where clicking on it produces a darkened overlay with icons of the folder’s content. Unfortunately, this system no longer allows you to traverse the folder’s hierarchy like in Tiger and before It also dumps you into a new Finder window if you click on a folder in the Stack, which is frustrating if what you’re looking for is more than one level deep. At least it’s pretty, though! Grumble.
As for the menubar, it’s barely transparent at all. An more accurate description would be that is picks up the color of the background and blurs it a whole ton. It this necessary? No, but it’s hardly distracting, even on some very busy backgrounds:
None of this was even remotely necessary, though, and that’s the crux of the issue. We’ve all been laughing our asses off at Vista for its over-the-top transparency, and along comes Leopard, seemingly trying to one-up it in terms of embarrassing wastes of processor cycles. These design decisions aren’t cripplingly stupid, nor do they do much to inhibit usability, but they do seem like decisions Microsoft would have made, and that’s unsettling.
Is Apple so complacent that they think it’s okay to waste time on changing the look of the menubar and the Dock? Where are the secret features Steve promised? What happened to ZFS and resolution independence? Why is there still no desktop-Laptop synchronization utility or Windows Migration Assistant? Where’s the flying car?
Time Machine
Apple did not invent backup. But Apple is the only company that could have invented Time Machine, the most hyped feature of Leopard. And boy, does it deserve its hype. It has you whizzing back through time through some kind of space vortex! What is it, a computer game? Time Machine is the only personal backup system that isn’t dull as dishwater–in fact, dare I say that it might actually be fun? In any event, it certainly showcases Apple’s recent attempt to take concepts that may be intimidating to non-experts and make them friendlier and more approachable. Garageband does the same thing for non-musicians:
No, this isn’t actually a video game!
Some folks have scoffed at the lack of a “pro” interface for Time Machine, but they’re missing the point; “Pros” already have backup systems in place that suit their needs far better ((Bootable clones and rotating network synchronization are some of the things Time Machine can never replace for those who use them)). Time Machine’s audience is composed of the people who have never backed up anything in their life, and the interface is actually beneficial for them; it’s so unusual, so curiously unconventional that it just begs to be explored. And what better way to explore it then by using it? ((When was the last time anyone curiously poked around in Windows Backup and Restore center, I wonder?)) Time Machine makes the boring chore of backup effortless, and should you ever need to take advantage of that backup, the restore experience is to unique that you can’t help but forget at least a little of your stress. Experts don’t generally need such cajoling and mollycoddling, and for them, there’s SuperDuper! and CarbonCopyCloner, which remain viable products for this very reason. If Time Machine’s job is to being incremental backups to the masses, it will succeed.
On the other hand, there are some problems with its implementation. First of all, it requires an external hard drive, and not everyone has one lying around–least of all the kind of people who would use Time Machine. Sure, huge external hard drives are dirt cheap these days, but needing to buy one is still a barrier to entry. On the plus side, at least Time Machine doesn’t let you use your computer’s internal hard drive, as Windows’ Volume Shadow Copy feature does. While this means your backups are inaccessible on the road and in the air (unless your backup hard drive is in a laptop-sized enclosure, which is a very good idea), it also means your data will survive when your computer’s hard drive goes kaput.
Why did I say “When”? Because your computer’s hard drive will die. If not today or tomorrow, it may conk out while you’re in the middle of writing an important term paper or Photoshopping a masterpiece. Windows’ integrated system leaves you high and dry, since there’s no record of your data except on the hard drive that just died. This is where Time Machine comes in; you buy a new hard drive and import the Time Machine backup, and your stuff’s all there. ((Of course, since Time Machine backups are not bootable, you’ll need to first get that replacement hard drive yourself. Again, this is where SuperDuper! and CarbonCopyCloner come in handy, since they can make a backup you can boot your computer from to keep on working while you wait for the replacement)) Choose for yourself which is the superior system.
