Tech Paladin

I just finished Guns Don’t Die — People Do by Pete Shields, the founder of the National Council to Control Handguns (NCCP) — what would later be known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The book is a manifesto of sorts, and follows the journey taken by Shields as he became more and more perturbed by the presence of Handguns following the slaying of his son in the Zebra Murders.

First of all, I have to mention how human I found the narrator. Shields writes with depth, eloquence, and genuine emotion—a sad passion identifying him as a man who has experienced tremendous loss and wants desperately that nobody else should ever have to suffer what he did. Pete Shields is a good man, an honest man, but his decisions have been clouded by the red haze of grief. As he himself admits, the random, senseless killing of his son made him desperately seek some sort of meaning to the tragedy that befell his family. What he found was the need for tighter gun control, specifically that targeting handguns.

Never having experienced anything even remotely approximating the death of a loved one, I almost don’t feel I deserve to be able to critique the way Shields deals with his loss. I know what such traumatic grief does to people; who are we to judge how they cope? The trauma simply breaks some, transforming them into shadows of their former selves; others it unhinges, never to be the same again. Still more are infused with a zeal to ensure that no others are made to endure what they did. This is simultaneously the most noble and selfless way of coping, but also the most dangerous; after all, what has more potential for harm than a fanatic who’s wrong but can’t possibly see it?

And that is the man who Pete Shields is; honorable, kind, warm, eloquent, passionate, wounded, and very, very wrong.

In the pages following Shields’ description of the act and aftermath of his son’s murder, he outlines the laxity of U.S. gun laws by tracing the path of the gun used to kill his son as it traveled from hand to hand, from law-abiding citizen to friend, to pawnbroker, to customer, to thief, to drug dealer, then finally to murderer. Yet Shields never actually gets around to discussing how any of his proposed legislation would have broken this chain or saved his son’s life; the weapon used to kill him was legally purchased by a man who would not have been prohibited from doing so had the controls we have today existed at the time. The future murder weapon was legally transferred to other law-abiding citizens until it was stolen from one of them by a burglar, at which point it entered the unregulable black market where Shields himself admits that nothing can be done to curb the flow.

Shields himself at times seems unsure of his position; he readily admits that he’s making it all up as he goes along. For example, he can’t seem to figure out his stance on banning handguns: on one page, he’ll assure the reader that neither he nor his organization sees it as remotely appropriate, yet on the next he’s explaining how he supported or campaigned for someone else’s existing or proposed handgun ban. And then there are the times when he almost overflows with emotion, describing guns as “portable death machines”, or “concealable murder machines” “whose only purpose is to kill and maim human beings”.

You see, Pete Shields has been so thoroughly traumatized by the impact of gun violence that he has lost all sight of the handgun as a potentially useful tool; he urges citizens who are violently attacked and are mindful of preserving their own lives to capitulate, to cooperate fully and surrender whatever property is demanded. But he offers no satisfactory answer in response to the question of what to do in the case of an assailant intent on committing murder or rape.

I found it interesting to see Shields take a position that I myself did many years ago: that we should work towards the obsolescence of the handgun. It conjured up a half-finished piece of art I began in 2001, depicting a handgun and some cartridges in a glass case. I intended the display to be a museum piece, and though I never finished it, in my vision for what it would become, I imagined patrons gazing with puzzled looks at the strange conglomeration of metal and plastic, wondering why humans would have voluntarily created devices to murder one another. I, like Shields, was naively focusing on the cold reality of the tool itself rather than trying to understand why such an object came about. The answer is that people created handguns not because they wished to kill each other,¹ but because they wanted protection from others more powerful then themselves who wanted to do them ill. As crazy as it would have seemed to me at the time and as crazy as it evidently seems to Shields, the handgun is an equalizer: no matter the size, strength, toughness, brutality, or hand-to-hand combat prowess of your assailant, you will triumph if you have a gun, often without firing a shot.

A world without handguns is a world in which the physically powerful prey on folks who have devoted their time to more peaceful pursuits. It is a world where those who are elderly, disabled, weak, young, or female are vulnerable to assault, robbery, rape, and murder. The gun gives these people a chance to protect themselves from those who would otherwise have them at their mercy. In order to render the handgun obsolete, we have to eliminate violence itself. And good luck trying to do that.

