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Leopard review

Leopard is the fifth upgrade to the Mac OS X operating system family. It only comes with a few major new features but what it does very well is that it continues refining the operating system and making the user experience more enjoyable. Most of the 300 new features are minor tweaks to the system, but adding up all these small upgrades makes for a very good upgrade. I ordered Leopard from the Apple store, and it was delivered to me 30 minutes before it was set to launch in stores. Below are some of my experiences and thoughts of using Leopard for a couple of days.

Installation

The installation went very smoothly, I inserted the Leopard DVD and rebooted, pressing “C” to boot from the disc. The install took about 45 minutes all-in-all on my MacBook Pro. Check out the unboxing and installation picture tour

First impressions

The first differences you notice when switching from Tiger is the transparent menu bar and the 3D dock. The dock looks nice, even though not offering much new functionality. The new stacks look cool, and offer a quick way of accessing documents and programs — but only if you have a relatively small amount of them. Having too much stuff in a stack makes it very cluttered and difficult to find what you are looking for.

All windows in Leopard now have a unified look. Having different window styles for different applications in Tiger didn’t really make sense, having a unified look throughout the entire system gives a much nicer and more professional look.

Starting programs seems much faster than it did in Tiger, although this may also have to do with my clean install. Starting Safari now takes about as long as opening a new Safari window in Tiger.

Programs and features

Finder

The new Finder has a more refined and compact look. The sidebar looks like the one iTunes has. It is divided into different categories, each collapsable by pressing the triangle next to the heading. If you are in a network with other computers you will also have a category for shares, under which found network shares will be listed. It seems to work much better than in tiger, after just booting up my laptop it already listed my HTPC under shares. Network sharing in Tiger was one of my main complaints, I’m very happy that they addressed this issue. My only gripe with the new networking is that it takes ages for it to find new computers, and the old “Network” has been hidden under Go->Network or shift-cmd-K. It would be nice if Finder scanned the network for new shares every time you switch networks. Here’s a post on what I wish Apple would change to make network sharing work better

My main complaint about the new Finder is with window sizes. The initial size was too small, giving scroll bars to view the entire sidebar. That was of course easily fixed, I resized the window to my liking and closed it, making it the default size. But if I select Cover Flow mode the window size I used for column view is too small, the preview pictures aren’t much bigger than icons in icon view. If i now resize the window to make Cover Flow look good, it will be unnecessarily large for column view, which I use most of the time. I would like to have different default sizes depending on the selected view mode in updates, preferably even an option to give different folders different default views. So for example if I’m in my pictures folder I’d like to automatically use Cover Flow, but when I’m browsing through a programming project with hundreds of source files, I would prefer using column view.

Quick Look

Even though I didn’t initially see much value in this feature from watching the screencasts, I must admit that now that I actually have it, I use it constantly. If all I need to do is check that this is in fact the right document or picture I’m looking for I only need to press space and to get an instant peek at that file without having to open up any new applications.

Mail

The new Mail application really surprised me positively. And I don’t mean the new To-Do and Note features. Setting up my 4 different mail accounts has never been this easy before. Many clients have before tried guessing the right servers and settings for my account, but have always failed and left me configuring them manually. To my great surprise setting up my mail accounts in the new Mail app went very smoothly.

The only minor hiccup I encountered was setting up my gmail account — mail offered to do a completely automatic setup of gmail for me and I agreed. Mail then enabled POP for my gmail account and proceeded to add my account. The only problem here was that gmail announced IMAP support a few days back and I would have preferred to use that instead. Mail didn’t however delete any of the messages in my account even after retrieving them, so all I had to do was delete the automatically set-up account and add the account like I had done with the others, selecting IMAP.

I’m not really the kind of person that emails himself to-do notes, so unfortunately I don’t really get much use of those features. I tried them and they seemed to work as advertised, but I’d still rather have my to-do list and notes not cluttering up my mailbox.

Time Machine

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I had some trouble setting up Time Machine. I had to cancel the first backup as I had to turn of my laptop. Doing this apparently corrupted the backup database and made Time Machine fail on every successive backup attempt with the error message: “Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume.” Check out the article on this problem for further info.

Spaces

Now this is a feature I have been waiting for a long time. I’ve been using various Linux-distributions as my main operating system for the past 6-7 years and have grown accustomed to having several desktops to my disposal when working. This was one of my main complaints in when I first switched to Tiger, even though Exposé gave me a chance get a quick glance of all my open windows, it still felt cramped. I tried Virtue Desktops, but it wasn’t really stable enough for actual use. It was also very difficult to get a view of where different apps were and moving them from one desktop to another.

I’m very happy with the how Spaces turned out. It is all that was hoping for, maybe even more. It makes managing and using the spaces very easy and intuitive. The transitions are quick and non-obtrusive. The Exposé like overview is very handy, even allowing you to drag and drop single windows from one space to another or switching around the order of the spaces.

