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| Entry tags: | mac, tech |
22 days of Leopard - with lots of pics!
So, on Saturday 3rd Nov. my shiny copy of Leopard arrived and I promptly installed it on my Macbook.. No problems there, perfect first time.
Then I proceeded to install it on our other two Macs...
I know, i know, my setup is hardly sleek and minimalist.. This is only one of two(or three?) screens too..Next I went for
my G5, which took about a days worth of faffing around. My dodgy USB setup and flashed,
technically unsupported "Windows" video card were worrying me.. My 500GB USB HD was making the whole setup Kernel Panic frequently. Os X Kernel Panics are essentially the same as a windows Blue Screen Of Death, apart from they're grey. Checked the logs and sorted that out by swapping around all my USB stuff.
Before my G5 was done we also did a problem free upgrade on Kat's Macbook Pro..
Well, the wow starts now..? :P Leopard is nice! Everything runs faster, even on my "antiquated" G5.. Seriously, that blew me away - I was expecting old hardware to choke on the new effects, but (as everything is multi CPU/core aware?) it flies now. I can't even make my unsupported ATI card crash anymore (touch wood)..
The strangest part; all of the things I thought were hardware/incompatibility glitches on my G5 (the inability to wake from sleep caused by dodgy USB stuff, annoying ATI card freezes) seem to be *fixed* now. So it's faster and more stable using random hacked together PC components.. Excellent, and unexpected.
PositiveTime Machine not only works well but looks ridiculously over the top whilst doing it. I've disabled all of my cobbled together backup scripts - this keeps an up to date image of any changes i make transparently. Very happy about how easy it makes the process. Anyone who hasn't seen this, it means you can rewind the system, or any file, in hourly increments.The OS interface is much more consistent now. No brushed metal ugliness.Everything I've tried still seems to work!Quicklook is instantanious on both my machines, and works flawlessly - very.. VERY nice. This is beyond useful and quickly becomes indispensable. (loads any previewable doc, psd, pdf, jpg, etc. in a popup window without loading any apps.Finally the ability to change the icon grid size in the Finder.. I don't understand how that took them so long to sort out.Virtual Desktops work about as well as I can imagine they could. I have my second screen set up with IM, IRC, EyeTV etc and they hover there happily while sliding between the main monitor's spaces. Clears up lots of space for Photoshop. On the Macbook running parallels I can easily have one "Space" for XP so i can Alt-tab and it slides between the two OS.. Network prefs consolidated into one much nicer prefpane, yay!Coverflow is actually really.. REALLY nice, especially in folders full of images. Runs smoothly on both machines.Dictionary and Calculator are now rigged up to the spotlight search function.. type a word or sum into the corner box and get the answer instantly without any other apps loaded..Spotlight is *much* faster now, making it a viable app launcher. It supports Boolean terms now too, usefully.Normal file dialogues now have a "media" section - with all your itunes music library, iphoto library/albums and movies folders for browsing. Seems like a little thing, but again it's a good time saver as it saves loading any of the library apps. The iPhoto stuff in particular is very well done.All the machines on the network magically appear in the Finder sidebar. It works!There are a huge number of other improvements in all the component apps.. iChat, Addressbook, iCal, etc etc.NegativeA large number of people have had installation issues - I was among them, but that was due to dodgy software and hardware hacks.. Oops. Only outstanding issue is with that external drive.. I think."Stacks" aren't configurable enough and remove a useful "pop up folder menu" feature of the dock. :( But they're pretty and they do have some added functionality (you can drag things out of them for a start)inexplicably reflective dock.. Cute though - I'm undecided.The menubar is unconfigurably transparent for no good reason. There have been a lot of UNIX commands uncovered to fix that though. Funny to see Leopard machines at uni with these hacks applied so you can *see the menubar when they're doing presentations etc*.. Bad move Apple.They removed the ability to send SMS messages using Bluetooth in the address book!??! That feature was great and saved me ages! In the US you can send SMS with iChat, but that's no use here. :( (I guess you're supposed to get an iPhone instead? Great.)
Summary
I think Leopard is the first OS I've used which instantly and easily illustrates *why* I prefer using it over other systems in a functional way that people could actually understand.. Both AmigaOS and MacOS 10.2 through Tiger acted "much like windows" but with a couple of nice features (exposé, spotlight in osX, screen management etc on the Amiga) and everything being in different places.. People are put off by the differentness and see no functional difference (and are scared of losing software, heh). Now the number of obvious, demonstrable useful features has increased massively. At uni where there's the usual windows people (Games Design!), they've only said positive things.. Coverflow and Quickview aren't gimmicks - I wish I'd always had this functionality - it saves a lot of time. Leopard on the whole seems like Apple doing everything they can to streamline things and make them better organised, including the desktop and user workflow.. And they've largely been successful. Considering one of the Mac's main selling points has always been how it keeps out of your way and lets you get on with things that's probably quite an achievement.
They might've rushed Leopard near launch to get it out on time - I wouldn't have recommended the upgrade for everyone at first due to the teething problems on certain configurations, but now things seem more ironed out (10.5.1), It's definitely worth it!
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