The best example of Shields’ flawed thinking is embodied in a poster that NCCP disseminated nationwide:

The poster embodies all that’s wrong with NCCP: it’s breathlessly sensationalistic, vaguely fearmongering, and factually wrong, leaving out crucial information. You see, the poster fails to mention that Israel and Switzerland are virtual fortress-states, armed to the teeth with both handguns and assault rifles, and Shields himself misrepresents the laws in those countries in his discussion; he cites Israel’s tough handgun laws for instance but declines to mention that the restrictions are placed on those who carry guns concealed and that those who openly display their weapons in public face virtually no restrictions as all. In switzerland, ownership of fully-automatic weapons is mandatory for men of militia age, and purchase laws are very lax. Great Britain has extremely low levels of gun homicide, but Shields doesn’t reveal that it did before the tough laws were enacted and that violent crime in general has in fact begun to rise since the laws were passed. I could go on and on.

Shields is especially fond of refuting the argument that gun regulation inevitably leads to a slippery slope of registration, banning, and confiscation, and he portrays gun owners as reactionary violence-mongers who selfishly prize their own convenience over others’ safety.

But he misunderstands the nature of their position; their opposition is grounded not in a disrespect for public safety, but on a legitimate fear of abuse down the road. Those pushing a piece of legislation that gives them some power—say, the capacity to wiretap citizens in the name of counter-terrorism, for example—will always claim that they will not misuse the power vested in them. Yet it’s equally true that these people will likely retire or be voted out of office, to be replaced with those of perhaps more dubious moral fiber. Even if we trust existing stewards of these programs, can we trust any and all possible successors? And if we disagree with the program to begin with, the possibility for abuse becomes all the more frightening. This is why Democrats fear President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program and Republicans fear gun registration: the mechanisms put in place by the well-meaning have the potential to be co-opted and abused by those of fewer scruples in the future.² As we have seen, this always comes to pass; Americans have indeed been illegally spied on by the government and guns have indeed been confiscated using registration information.

And we can even see this slippery slope effect in the positions espoused by Shields’ organization. Although in the beginning Shields talks only of handgun control, in the years since the book was written, the organization he leads has pushed for handgun bans, succeeded in regulating the very long guns that he promised would never be touched, gotten a great deal of guns of all types banned entirely, regulated ammunition of handguns as well as long guns, and kept silent when the weapons owned by residents of New Orleans were confiscated by police and National Guardsmen who combed registration documents in the wake of rioting after Hurricane Katrina.

But none of this changes my attitude towards Pete Shields; no matter how much I may disagree with his position, he is the sort man I could imagine myself becoming if pushed hard enough: one who throws logic to the wind and unchains his emotions in trying to heal himself in the aftermath of a horrific personal tragedy. It’s all we could really expect from ourselves; after all, who criticizes the coping mechanisms of the bereaved?

No, the only objectionable action Pete Shields took was generalizing the intensely personal healing process he had to undergo onto the rest of the country. I have no problem with him coming out strongly against handguns, but the issue arises from the fact that he did so in an extremely public and legislatively prescriptive fashion, despite the fact that homicide was actually falling when he started his campaign—a time when handgun ownership was in fact rising. These facts took a backseat to his profound fear of handguns. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly not strong base for a political movement.

Despite all this, I feel that Pete Shields, in writing this manifesto, has inadvertently created a piece of work that has the potential to bridge the divide between the pro-gun and the anti-gun. You see, Shields wrote this book because of fear. He was afraid for his own life; afraid of a violent death looking down the barrel of a gun; afraid that the murder of his son could be replicated ten thousand times by pistol-packing street punks; afraid of victimhood. He was saying, “I’m so afraid of crime that I want to make every effort to prevent it by seeing that criminals are disarmed.”

But fear is not so very different from the reason why many Americans do not avoid, but in fact purchase guns themselves for their own protection. They say, “I’m so afraid of crime that I want to make every effort to prevent it by arming myself against the possibility of a violent attack.”

