OS X.5 – Leopard. Apple’s new big cat’s all grown up.
I’ve finally managed to install Leopard. Took me over a week because I wanted to go out and get myself an external hdd. I did this not so much for Time Machine which I don’t have much use for at home but I wanted to do 2 clean installs so I needed something to back up to. I proceeded to install Leopard on my 3 month MacBook and on my 4 year old G5. The G5 has 2 hdd’s, one of which I cleaned after moving its data to the external HDD.The HDD (a 500gb LaCie basic model from scanmalta.com for Lm52) will also house all my software installers and backed up installer CDs in one neat place. It will also be used to back up my Mac Pro at work. This will free up some space on my other LaCie external drive which sits on the network as my media server. I’m pretty happy with LaCie’s products and chose them originally for their long standing support for the Mac platform knowing set up would be very straightforward. So my G5 now houses both Tiger and Leopard after the lengthy installation process. I did a full install so it took quite some time. My Macbook on the hand, took much less as I performed a custom install without all the drivers and language support. Also, due to its puny 80gb hdd, I probably won’t be installing as much software on it as I had done before. I’ll be looking for smaller, less bloated apps. No Office or CS3 that’s for sure and definitely no Garage Band, iMovie or iDVD. My G5’s there for all that. One pleasant surprise for me was the inclusion at long last of a Maltese keyboard map. This follows the official CIMU/MITTS layout rather than what I used for my own keymap. This is great news for anyone using Macs in professional creative environments here. There’s no reason why a USB Maltese keyboard wouldn’t work either. Still need to find out how to access the tilde key though as it becomes the ż in the Maltese keyboard layout.. As far as Leopard itself goes - it sure feels snappier than Tiger especially so in certain cases like invoking the dashboard or front row for the first time.There are several minor cosmetic changes which have been explored on many a blog. The only conclusion one can surmise from the coverage things like the new transparent menubar and 3d dock is that Apple should allow some new preferences for these visual elements. I got used to it all on my 20″ Cinema Display with the Leopard space wallpaper. On My laptop I changed it to one of Apple’s blue aqua gradient wallpapers and have found the menu bar to bee too transparent at the top and the glowing lights on the dock get lost at that size. Many people who have been using the OS X will find the changes superflous as they’re really the first changes to the dock which have been purely cosmetic unlike previous ones which were of a functional nature. I recall trying out OS X prior to the inclusion of the black triangles. Their addition was what I feel really made having the dock in OS X worthwhile. They will be remembered fondly.One of the best improvements to Leopard are the new sharing abilities. Sharing a folder is now as easy as on XP as we’re not limited to the public folder anymore. Excellent stuff Apple! Stacks needs a bit more work to be useful, though admittedly it is some nice eye candy.The new Finder rocks with the new coverflow and quicklook features as well as its overall speed performance. Id’ like more customisability in the sidebar as its a bit cluttered and there’s no way to change the display order of the new additions (saved searches, shared, places…). the new breadcrumbs feature is excellent too. All that’s missing is a proper address bar. One great feature that’s greatly overlooked is the new icon view in both the finder, where previewing files now rivals Windows’ but also in the save / open dialogues. Anyone that works with thousands of graphics files will tell you that at times to find a particular image one has to rely on the thumbnail preview rather than name, date modified or spotlight tag! Spaces is an interesting addition of a feature that has been predominantly the domain of geekdom. Apple’s implementation of this (not new) idea (multiple desktops) is as slick as you’d expect. How it will integrate in an individual’s (and my own) work flow is still to be found out.With all the fuss about mail’s new stationery, which I think is excellent for those who like using that sort of thing, Mail has several other new offerings including To Do lists and Notes. It is important for mail to grow into more of a personal organiser / information manager and still retain its solid foundations and nimble execution . But I think Apple should aim at more power users rather than a student or whoever needs a grocery shopping list. I’d like collapsable to do items for example. Maybe apple should speak to the Omnigroup about some of their software. One feature in Mail that should find its way in finder is the integrated file activity monitor.One interesting longing omission from Apple’s OS is an equivalent of Windows’ paint. Don’t get me wrong I know it’s absolute rubbish but I’m sure Apple can do a better job. We’ve got TextEdit and the iLife apps and toys like Photobooth, but nothing in the OS or iLife that lets people create simple drawings! My major pet peeve so far with Leopard is the addition of a “more” item in the Finder’s contextual menu. When you right-click (c’mon who uses cmd click still?) on a file items such as toast’s mount it and burn it are tucked away in the more menu together with the automator and actions items. That’s my first look at the full version of Leopard. Definitely worth the upgrade? Depends on your use as Tiger is a very capable OS. However, though Leopard’s new features may not be revolutionary, they will mostly come in handy and will be sorely missed as soon as you go back to Tiger. The sharing improvements alone make Leopard a must have for many out there and once more applications take advantage of the new frameworks we’ll see many apps become Leopard only.