Living without Leopard… for now

After what seemed like an interminable wait, Apple finally released version 10.5 of its Mac OS X operating system, codenamed Leopard.  Two years in the making, this release promises the biggest leap forward since Mac OS X first hit the shelves, with over 300 new features, many of which have been given a big thumbs-up from critics worldwide.  It seems that once again Apple has outdone themselves, and has avoided many of the pitfalls Microsoft fell into with Vista.  It all seems quite rosy for Apple right now.

However, my question is this: is it a real step forward, or is it just hype and a lot of extra sparkle?  What can Leopard offer that we haven’t got already?  In this review I shall go through some of the big features of Mac OS X 10.5 and look at how significant they really are. 

A unified GUI

In the beginning there was the pin-stripe.  Then came brushed metal.  Then came a smooth metallic texture.  Mac users have long been bewildered at how all these different styles somehow still pop up in Tiger for no apparent reason, with no continuity or consistency.  Finder is brushed metal, iTunes is smooth metal, and Mail is smooth but with a completely different icon treatment.  Why, Apple, why??

Leopard promises to sort all that out, unifying everything with the same smooth metal treatment as has appeared in iTunes for the last few releases.  Great, thanks for that.  However, there’s nothing new in that - Uno has been offering that option for a while now, providing a freeware tool to change the interface of pretty much all Mac apps.  I have that installed on my Tiger at the moment, and have thereby eradicated all trace of brushed metal, which cleans things up significantly.  Sure, Leopard has done a good job in providing that as standard, but it’s not new, and it’s far from ground-breaking.

New Finder

As the primary method of finding and sorting files, the Finder is probably one of the most used programs on the Mac.  In Leopard Apple introduce Cover Flow, which has already proven to be superb in iTunes and on various new iPods.  By showing every file as a thumbnail, Cover Flow allows you to skim through your files graphically, so that you can visually see what each file is, rather than relying on file names.

That’s fine if you’re working with a file type that Leopard recognises and can read, but what about the others?  I have no idea what the limit is, but I’m sure there will be lots of files from third-party programs that will still just appear as icons, regardless of how clever Cover Flow is.  And in such cases, all you will end up looking at is a very large icon, which is no help at all.  Neither does it help when you have multiple versions of the same image, saved in different formats (such as GIF, PNG, JPG, PSD and AI).  Great idea, I’m just not sure it’ll be all that useful all the time.  Still, I don’t think anyone else is providing anything similar to the Cover Flow system, so Apple has cornered that market.  For now I’ll just have to make do with making my icons bigger.

Time Machine

Oh, how the critics have raved over this one!  No one likes the hassle of backing up their files and setting up complicated scheduling and using up masses of disk space that you’ll never need to go back to.  Until everything goes wrong, of course, which is when you usually find your backups are insufficient.  Time Machine makes backups a dream, almost a game, with it’s slick and hypnotic interface and one-click settings.  Just switch it on and it starts working, and very intelligently by the sounds of it.  That day’s changes are recorded every hour, then at the end of the day they are compiled into one daily record; daily records are kept for a month, then those dailys are combined, and so on.  All the changes are recorded incrementally, which is the industry standard really, and ensures that disk space isn’t wasted unnecessarily.  All in all, you can’t really fault it.  Sure, some might think the interface is superfluous, but when you think about it, isn’t all interface superfluous?  After all, Mac OS X is built on a Unix subframe, so you hard-core users can just do everything from command line, right?  Apple argues that a beautiful interface encourages people to use it, and in the case of backups, I’d say that was a great idea.

Stacks

There has been much hype about this dock feature too.  Very pretty, nicely animated, pretty cool.  But is it actually useful?  I already have a folder on my dock that works as a downloads folder, and all my browsers and suchlike have been set to store downloaded files in there rather than on my desktop.  Clicking on that folder brings up Finder and all those hundreds of files, clicking and holding brings up a scrolling menu.  Stacks takes that idea and prettifies it.  That’s it.  If you have five or six items in there, the stack actually looks and works quite well, and if you have a couple of dozen files it opens up in a popup box, which is fairly good too.  But what I’ve not seen is how it handles stacks with hundreds of files in.  I know that’s taking it to the extreme, but if it’s a download folder I’m likely to fill that up fairly quickly and never get round to sorting it out because it’s tucked away out of sight.  The prettiness of Stacks might encourage me to use it for a while, but I’m fairly sure that under heavy use it’ll be no more useful than a simple folder.

Desktop

The desktop has been given an overhaul, as you would expect, and has introduced some neat visual treats.  The dock has to be one of my favourites - each icon on the dock (which is now more 3Dish) has its own reflection on the dock surface, in iconic (excuse the pun) Apple style.  More than that, windows on the desktop also have their reflection on the dock when you move them close enough.  Very cool.  Unnecessary, but very cool.