Are these positions really so different? Both are based on the fear of crime and a desire to curb its ill effects: a noble intention. It’s in the nuts-and-bolts of the issue that differences of opinion become apparent. But trusting opinion without knowing fact is the surest way to make a mistake, and the facts are not on the side of restrictive gun control. At least we can both agree that something needs to be done about crime, though.

But in order to do anything about it, we have to let ourselves become emotionally detached from the issues we deal with so that we can evaluate the success and failure of public policy with an eye towards facts and evidence and not histrionic appeals to emotion. We are of course free to believe whatever we want, no matter how silly, but when we endeavour to impose our position on others, we owe it to them to carefully consider the issue from all sides, rather than digging up one-sided facts that support our already-held opinions. This, I feel, is the only sin of Pete Shields, an otherwise exemplary human being.

1. Rifles were created for that. [↩]
2. To say nothing of the damage they may do in the present. [↩]

I recently replaced my wonderful Razer Pro|Click mouse with a wireless Logitech VX Nano–perhaps the most diametrically-opposed mouse there is in terms of input device philosophy.

Out with the old, in with the new

The Razer is corded, full of buttons, and boasts a resolution so high it could find a nun’s sins without trying. It’s a gaming mouse repackaged to look more “professional,” meaning it’s a sensible white instead of some hallucinogenic color-changing plastic-by product with half a dozen blinking lights. It served me well over the past two years, but it was showing its age and my mousing habits had changed sufficiently that a wireless mouse looked more appealing.

The nano, on the other hand, is light and portable. It comes with a handy zippered travel case, and its USB wireless receiver protrudes no farther than the thickness of a Tylenol. The Nano is only 3.75 inches long, and everything about it seems to have been somehow miniaturized. It’s like a regular mouse, only, well, Nano!

The mouse itself

The Nano is the latest mouse in Logitech’s newest family marked by an unusual scroll wheel design. Called “MicroGear” in lame marketing-speak, the scroll wheel has two distinct modes. One is normal in that it’s ratcheted and produces audible clicks as it’s rotated. The other, though is frictionless; think of spinning a bike tire off the ground—it just keeps on spinning. This makes it a snap to scroll to the end of long documents, but the precision afforded by not having to stop on discrete steps makes the frictionless mode far smoother for ordinary “slow” scrolling as well.

To switch between modes, you deliver a heavy click to the wheel itself, which depresses slightly and produces a satisfying mechanical pop. It’s a nice touch to have made this feature mechanical rather than software-controlled, which would have thusly depended on using Logitech’s driver software and only Logitech’s driver software.

Now, because of this mechanical scroll action, you can’t middle-click by clicking on the wheel, which is what most scroll wheels do and thus what most people are used to. Thankfully, there’s a button immediately beneath the scroll wheel which I’ve mapped to middle-click. Problem solved.

The Nano’s scroll wheel also tilts from side to side—another nice touch. Throw in two more buttons within easy reach of the index finger, and this mouse is exceptionally powerful despite its size.

The primary and secondary buttons are generously large for such a small mouse, but the left button requires a very firm touch, and occasionally ignored clicks that were overly gentle. You might have to retrain yourself to click harder if your previous mouse only needed a feather-touch like mine did. It’s by no means a big deal, but it does take some getting used to.

Well, what about gaming?

The Nano’s tracking is magnificent in Windows. I’d heard horror stories of wireless mice being horribly unsuited for quick movements or gaming, but the Nano is wonderful for just that. One of the first things I did after getting it set up was play some Team Fortress 2, and it was the best match I had ever played. Easily, hands down, no questions asked–I was 50% more frag-tastic with a diminutive wireless laptop mouse than I had been with an ultra-percise gaming mouse. In Windows, the Nano’s tracking and movement are generally wonderful.

However, its tracking in OS X is a little bit short of that. The cursor moves far too fast when the mouse itself is thrown about, but it’s quite sluggish at the slowest speeds. Sadly, this is simply a philosophical difference between the way Mac OS X handles mice and the way Windows does, which allows you to move your actual hand farther without causing the cursor to fly out of control. Now, most Mac users are used to this difference and many actively prefer it, but I am not one of them. What to do? Drivers to the rescue!