The Finder, fixed ((One might say, “TFF is finally F’d”, for those so initiated))
The Finder has always been the whipping boy of Mac OS X’s technophile audience. Everybody had their own pet peeve, it seemed, but the criticism seemed to gel around a dozen or so concrete issues. Leopard, Like no other release in Mac OS X history, addresses many of them.
First, there’s networking. Frankly, it sucked in Tiger and before. Forget to disconnect a network volume before you took your laptop off the network? Get ready to wait for 120 seconds of beachball hell. Every single time. Then there was its Spotlight interface, or rather, all three of them, each with different capabilities and limitations. And so on.
Leopard’s Finder is a breath of fresh air. First of all, it looks an awful lot like iTunes. CoverFlow, the categorized sidebar–everything! Now, I’d say this is a pretty good thing, since everyone loves iTunes (or rather, fewer people hate it than hated the old Finder), and it does help the ever-maligned consistency.
The Finder’s new sidebar is a wonderful thing, if only for its seamless network discovery feature: networked machines and services simply appear right there, just like in iTunes. No searching, no finding the network view, no manually connecting, all that’s gone and replaced with iTunes style connecting, and the difference is like night and day.
Besides, who could resist laughing at the cruel snub to PC users in the form of this icon used for networked PCs:
Sure, it’s juvenile and asinine, but as a Mac user, it makes me feel good inside. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think this is hilarious. Besides, you have to admit it’s funny that Apple can make even a blue screen of death on a 1994-era CRT look good.
I’m deliberately ignoring Cover Flow because it’s as superfluous and stupid in the Finder as it is in iTunes. But it’s there for you if you happen to find it useful in some way. I don’t.
Quick Look, though, really is a revolutionary feature. The idea is simple: rather than opening files if you’re looking for something specific, it would be much more efficient to get a rapid preview–enough for you to determine whether it’s what you’re looking for and move on if it isn’t. And Quick Look excels marvelously. Tap the space bar when a file is selected and a preview window will instantly zoom out to show you the contents. If it’s not the right file, you just hit an arrow key to select a new file, and Quick Look will change the contents of the preview window to match. It’s utterly brilliant in its astonishing simplicity and instantaneous accessibility. Really, it is. You’ll be completely hooked after about the second time you do it.
Though Spotlight is not technologically part of the finder, they’re closely linked interface-wise, and Spotlight is also massively improved. First of all, it’s about 900,000 times faster than before. Results appear literally instantly, even when all my memory is used up, I’m doing a Time Machine backup, and I have 8 applications open at once! I don’t know how they pulled this off, but they did, and now it’s at least as fast if not faster than Windows Desktop Search, which handily beat Tiger’s Spotlight in terms of speed.
Its interface is also vastly improved, and now searching is done through one consistent unified portal where smart folders an be made. Sadly, though Spotlight finally (finally!) lets you search system files, there’s no way to make this a global default, so every time you search your preferences folder, you’ll manually have to re-enable the setting. Ugh. At least it’s better than not being able to, though.
Spaces
Finally, there’s Spaces, Apple’s implementation of virtual desktops. Essentially, it allows you to get a bigger workspace by putting some of your applications’ windows off-screen in predefined areas you can rapidly toggle between. The switching animation is smooth and fluid, which is good, since a lack of visual obviousness would make it extremely unclear just where windows were and where they appeared from when you switched to a new Space. There’s also an Exposé-like view where you can view all your spaces, and you can drag windows to and fro in this view, which is a nice touch.
You can bind your applications to a specific space, or have them appear on all spaces. Alternatively, you can manually move their windows where you want them, although this becomes tiresome.
To be honest, I’m a little disappointed with Spaces, since it lacks one feature that would make it indispensable to me: the ability to bind applications to multiple spaces.
