Entries RSS · Some observations after a week on Mac OS X Leopard
Time for some trivia. I installed Leopard last week on my tiny iBook G4 (1,33 Ghz, 1 gig ram, new 160 GB 5400 rpm hard-drive), which is still happily churning away after two years. Here are some observations.
- I first did an upgraded install, but Leopard changed something unix-based and didn’t like my separate partitions for swap, applications, and users. I then did a clean install, using only separate partitions for users (which is very easy) and Time Machine, and everything works great. Of course, I backed up first!
- It runs just as fast as Tiger, some apps like Safari launch even faster. All effects are working on my humble G4, as far as I know.
- All of my software works, except Skype, which doesn’t like the Firewall, and Last.fm, which works, but acts funny.
- Not a minor update, Mail now supports setting different reply-to’s for different email-adresses. I don’t use its other new features, to-do’s, rss, ical-integration.
- I got the right-click tap on my trackpad-mouse now (previously Intel-only), which I’m having enormous difficulty getting used to. I still prefer the ctrl-click. Not sure how you Intel-guys cope with it.
- Spotlights is now enormously fast, and if it wasn’t for Quicksilver’s triggers, would be a great replacement for that.
- The firewall supports per-app rules now, except that I never really felt unsafe on my Mac, but OK.
- Grammar-check is not universally supported, only in Textedit, I think.
- Spaces rocks, 4 spaces to which I assign applications to open. So I now have a space for web, one for work, one for multimedia, and one for maintenance. In other words, no more minimising… ever! Works great, except when I switch and switch back it has the tendency to select the background window instead of the one I was using before. Apart from that, no slow-downs, no nothing.
- Fixing permissions in disk-utility is slow, sometimes takes 10 mins, and I’m not sure if it really works. I expect this to be fixed in the next update.
- Time-machine‘s backing up to a separate partitions, and works great. I backed up around 9.5 gigs yesterday, today, after 20 hourly backups, it’s only a few mb bigger. The space-effect looks pretty cool also, but a simple menu-bar icon instead of a dock-one would be nice. That said, I’m not sure I find the concept of backing up all that useful, to be honest
- Stacks are pretty useless, and actually annoy me.
- Airport has become much more stable, dropping my connections far less than before, with all other conditions unchanged.
- File-sharing has become slighly more pleasant.
- Cover-flow is useless, 99% of the time.
- Using the smart-folders like crazy.
- Software-update does something new with updates that ask you to restart. It logs out and then installs them.
- The dock looks great … on the right side of the screen.
- Quicklook is a wonder and has turned my Mac into media-heaven. Imagine pressing space (or cmd-alt-Y for full-screen) on any file in the finder and just viewing it without opening a separate app.
- Preview-app is still not better than Skim (the open source alternative to Acrobat)
- I haven’t really looked, but I expected an updated Worldbook to come with Leopard, I guess that only happens with new Macs.
- The print-this window has received an upgraded look.
- Still missing the ability to easily enter meta-data like tags.
- Spotlight now looks up dictionary words ; works as a calculator ; in the application-help, which is basically spotlight, you can enter any possible term on the menu and it will open it from there
- Dictionary and wikipedia = yum!
- Safari and Camino now look identical = scary! I haven’t used Firefox in over 6 months and no withdrawal symptoms.
- Safari’s “clip and add to dashboard” feature is as useless (or useful) as Dashboard, which I never use.
- Dashboard looks exactly the same: annoying and distracting.
- I don’t mind the see-through menu-bar.
- I haven’t used back-to-my-mac
And that’s about all I can think of. Overall, while it really does not put any extra strain on my system (which I expect to keep until 10.6 comes out or if a mini-MBP with a matte-screen is released), I consider it a substantial upgrade. Spaces, Quicklook, Spotlight’s extra capabilities all make it worthwhile, though I’m not sure whether it’s worth €129, more like half that. Some of the rest is nice, and I hope that 10.5.1 fixes some bugs like the disk-utility, and that more applications integrate more of Leopard’s functions, like grammar-check and Quicklook.