If you haven’t used multiple desktops before, it may take a while to get your head around the concept and fully utilize them. Once you however get used to having all that extra desktop real-estate there is no going back.

System preferences

Many of the items in System Preferences have been re-organized and made more logical. Network settings are now all under “Network”, no longer split into “Network” and Connection Manager.

The “Sharing” panel is also upgraded, having a column for different things you can share and one for settings for that option. If you select file sharing in the left column you will get options for setting up file sharing in the right column. This feels much more logical than before.

The firewall settings have been moved to the “Security” panel. The firewall in leopard can be set up on a per-application basis, but for some reason they seem to have left out the ability to manually specify ports to open in the firewall.

Front Row

Front Row now uses the same interface as Apple TV and seems much faster than Front Row in Tiger. The fading away desktop effect is gone. Still, my biggest complaint with Front Row remains — I want to be able to use it on an external monitor like my TV without having to make the TV my main display.

Safari

Leopard ships with Safari 3.0.4, so if you have been using the public beta of Safari or the WebKit nightlies you will already be familiar with the new Safari. I don’t know wether it is my clean install, Leopard or the new Safari — but this thing is lightning fast. It starts up in no time and everything about it seems faster than before. Loading RSS feed with lots of images seems much faster than before and if you enable “Highlight New Articles” in the preferences it will put a nice light blue rectangle underneath the new articles.

Spotlight

Now supports “String searches” AND boolean conditions! Wohoo! Also, it seems to work much faster than in Tiger. Searches also include dictionary entries and you can do calculations directly from spotlight like with google calculator.

Photo Booth

I still haven’t got the new backdrops effects to work properly with any lighting or background, it seems as if you need a solid-color background and pretty good lighting to get this to work. The backdrops themselves seem to work well and look really nice. You can add own pictures and movies as custom backdrops.

Third party application support

Adium X

Adium X seems to work very well in Leopard, no issues to report.

Growl

The almost necessary add-on when using Adium and other chat programs is Growl. It also works fine with this new version of OS X.

Skype

Also no problems here.

Parallels

The virtual machine itself works fine, but it did display an error about not being able to mount the XP hard drive so I could access it from OS X.

Firefox

No problems here.

Opera

Everyone’s favorite Norwegian browser plays well with 10.5

Pixelmator

My new favorite image editing program works, if possible, even faster in Leopard!

Textmate

I’m writing this from using TextMate, everything seems to work fine. Even compiling LaTeX documents works after installing MacTeX. Hooray!

Transmission

Works fine.

NetBeans

No problems using NetBeans either. I installed the Xcode tools from the Leopard DVD first to make sure I had all the needed development tools.

iPhoto 04

The only program in iLife I use, so I didn’t feel compelled enough to go out and buy the iLife 08 just for an upgrade to iPhoto. Luckily iPhoto 04 works well in Leopard also.

Missing Sync

This is the only program I’ve found so far that has problems with Leopard. Mark/Space are promising an update within 90 days, but that’s a quite long time without syncing my phone.

Security

Leopard is also the most secure OS X to date. Some of the key changes to security are:

• Tagging downloaded applications The first, and only the first, time you run an application you have downloaded you will be aware of the fact that this is a downloaded application and from where it has been downloaded. You can then abort the execution if you haven’t downloaded a new version of this application because it is then most likely something you do not want to run.
• Application based firewall
• Sandboxing Applications like Bonjour, Quick Look and Spotlight run in a sandboxed mode, making exploitation of bugs in these applications useless.
• Library Randomization This is a feature that Vista and Linux distributions also use, it works by placing the system code at random locations in the memory. Before hackers have always known exactly where to place code to get it executed by the system. All they had to do was find a security hole in an application that enabled them to move the data into the memory. With library randomization a hacker cannot know where to copy his code even if he finds a security hole in some application.
• SMB packet signing Adds additional security when using the SMB protocol for file sharing with Windows computers.

Conclusions

Leopard is by no means a revolutionary update. It does however contain many very useful and welcome additions to the operating system. It increases security without burdening the user with endless prompts, it increases productivity with more desktop space, and it works faster than its predecessor. Applications made for Tiger mostly work just fine with Leopard. All hardware I have worked fine right out of the box, no driver hunting was necessary.

If none of these reasons seem enough to justify upgrading, you will be fine using Tiger. If, however, you felt that these are features you’ve been waiting for, you’ll definitely be pleased with the new Mac OS X 10.5. At the very least it makes getting switching to Mac even more worthwhile.

If you have any questions about Leopard that I didn’t mention in the article, add a comment and I’ll try to answer them.

As always, we appreciate your comments and diggs, so keep them coming :)