Yet another review of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) is a fine update to Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), which was already quite solid as a day-to-day operating system. I’m going to focus here on the most prominent changes to the user interface; these are my observations after a month of using Leopard (10.5.1) day-to-day in a production environment.
The Finder
The transparent menubar is a minor irritation, but to me it’s not the big deal lots of people are making it out to be. Choose your desktop photo carefully, which you should anyway if you actually store anything on your Desktop, and it’ll be fine. In fact, I like having a colour-cast to the main menubar, as it can subtly set it apart from the rest of the interface.
Quick Look/CoverFlow
I expected this to feel gimmicky, but it’s proven useful. The only downside is that Quick Look is able to render Word files better than TextEdit: e.g. QL will show a document’s formatting (headings, lists, etc.), but the file, when actually opened in TextEdit, won’t. I guess that’s what Pages is for (not surprisingly, it does better than TextEdit, but Pages doesn’t ship free with Leopard). Bottom line: it feels like TextEdit should be able to handle this formatting info if Quick Look can.On a large screen, CoverFlow is even useful on a folder full of text files. Who would’ve thought?
Window zooming
When is Apple going to fix this behaviour? It’s been broken since System 7 was introduced. Microsoft gets this right: it should toggle between full-screen and whatever size you make it manually. The stupid green button at every window’s top-left isn’t just useless, it’s irritating. Its behaviour is maddenningly inconsistent, and — in a near-prescient way — it almost never does what you want it to. Some examples:Say you’ve got a Finder window in icon view, and you can only see a quarter of its icons. You’ve got room to make the window large enough to see all of the icons; clicking the zoom button should maximize the window so you can see the largest possible percentage of its contents, or just big enough to see all of them. That would make sense. But no, it will make it a different size and shape, but it will often make it narrower and taller, often resulting in fewer icons being visible, while having lots of wasted, empty space in the window at right.Maybe this is, in part, a result of my preference for having icon view sorted by name. I don’t know. I do know that it drives me mad, especially since, in many apps, it behaves the way I want: in Mail, iCal, and iPhoto it makes the window fill the screen. In GarageBand, which, bizarrely, opens with about an inch of Desktop showing around the edges, the zoom button maximizes the window.Then again, in Safari, the zoom button first tries to fit the content of the web page, but clicking it again makes the window some random size (too small for its contents, naturally).In iChat, zooming makes the window full height, but doesn’t change the width.In QuickTime Player, it sometimes does nothing, but sometimes it toggles between 100% and 200% view. Sometimes it moves the window without resizing it.Then there’s iTunes, the red-headed stepchild of zooming behaviour: it turns the app into a floating palette. What are they thinking?It’s all so arbitrary and inconsistent. I’m sure there’s some logic behind all of this somewhere, but so far it eludes me.
Grid Spacing
This is a good thing, overall, but they’ve missed out on an important feature: titles get truncated when the spacing is tightened (to allow more icons to fit the window), and you can’t reveal them unless you select and hit return. They should be expanded on mouse-over. Isn’t tool-tip functionality pretty much a given by this point?
Icons
The new Finder icons are different than the old ones. Why so much has been written about this is beyond me.Under Tiger, you could specify certain apps to open any files of a given suffix, such as .txt, and you still can in Leopard. In Tiger, though, having .txt files opened by BBEdit gave them all a nice BBEdit icon; under Leopard, they suffer from a generic icon.A wonderful enhancement with icons under Leopard can be seen with local .HTML files: if the path to the page’s CSS is relative, then the Finder will actually render the file’s icon as it would appear in a browser. Obviously, it won’t be rendering anything that requires a server interaction, but it’s pretty handy nonetheless.
QuickTime
No visible enhancements to anything but codecs. It’s still not half the editing app version 6.5 was (which I keep around for just that reason). No new QuickTime VR functionality (still can’t run VR files properly in Keynote, alas), no more Flash compatibility (with the 7.3.1 security update), and slightly Leopard-updated chrome on the player. Somewhere between sad and expected. In the end, Apple seems to view this once-killer technology as mere plumbing: still-impressive and capable plumbing, but purely behind-the-scenes stuff.