Developers developers developers developers developers!

…Except not Logitech’s. In the Mac world, Logitech has a horrible reputation for its abysmal driver software, and this mouse was no different. In fact, Logitech even uses an unsupported framework for third-party hacks called APE, rather than the standard Apple-senctioned method which would be easier for them and produce better software. APE has recently gained a good deal of negative publicity for being the culprit in many failed Leopard installations, and it’s inexcusable of Logitech to rely on such an unstable framework for something as crucial as a mouse. This is just not anything a professional company should do; if it was some backyard tinkers or a company new to the Mac platform who pulled this, it would be forgivable, provided they shaped up mighty quick. But Logitech!?!. Disgraceful! Needless to say, I opted not to install Logitech’s software.

Instead, I used a third-party universal mouse driver called SteerMouse, which is quite excellent. With SteerMouse, all of the Nano’s buttons—including the side-scroll ones—were programmable, and I set up different functions for them depending on what application I’m using. But SteerMouse’s real power it derived from its ability to let you tweak the acceleration curve of your mouse. In my case, I wanted to make it more Windows-like. Compared to in Mac OS X, a Windows mouse cursor basically moves faster at slow speeds, and slower at fast speeds. Whipping the mouse around makes the cursor move fast, but not at bullet-train-esque speeds, which is the problem I and many others have with the Mac curve.

It took a lot of tweaking and testing, but I finally managed through SteerMouse to get a setting that feels the most Windows-like to me. Sadly, this setting only works for the VX Nano, as every mouse has its own internal mechanism, so you would need to use a different set of values for all other mice. But if you happen to own a VX Nano and SteerMouse and want a Windows-like acceleration curve, here’s how:

Set the Tracking Speed (SteerMouse’s word for acceleration) to 0.0625 and the Sensitivity (which is actually base speed, confusingly enough) to 450. That ought to do it.

Sadly, SteerMouse isn’t free. It costs $20, which is intensely annoying if you need the more advanced functionality from your mouse but hate Logitech’s shitty Mac support–it’s like adding on twenty bucks to the cost of the mouse! I believe it’s worth it, though; SteerMouse unlocks so much of a mouse’s power, in addition to the indispensable ability to edit its acceleration curve. Until Logitech stops treating Mac users as second-class citizens, though, we’ll just have to live with the “SteerMouse tax.”

Portability

The Nano unfortunately doesn’t use Bluetooth to communicate with a computer, necessitating an external receiver. Fortunately, this receiver is practically invisible, barely longer than its USB plug that disappears into a port. It’s actually pretty cute! There’s no problem in keeping it attached to your laptop when you pack it up due to its stunningly small size, but the paranoid can store it within the mouse itself while in transit, and while it’s inside, the mouse automatically powers off. Nice. Not as nice as Bluetooth because it uses up a USB port, but about 90% as nice.

A major benefit is that the Nano uses standard AAA batteries rather than the built in lithium-ion battery its two-scroll-wheeled big brother uses. This means there’s no bulky charging cradle to keep on your desk and use up an outlet, and you can also replace the AAAs when they die as opposed to just watching anxiously as the built-in LI-on battery slowly loses its ability to hold a charge. It also means you can easily keep the mouse in service by keeping two spare AAAs handy; with a sealed battery, you’d have to return the mouse to its charger and wait until it built up enough power before you could use it again.

The generously included traveling case is pretty svelte, and fits the Nano perfectly. Another nice touch.

The verdict

The Logitech VX Nano is a wonderful mouse. If you’re looking for extreme portability, robust wirelessness and, well, cuteness, this is your mouse. Though the terrible Mac drivers are a liability, SteerMouse can make up for them if you’re willing to spend a bit more.

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 better¹. 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?² 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.³ Choose for yourself which is the superior system.

The Finder, fixed⁴

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.

1. Bootable clones and rotating network synchronization are some of the things Time Machine can never replace for those who use them [↩]
2. When was the last time anyone curiously poked around in Windows Backup and Restore center, I wonder? [↩]
3. 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 [↩]
4. One might say, “TFF is finally F’d”, for those so initiated [↩]