Imagine for a moment that you have a Space for general web browsing and RSS reading and also a Space for programming. You obviously want Safari in the web browsing Space, but having a browser open is extremely handy for programming, as well. So, since there’s no way to tell Safari to exist in only two Spaces, you tell it to live in all Spaces. But now you want a third space for Photoshop and nothing else–to cut down on the distractions. Uh oh! Safari appears in the Photoshop Space! If you tell Safari to stop appearing in all Spaces, you have to choose between the web browsing Space or the programming Space, but not both.
This makes Spaces a bit of a bust for me, since the aforementioned example is my situation exactly. There are times you need an application in more than one place, but not all places, and Spaces cannot handle this. I’m disappointed. Now, I’ve never encountered an implementation of virtual desktops/workspaces that did allow this, but for me, it’s what sets the feature apart from simple selectively hiding and showing applications.
A whole big plate of the little things
In terms of big new features, that’s about it. Sure, you could argue about iChat and parental controls and this and that, but really, Time Machine, Spaces, and Finder/Spotlight/Quick Look are the biggies. In many ways Leopard is sold short by it lack of whiz-bang new consumer features; so much more is “under the hood” or an improvement to some existing component. For example, Leopard’s Preview is a powerhouse image editor, able to crop, resize, convert and color correct images, as well as cut elements out of their backgrounds. It can also read, write, mark up, and annotate PDFs. For free. There’s nothing like this on Vista; Windows Photo Gallery is nice, but it can’t even save images in different file formats! Really, though, Leopard’s Preview isn’t that different from Tiger’s; a few new features were added, most of the existing features were polished, and the interface was cleaned up–That’s all. It’s also how you could describe the rest of Leopard.
These little improvements that make all the difference, and they’re everywhere. Mail now synchronizes with iCal’s To Do database and can intelligently grab information from incoming emails for iCal events. It can also view RSS feeds, truly bringing RSS to the masses; I suspect Leopard’s Mail.app will make RSS a lot more palatable to the people who are used to the email client being the place where things automatically arrive.
But there’s more. iCal shows the current time in the daily calendar with a nice little pushpin and a grey line. Front Row now looks exactly like the interface on the Apple TV. DVD player has a time scrubber. Textedit can read .odf files. A grammar checker and smart quote support have been added to the list of systemwide services. Terminal has tabs. iChat has tabs. iChat also has screen sharing. Disk Utility can resize a hard disk’s partitions without having to erase the whole drive first. The firewall can be configured on an application-by-application basis. The dictionary searches Wikipedia. And on and on and on, until you begin feel that an unbelievable amount of care was put into making the operating system not only functional and pleasant, but hyper-integrated and uber-efficient.
Essentially, Leopard continues the Mac OS X trend of releasing cool new features and capabilities, but polishing them to a brilliant sheen in the subsequent release. The pervious paragraph of examples show Apple improving existing features, but there’s plenty that’s new and unfinished. Example: The Finder’s wonderful new path bar is not spring-loaded. This means that you cannot drag an icon down to one of the icons on the bar and have the window contents change to that folder. For some reason, Apple seems to have a great deal of trouble with the concept of springloading, which the “old” floundering apple of the 90s adored so much. Heck, it took until Mac OS X 10.3 to get springloading on ordinary folders, and it’s only now with Leopard that Docked folders–oops, I mean Stacks–inherited the ability. Now there’s another great use for it in the Finder’s path bar, and I fully expect to see this bug fixed in Mac OS X 10.7 Serval.
Another example: While Windows nags you to restart after an update, Tiger would let you restart whenever you wanted, though it didn’t let you close the nag screen. In Leopard, that nag screen got a lot less naggy; there’s now a “Not now” button which simply dismissed the window and leaves it up to you to restart.
Overall…
Basically, Leopard is better. By a lot. But not by a huge amount. There are some stinkers, but there are far more winners, and Leopard is quite compelling. It’s tweaked and optimized in a million little ways that make it much more of a pleasure than Tiger to use, and that matters for a lot. Leopard is all about polish, and it’s got it in spades. And Time Machine is nice too.
Categorised as: Reviews