Friday - November 09, 2007
10.5 Reviewed!
Two weeks with my favorite big
cat.
I am an Apple addict. I admit it. I have an
unquenchable need to be an early adopter of new stuff. Apple is my pusher and
Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) is now my drug of choice. I am one of the 2 million Mac
users who have already upgraded, and even though it has only been 2 weeks I am
very happy that I did. Let me start with a sort of general impression of the
system, and then I will move into some
specifics.
First off, I think Leopard is by far the best version of Mac OS X to date. Not so much for the features and wow factor, but for the feel and polish. The system is much faster in my hands than other upgrades, not that the spinning beachball of death is gone, but it rarely makes an appearance, and this is on a 17 inch PowerBook G4 1GHz with only 512MB of RAM (just above the minimum requirements set out by Apple). One thing to note when I bought Leopard the Apple sales personnel made sure I knew what my machine was, and that it would run Leopard. It seems they want to make sure people aren’t disappointed when they get home and try to install it on an old G4. I am always a bit giddy and apprehensive when installing a new system, and this time was no different. I inserted the DVD and away I went. Initially selecting the Upgrade option, as I figured that would be the quickest way to get up and running with the new system. As it turns out, I was wrong. After waiting about 2 hours for the upgrade to complete, I was ready for the leopard experience to begin. Unfortunately when I rebooted I got a blank blue screen. I was despondent… not that I would lose my stuff (I have backups for just this problem) but for the first time an upgrade went horribly wrong, even though there were no errors in the process. Well, I decided that I would give the Archive and Install (preserving the users and network preferences) a shot. Not only did it install faster, but I rebooted into Leopard’s polished goodness and could now give it a spin. I immediately liked what I saw. The Finder is 100% unified, it all looks crisper, it’s faster, and Apple spent a lot of time getting the details right. It seems to be feature rich. With that I will get into some of the new features and what I think of them.
Time Machine was by far the feature I most wanted to look at. So I went ahead and plugged in my external FireWire drive that I had already formatted and partitioned into 3. Time Machine popped up and asked me if I wanted to use one of these for its backup, and I said yes. It proceeded to set it all up and start backing up to the drive. It took it a good 3-4 hours to complete the initial copying of files, but subsequent backups are very fast, obviously only copying what has changed. It is very easy to set up and it performs hourly backups that it then combines into a daily and weekly format. I am disappointed though in that it seems these backups are not actually true backups, but more of a database that it can use for the really cool Time Machine restore feature. It will not replace, in my mind, a true clone backup of your machine, but will be a lifesaver for the average person who until now has had no backup plan at all. It also appears that Time Machine was a bit rushed as features like being able to use a network drive are not available, although I am sure they will add them in the future.
The next thing I was looking forward to seeing was the new Finder with Cover Flow and Quick Look. I find this to be one of the best features of the system. The Finder has been unified so all apps and windows look the same, they have drastically improved the speed, and they have really improved the Help menu. This last one is the most improved feature of the Finder. I couldn’t use the previous help menu, as it was slow and cumbersome. They have now made it work like spotlight. It looks like spotlight, and it is fast. The Cover Flow view in the finder is just like that in iTunes. I was worried that it would really bog down the system and take too much time to navigate, but it really works well. There is no delay in scrolling and when you couple it with the ability to use Quick Look to look at a document, photo, movie without having to open up an additional app, that is a real timesaver in my mind. The rest of the Finder stuff seems to mostly be eye candy to me, and there is a lot of it about in this system, but its not unwanted or overstated.
The other feature I was interested in is Stacks. I can tell that there are going to be people that love Stacks, and a lot of people that hate it. I happen to love it! It really goes a long way to making organization easy, but the real bonus is that it really makes it easy to drill into folders with very little effort. I don’t really like the fan implementation, but I like the grid a lot. One thing to note is that Apple has eliminated the click and hold hierarchical menus in the dock, but I don’t miss them with Stacks (you can still click and hold to get the keep in dock menu). One thing I don’t particularly dig with Stacks is that the icon of the stack changes to whatever the first item is in the stack, for instance in the downloads stack if the first thing is a disk image file, that is what the icon is in the dock, not the folder containing the items, and it will change based on what is first.
Spaces is a very interesting feature allowing for multiple desktops. The default is 4 but you can make basically as many as you want. This allows you to set up workspaces for a given task. For example you can have one space that is for email and browsing, one for video and photo editing, one for coding, and one for chatting. You can have the apps open in the given space and when you switch from space to space the apps disappear and the new ones appear. Spaces is very handy for preventing screen clutter.
All in all, this OS is worth every penny. It is very mature, polished, and quite stable. There are some compatibility issues (like my beloved Fruit Menu), however the software developers are working on getting updates out as quickly as they can. I highly recommend this OS upgrade, although I cannot recommend the Upgrade method (use Archive and Install). It is highly refined with many improvements over Tiger. As with any new system there are hits and misses, but with this big cat there are definitely more hits than misses.