Mac OS X Leopard: 7/10
So what do you guys think? Is Leopard worth the upgrade? Is there an important feature that you like or are looking forward to in Leopard, and that I didn’t mention? Or is there a reason you won’t be using Leopard (yet)?
Vincent is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find all of his posts here, or check out his food & retail blog, updated nearly every day.
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Apple should really insist on Clean Installs.
Since Jaguar at least, they have avoided thousands of Mac Users from getting into real trouble.
Just a quick comment on File Sharing : apparently there are still some little issues, although the Finder is not freezing anymore when connecting to a server.
I would have really preferred to just to an upgrade to be honest. It’s just because of my weird partition-tricks in terminal that I fucked up Leopard, I think. That said, some people were complaining about upgrades too and it is an option, if somewhat invisible.
About file-sharing, I can happily report no more beach-balls. It also auto-detects and mounts(!) windows-computers on a LAN.
Thanks for this post Vincent, I’ve learnt a few things !
I always try to upgrade more than a month after the release. This way I shouldn’t be stucked waiting for 3rd party software upgrades…
I’m not excited by the new UI : icons, transparent dock & menu bar, wtf Mr. Jobs ?
But reading this post I can’t wait for spaces, files previews and a fast spotlight (at least)…
Like with any OS X update, it’s not so impressive, but the small tweeks should improve the long-term usuability
The transparent menu-bar looks ok. If you use a dark background it looks identical to the Tiger-one. But since it doesn’t amplify colours, it mutes them, they can be be tuned out pretty quickly. The spotlight-icon on the right and the apple-icon on the left are both black now btw. So, in my opinion, it’s become even less distracting then before.
And the dock, well there’s some hacks on either macosxhints or lifehacker for converting it into a 2-d normal-looking thing. Of course, auto-hiding the bar always helps
Ah yeah, I forgot that the folder-icons all look the same, which sucks. I hope someone releases some kind of easy (!) fix for that too.
Yep, the choice of almost similar icons for the folders is an absolute disaster.
Despite those minor errors, Leopard seems pretty strong. I am a bit dismayed though about the withdrawal of full ZFS support, resolution independance, and Time Machine’s backups through Airport.
The latter two are killer feaures, which could have made me buy a Mac finally !
Resolution independence, from what I understand, is possible in Leopard, but not yet turned on. The problem is that the new applications built for Leopard need to support it, and that it’s meant for displays with very high resolutions, and which 99% of people obviously don’t have yet. Nevertheless, I expect it to come out not too long from now (knock on wood).
Time Machine over “the air” is also possible, but after some hacking. It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple decided to just enable it out of the box at some point.
The status of ZFS is not quite clear. I remember reading that there are stability-issues with it. The guy from Ars Technica, who probably wrote the best, and most technical review of Leopard, expected significant filesystem-upgrades to come in 10.6 only.
Time Machine “over the Air” is a really nice feature. Maybe someday we’ll find cheap, decent Airport stations with fast&large hard drives inside ?
This would be awesome and Time Machine would be really useful in that case.
Leopard on my PB G4 1.25Ghz : it rocks.
TimeMachine : the one app which is MANDATORY for The Rest Of Us. It’s moving the daily use of a computer to the next level : you don’t have to worry about copying/backing up your files anymore, the computer does it for you.
CoverFlow : totally disagree with you Vincent. It’s the feature that makes the Finder useful again, together with QuickLook. The thing is, CoverFlow will bring the most of its power to the forthcoming MacTouch. Plus, don’t forget the new iMac *looks* like the iPhone : it was designed to make people used to it, so Apple can unleash the MultiTouch capabilities to its iMac line as soon as the idea goes mainstream.
Marc, just a quick question if I may: is there something you don’t like in one of all Apple products or are Apple products all perfect?