There are, however, some bits I’m not so keen on.  The semi-transparent menu bar at the top of the screen raised more than a few eyebrows when it was demonstrated in pre-releases, although thankfully it’s less transparent in the final release than it used to be.  Nonetheless, it would be good to have a control somewhere to make the transparency user-determinable, depending on the individual’s taste.  Sadly that doesn’t appear to be included.  The icons have been changed too, from the cool 3D semi-transparent ones we’ve all come to love on Mac OS X, to a flatter variety with significantly less visual pizzazz.  Disappointing.  Still, icons can be changed, so it’s no big problem.

Also missing is the blue Apple logo and Spotlight icon in the menu bar.  I liked that Apple always offered the choice between the colourful Aqua colour scheme and the less distracting Graphite one.  It seems a shame then that Apple should force us to live with a colourless menu bar in Leopard.  Also, and this is an enormous issue that I’ve not seen anyone else complain about yet, where are the rounded corners in the top left and right of the screen???  Mac OS has ALWAYS had those, and it set the operating system apart from the competition because of it.  Yes, it was unnecessary and didn’t do anything, but it was a design feature that will be sorely missed, if only by me.

Spaces

Again, nothing new here.  Linux has had virtual desktops for years, and third-party add-ons have been available for pretty much every operating system since desktops were first able to show your family holiday snaps.  Spaces jumps on the bandwagon, with little more than some Apple-esque animations and some easy usability.  I’m currently using VirtueDesktops, which is free and works very well, and even makes use of the Quartz engine for its animations and transitions.  I’ve set mine up with four virtual desktops, and switching between them is as easy as holding the Apple key and nudging my mouse to one side of the screen.  You can set yours up however you like, as no doubt you can do with Space too.  In fact, I’m not even sure what the difference is between Spaces and VirtueDesktops, except that Spaces puts yet another icon in your dock and uses a better Expose-type pager.  Actually no, tell a lie, the ability to move application windows around in that pager is very neat, and not something I’ve found to work in any other virtual desktop app I’ve tried so far.  In Spaces the pager shows a live preview of each desktop, and from there you can literally drag and drop windows from one desktop to another, and it’ll remember to open them in that desktop next time too.  That’s neat, and although VirtueDesktops offers the same functionality it looks like Spaces does it better.  So I’ll concede that Spaces might actually be better than the competition, ever so slightly.

EDIT: I’ve just discovered that development has ceased on the VirtueDesktops project, so there will be no more updates.  Shame.  Still, with Spaces as the competition, I’m not altogether surprised.

Spotlight

Yes, Spotlight has been improved.  It now integrates nicely with other applications, drilling down to find more specific information.  For instance, typing in a mathematical sum will summon the Calculator app and give you the answer, right there in Spotlight, without having to open Calculator itself.  Neat.  You can also launch applications from Spotlight, and search across networks.

However, at least some of that functionality can already be achieved using other software, such as the highly acclaimed Quicksilver, which I have come to use on a daily basis for all sorts of things.  I’m not going to go into what can and can’t be done in Quicksilver, there are plenty of other tutorials that go into detail on that topic, but let it be said that there is very little that a combination of Tiger’s Spotlight and Quicksilver can’t do, and much that Leopard’s Spotlight can’t do that the addition of Quicksilver can.

iChat

The latest version of iChat gives us some cool features, like green-screen background effects, warping visual effects, and you can even let someone else control your computer if you let them.  As before, iChat is seamlessly integrated with AIM and Jabber chat protocols, and apparently the tabbed chatting is now greatly improved.

However, my biggest gripe with iChat is its lack of expandability.  I would dearly love to use it to chat to my MSN buddies, but that’s not supported.  Neither can I change the look and feel of iChat with a skin, or add in custom plugins.  As a result, I’m using AdiumX, which is a superb alternative that works with pretty much all chat clients (except Skype) and is highly customisable.  It’s also free, which is a bonus.  What Adium doesn’t do is audio or video conferencing, but I have Skype for that anyway.  So I’m in no hurry to use the latest version of iChat, as it doesn’t really give me what I want.  Sorry Apple, you’ll have to do better than that.

In conclusion

Long-awaited Leopard has a lot to live up to, and on the whole the user experience seems to be exceptionally good.  I have every expectation that Apple shares will boom, again, and more home users will make the jump from their tawdry and unresponsive PCs to the delights of Mac OS X 10.5.  However, Tiger users can still enjoy similar levels of functionality without having to spend a fortune.  Yes, an unaltered version of Leopard will be miles better than an unaltered version of Tiger, but Tiger with a few carefully chosen additions can still be a contender, and can still knock the socks off Vista without really trying.  If you are on Tiger now and would like some of the Leopard features, take a look at the software I’ve listed below - you might be able to hold off upgrading to Leopard for just a little bit longer…

Don’t get me wrong, Apple have done a superb job in creating the next incarnation of their amazing operating system, and I’m looking forward to the day I can afford to upgrade my own machine, but for now there is no reason to be down in the dumps about having to stick with Tiger.  There are a lot of apps out there that will help you along in the meantime, and until Apple stops support for Tiger we can all quite happily continue running our old computers without worrying that we’re missing out on too much.

Matthew