-Bunsen Honeydew
First off, I think Leopard is by far the best version of Mac OS X to date. Not so much for the features and wow factor, but for the feel and polish. The system is much faster in my hands than other upgrades, not that the spinning beachball of death is gone, but it rarely makes an appearance, and this is on a 17 inch PowerBook G4 1GHz with only 512MB of RAM (just above the minimum requirements set out by Apple). One thing to note when I bought Leopard the Apple sales personnel made sure I knew what my machine was, and that it would run Leopard. It seems they want to make sure people aren’t disappointed when they get home and try to install it on an old G4. I am always a bit giddy and apprehensive when installing a new system, and this time was no different. I inserted the DVD and away I went. Initially selecting the Upgrade option, as I figured that would be the quickest way to get up and running with the new system. As it turns out, I was wrong. After waiting about 2 hours for the upgrade to complete, I was ready for the leopard experience to begin. Unfortunately when I rebooted I got a blank blue screen. I was despondent… not that I would lose my stuff (I have backups for just this problem) but for the first time an upgrade went horribly wrong, even though there were no errors in the process. Well, I decided that I would give the Archive and Install (preserving the users and network preferences) a shot. Not only did it install faster, but I rebooted into Leopard’s polished goodness and could now give it a spin. I immediately liked what I saw. The Finder is 100% unified, it all looks crisper, it’s faster, and Apple spent a lot of time getting the details right. It seems to be feature rich. With that I will get into some of the new features and what I think of them.
Time Machine was by far the feature I most wanted to look at. So I went ahead and plugged in my external FireWire drive that I had already formatted and partitioned into 3. Time Machine popped up and asked me if I wanted to use one of these for its backup, and I said yes. It proceeded to set it all up and start backing up to the drive. It took it a good 3-4 hours to complete the initial copying of files, but subsequent backups are very fast, obviously only copying what has changed. It is very easy to set up and it performs hourly backups that it then combines into a daily and weekly format. I am disappointed though in that it seems these backups are not actually true backups, but more of a database that it can use for the really cool Time Machine restore feature. It will not replace, in my mind, a true clone backup of your machine, but will be a lifesaver for the average person who until now has had no backup plan at all. It also appears that Time Machine was a bit rushed as features like being able to use a network drive are not available, although I am sure they will add them in the future.
The next thing I was looking forward to seeing was the new Finder with Cover Flow and Quick Look. I find this to be one of the best features of the system. The Finder has been unified so all apps and windows look the same, they have drastically improved the speed, and they have really improved the Help menu. This last one is the most improved feature of the Finder. I couldn’t use the previous help menu, as it was slow and cumbersome. They have now made it work like spotlight. It looks like spotlight, and it is fast. The Cover Flow view in the finder is just like that in iTunes. I was worried that it would really bog down the system and take too much time to navigate, but it really works well. There is no delay in scrolling and when you couple it with the ability to use Quick Look to look at a document, photo, movie without having to open up an additional app, that is a real timesaver in my mind. The rest of the Finder stuff seems to mostly be eye candy to me, and there is a lot of it about in this system, but its not unwanted or overstated.
The other feature I was interested in is Stacks. I can tell that there are going to be people that love Stacks, and a lot of people that hate it. I happen to love it! It really goes a long way to making organization easy, but the real bonus is that it really makes it easy to drill into folders with very little effort. I don’t really like the fan implementation, but I like the grid a lot. One thing to note is that Apple has eliminated the click and hold hierarchical menus in the dock, but I don’t miss them with Stacks (you can still click and hold to get the keep in dock menu). One thing I don’t particularly dig with Stacks is that the icon of the stack changes to whatever the first item is in the stack, for instance in the downloads stack if the first thing is a disk image file, that is what the icon is in the dock, not the folder containing the items, and it will change based on what is first.
Spaces is a very interesting feature allowing for multiple desktops. The default is 4 but you can make basically as many as you want. This allows you to set up workspaces for a given task. For example you can have one space that is for email and browsing, one for video and photo editing, one for coding, and one for chatting. You can have the apps open in the given space and when you switch from space to space the apps disappear and the new ones appear. Spaces is very handy for preventing screen clutter.
All in all, this OS is worth every penny. It is very mature, polished, and quite stable. There are some compatibility issues (like my beloved Fruit Menu), however the software developers are working on getting updates out as quickly as they can. I highly recommend this OS upgrade, although I cannot recommend the Upgrade method (use Archive and Install). It is highly refined with many improvements over Tiger. As with any new system there are hits and misses, but with this big cat there are definitely more hits than misses.
-Bunsen Honeydew