I don’t like coverflow for practical reasons. I have a 12″ screen and coverflow doubles the size that the finder takes in it. On a big 15+” screen, it may be usable I agree. But generally speaking, when I dig in the finder I prefer having a choice of what I preview, and Quick Look gives me that option. You can also have a similar effect with Quick Look by previewing a file with space and navigating with the arrow keys to other files. Works great for pictures, videos, and similar.
About the multi-touch… well, we’ll cross that bridge when it comes.
@jeremy: that’s a dangerous question. For some people, it’s like asking whether there’s anything they don’t like about their wife
Of course I make no assumptions about Marc in this regard.
@Jeremy : as of today, I’m the proud owner and daily user of a 3-yrs old PowerBook which survived a 400°C fire, the happy owner of a 1st generation iPod which plays audio in my car quite well, and the soon-to-be owner of some brand new Apple laptop (don’t know which one so far) and refurbished Intel Mini (for the kids). On top, two other iPods at home : a 1st gen iPod Mini and a 2d gen Shuffle (the little tiny one).
Still, there are a few things I don’t like with Apple, such as a couple of uggly behaviour of OS X.
See, I’ve lost one hour this morning with my office PC, which started the day not recognizing the WiFi base station here, then got blown away by… MS MediaPlayer11 updates, which forced a restart w/o any warning. Such of experience rarely occur with a Mac, at least since MacOS 10.1
I know you’re MS, but : you should always consider the User Experience and the Whole Product Solution as your two key basic elements when designing a new product or service… That’s where Apple is pretty strong, and MS pretty weak.
Upgrade on my PB G4 1,5GHz went smoothly. Absolutely no problems.
Quick look is where it’s at. I mean, it’s insane that I can browse videos, word documents, powerpoint docuemtsn, pdf documents, text files, pictures, music… in seconds just by clicking space bar. And It Works. The other niceness is the universal icon preview, it’s cool that the icon is the preview in some cases. With ever-increasing resolutions, this approach makes sense.
I’ve Time Machine on, but haven’t really used it. I think both Quick Look and Time Machine will become absolutely terrific as soon as Apple’s and 3rd party software start to leverage them. I imagine the power of Time Machine is more apparent when it’s intergated with Word or Photoshop or similar.
Due to my background choice (Oscar the Fisherman by David Lanham), I don’t notice transparent menu bar that much and thanks to Quicksilver, I use Dock rarely these days. I actually don’t have any problems with the new dock. Sure, I’d love to have the same view on the bottom as if set to left/right, but … I think the new dock is ok. The candy-coloured close-min-max-buttons are far more irritating than the new dock.
My main gripe about Leopard? OK, so they added a recent ruby build (yay!) and added readline-support (double-yay!) for irb (interactive ruby shell), but ffs I can’t use scandinavian letters in irb!
There are lots of little things that have been fixed, which had caused daily irritation in Tiger. They were so minor details that I’ve already forgotten what they were.
The problem with ZFS, I think, is that neither Apple or Sun has managed to make it work as a boot partition yet. I might be wrong, but even in Solaris you have to use something else as your main parition.
I have the same view on the dock on the bottom as on thesides. I think I used a macosxhints-method, pretty much 5 mins after I installed Leopard.
About 3rd party integration in Time Machine. That would be awesome. I don’t expect either Adobe or Microsoft to jump on that boat anytime soon, however. All the other cocoa-apps now competing with their softwares, will be head over heels, if Apple makes it easy.
I hear a big issue for developers is also the lack of Java 6 in Leopard.
I am not happy with Time Machine. I had to restore from back up and it was a complete mess. My MBP is set up very different from the standard set up. I have installed a lot of additions webdev stuff that is Unix rather than Apple and Time Machine made a complete mess of all of it. Time Machine restored to the disk install state and I had to do all the updates and changes after the restore. This is not good enough and I would rather have a real backup and restore system. Apature did not work after restore either and I had to reinstall Apature as well. The whole thing was bad.
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