Leopard Observations

I have been running the new release of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” for a while — ever since I was given access to the betas. What's the impression after using it as my main operating system for a while?

Of course, reviewers all over the world have covered the major areas of the Leopard experience, so I won’t repeat that here. Time Machine, Quick Look, iChat screen sharing, as well as the significant improvements to Mail and iCal have already been covered in excruciating detail.

I’ll talk about some of the smaller enhancements that few of the reviews touched on, but are worth a mention — since they make me happy. Happy is important. Hopefully there are some gems in here that you haven’t discovered yet:

• On-the-fly repartitioning and resizing of disks without erasing content.
• Terminal is massively improved, and supports tabs.
• Preview can edit and merge PDFs! You can rearrange, combine, annotate and delete PDF pages with simple drag and drop, and save the result. As a result, most people won’t have to buy Adobe Acrobat anymore, as this is 99% of what they use it for. My prediction is that they will still buy it out of habit, but at least you know that it‘s not necessary anymore.
• Keyboard modifier keys can now be set on a per-keyboard basis, so you can remap that Microsoft keyboard you use at work to have the Apple keys in the right location without screwing up your keyboard at home.
• Simple settings to share a particular folder with people on your network without sharing the entire drive.
• Breadcrumbs in the Finder: Select View → Show Path Bar.
• Scripting and Cocoa bindings, as well as full Interface Builder and XCode support for everyone’s favorite language — Python. I’m excited about what this will let us do.
• “Repeat what I do” mode for Automator — finally this application starts being useful to automate repetitive tasks. Piecing together pre-built actions in the previous versions never worked out quite the way you wanted it.
• Experimental ZFS read/write support for developers. Need to test whether it makes a difference for Plone startup time soon, I know that HFS is not the most efficient file system when it has to deal with to lots of small files.
• Safari is the fastest browser on the planet right now — although Opera 9.5 (currently in beta) will be faster, Safari is the smoothest browsing experience out there at the moment. Also worth mentioning is that the “Inspect Element” part has been improved significantly, and is very valuable when debugging HTML and CSS in Safari.
• “Merge all windows” function in Safari. Don’t you hate it when websites open new windows without your consent? Now you can merge them back easily.
• Best virtual desktop implementation on any platform — try hitting F8 to activate spaces and press C to collect all the windows, or move the windows between the spaces using drag and drop — even Exposé works in the Spaces view!
• Parental Controls + Guest account that is wiped when user logs out → perfect kiosk mode to use for iTunes/Safari when you’re using your computer as a jukebox at a party, or just handing it over to others so they can use the web for a while. Your Plone instances will stay safe, and your party people won’t read your email.
• Finder is now multithreaded, so it pretty much never locks up, even when dealing with disappearing network devices. AutoFS to the rescue!
• Network settings panel is now sane and well-organized. Internet Connect application is gone, all the VPN and 3G/modem settings are now where they should have been in the first place.
• Related, Leopard supported my HSPDA 3G (mobile broadband) card out of the box, no need for ugly third-party software or drivers. It didn’t even need any setup, just plug it in and connect. Awesome.
• Spotlight is much faster, to the point where it is equivalent to Quicksilver when it comes to pure speed. It also ditched the “magic, invisible results window” that made it so annoying in OS X 10.4. It also supports AND/OR/NOT searches now¹.¹ Oh, and try typing in an equation in the Spotlight search, and it will feed it to the Calculator as you type, and give you the answer directly in the menu. Nice. While I still prefer QS for most operations, this makes it possible to survive on other people’s Macs.
• If you search the help menu — which has an inline search bar now — for something that matches a menu item, it will show you in which submenu it resides. Very elegant.
• All my installed applications from OS X 10.4 worked! This is very impressive. The Plone 3 Unified Installer has also been updated to work on Leopard.
• Faster! People have mentioned this, but seriously — it’s like getting a new computer. Less disk grinding, more efficient use of multi-core CPUs. After logging in, my startup apps are up and running in about half the time they took on OS X 10.4.

…the only downside is that Leopard is ugly as sin, and the new additions have pretty serious UI issues — Stacks and the Dock in particular. I’m hoping that UNO will be upgraded to support Leopard eventually. I never have — and never will — use the Dock, so I’ll leave those UI rants for others².² For an extremely detailed review of Leopard, including its UI warts — I recommend John Siracusa’s review of Leopard at Ars Technica.

The same goes for the translucent menu bar, WTF were they thinking? Visually and functionally, it’s the worst crime Apple has inflicted on its users in quite a while. While there are utilities that claim to put back the old-style menu bar, they fake it by putting a white area behind the menubar, which screws up the font rendering and doesn’t work with multiple monitors. Hopefully there’s a hidden setting to return to the old look somewhere.

Enough with the UI rants — is Leopard a worthy upgrade?

In my opinion, a resounding yes. It’s an extremely polished and solid release, and has served me well for quite a while with no problems. You can tell that this has been a major cleanup release, things are more consistent, faster and just plain well done. It’s like Plone 3 for your desktop. ;-)

Many small annoyances are fixed. Random example: renaming a file with an extension selects only the text before the dot, so you don’t end up removing the extension by mistake. There are hundreds of these tiny improvements.

Apple continues their great work on refining their operating system and the Mac experience — and although I would have liked to see something earth-shattering and revolutionary on the UI front in this release of OS X, I'm happy with a solid, incremental upgrade like Leopard is. There's always OS X 10.6 for the revolutionary, fun stuff.

Upgrade tip: I tried moving over my home folder manually instead of letting the Migration Assistant handle it for me — that didn’t work so well, and I had several permission issues. Trust the Migration Assistant, it is your friend. I did a clean install, and then used the Migration Assistant to move my backed up OS X 10.4 home folder and settings to the new OS. It even migrated my weird network setup perfectly. Slick.