The Dock
I’m not one of those who can get excited about the Dock, either way. Ooh, it’s faux 3D now. Whatever. The Dock should be hidden when you’re not using it, so it doesn’t matter what it looks like except when Jobs is showing it on a 30-foot screen. And even though I use (and love) LaunchBar, the Dock remains useful to me on a daily basis.I don’t see the usefulness of Stacks, especially in terms of how they’re rendered in the Dock. I plan to avoid this feature until they allow custom icons, or come up with a better visual representation: simply showing a document or folder doesn’t provide any visual cue that it’s something other than a document or a folder.
Spotlight
While Spotlight seems faster, I’m not running it on the same hardware I ran Tiger on; with two variables, I can’t say Spotlight is entirely responsible to the speed increase. It does seem to settle on results more quickly: where Tiger would engage you in a frustrating, never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole™, constantly moving results around as it changed its mind about which were most relevant. It’s much more responsive when typing, too, which significantly reduces the annoyance factor.
Dashboard
Almost as useless as before, but without the 30ish-second delay on first use. Again, maybe the new hardware is just that much better…
Searching seems much faster and better. Quick Look in Mail is great, for the most part. The one big miss is the “Save” attachments button. It has a downward-pointing triangle after the word “Save”, a symbol that, by convention, indicates a drop-down menu, allowing the user choices. In Tiger (and before), this button opened a dialog that allowed me to save attachments where they belonged (new images from clients would be saved into an appropriate client or job folder). Now, they go directly to Downloads. Better than the Desktop, but not where I want them, either. Now I have to go fish them out of Downloads. An unnecessary extra step.Big misses on Mail? Not buying-up and integrating Michael Tsai’s SpamSieve, Aaron Harnly’s Widescreen plugin or, for bonus points, Mail Act-On.
Safari
Since Safari 3 was in public beta for Tiger and Windows, it’s been written up extensively elsewhere. The new tabbing features, warning on closing windows with multiple tabs and the ability to recover closed windows are wonderful.
iCal
The drawer, where Tiger’s iCal event details were listed, is gone. You have to double-click events to be able to see details on them. This is so non-obvious that it took me a lot of poking around. Double-clicking is for opening apps; not for reading my schedule. Big step backwards. Drawers seem to be on their way out; look for them to be gone completely in the next major OS release (but vestiges will remain for 3rd party developers who’ve used them heavily).
BootCamp
Again, using Parallels has eliminated the need for BootCamp, but it’s nice to have the option, since it’s apparently better for 3D graphic-intensive applications, like games.
Spaces
Haven’t played with this much. Having multiple displays makes this rather superfluous. Good displays are so cheap these days, there’s no reason to live with one screen. They’re not so good on airplanes, though, so I’ll have to look into Spaces eventually.
Time Machine
Haven’t touched this, either.
Help
Like Spotlight results in Tiger, Help is a floating window that belongs to no app, and can’t be chosen from a list view or with Exposé. Another red-headed stepchild.
Final verdict?
I’ve listed a lot of annoyances here, but that’s only because I’ve long held Apple to such a high standard. I’m quite happy with Leopard, and I’m sure there will be many more small enhancements and improvements that will continue to delight.
Migration Postscript
A good friend had a horrid experience migrating from an iBook to a MacBook:After migrating her work files to the new machine, she had intended to continue using the iBook at home, but deleted everything from its hard drive while it was connected to the MacBook.To her, the disk on her MacBook’s Desktop containing all of her personal files was stuff that had been copied from her iBook; it was, after all, on her MacBook. It might seem obvious to an advanced user, but it wasn’t on her MacBook, it was simply available to her MacBook.In other words, a mounted remote hard disk is a concept that doesn’t exist: in her mind, her mounted iBook’s hard disk was data on her MacBook; and therefore safe to delete.Apple should make this clearer, even though it’s an edge case.
