What can you say about an operating system like Leopard? Well, quite a bit actually. I haven’t been using 10.5 that long and already I’ve experienced the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and the “whaaaaa?” of perplexion. Overall, I tell you this: while Leopard may not be a revolution of modern system software, it does keep OS X moving along the track of being the best OS around. So let me run down my first impressions of a number of its features, bells, whistles, and kazoos.
The Dock: Oh, the much-maligned 3D shelf Dock. Volumes have been scribed on this subject in the past several months. I fully expected to loathe it at first sight, and intended to find a way to turn it into something less hideous…only it grew on me. By this point, it’s one of the most recognizable features of Leopard, and honestly, despite the complaints have about the perspective, it’s really not that bad. The little blue “program running” lights blend in pretty well, but are still easy enough to pick out at a glance. I do have one gripe, and that’s the fact that because of the perspective, the Dock itself sometimes seems too big for the icons; I’d like to make my icons slightly larger, but I feel like the Dock itself would start to take up too much of my screen. As for the hint on switching to the vertical Dock’s styling, I have to say that I found it kind of unwieldy and ugly on the bottom. Your mileage will, of course, vary, but you do have the option to banish the shelf should you want.
Menu bar: Unlike the Dock, the translucent menu bar has not grown on me, remaining the simple most puzzling design decision I think I’ve ever seen on OS X. With my usual desktop picture, the menu bar is actually blue, which I found distracting and odd. The menu bar is one of the visual anchors of the Mac OS and has been since System 1.0. I don’t want it to blend in: I want it to stand out. The menus themselves are translucent, but are much higher contrast and far more easily readable; why not use the same effect for the menu bar? Anyway, there are some annoying but simple fixes for the translucency; I’ll touch on those in a separate post.
iCal icon: The iCal icon finally updates even when the app’s not running! Amazing! It finally enables me to ditch the Calendarclock app I’d been using since Panther, though I’m still not used to looking at the dock yet.
Help search: I haven’t really seen much about this anyway, but I find this a huge improvement. Every Help menu now has a Spotlight-like search box built in. This removes the step of selecting Help from the menu and waiting for the Help Viewer app to launch and load (which could occasionally take forever). The Help Viewer is now just a floating window too; it doesn’t show up in the Dock. And it seems much, much snappier. Very nice.
Cover Flow: I was looking forward to Cover Flow, specifically for one purpose: browsing folders full of photos. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the previews on my MacBook look incredibly low res (click that pic for the full size version). They’re good enough in most circumstances, but they look nowhere near as good on my MacBook as Apple suggests. They are, however, fast, which is why I suspect they’ve done this, if it in fact it isn’t a bug. But more than often, I find myself falling back on…
Quick Look: Quick Look is pretty darn tootin’. It works on about 90% of the files that I’ve tried it on (what, no AppleWorks support?). It’s quick too.
Path bar: For those that spend a lot of time in the Finder (I’m so sorry), the new path bar (View -> Show Path Bar), is smoother than a grease slick. It automatically shrinks to fit the width of the window, then expands when you mouseover parts of it. My only real complaint: while you can drag and drop files onto the folder icons, it’s not spring-loaded. Booo.
iDisk: I use my iDisk all the time; it’s where I keep most of my writing files. iDisk speed is hugely improved in Leopard. I used to have wait for at least ten twenty seconds the first time I tried to browse the iDisk in any application; now it’s instantaneous. This is how it should have worked from the beginning.
Stacks: The Downloads stack is useful; in fact, I like that Downloads has been given a folder on the level of Documents, Movies, Music, etc. But I keep my download stack fairly pruned, deleting disk images and zip files as I use them. Ever since Apple first added the ability for folders in the Dock to display pop up menus, I’ve popped my Applications directory in there; that functionality is basically taken over by Stacks here. However, I’ll say this: it’s way faster than the pop-up folder menus ever were. Though since I anchor my dock to the right side of the bottom of the screen, the fan shape quickly becomes impractical. Verdict: useful in limited situations.
Unified look I say this: I’m glad they’ve finally decided to settle on one look for most apps. I find the unified toolbar a little bit darker than I would prefer. Especially in Safari, where the text on non-active tabs looks a little too “embossed” for my taste.
Okay, that was my stream of consciousness of my first impressions. I’m sure there will be plenty more to come in the next few days, and even more as you folks get your hands on Leopard too. More than anything, I would say the difficulty lies in getting used to what’s different from Tiger—it’s like moving into a new house. Right now, it’s a little confusing, and we’re still getting used to it; in a month or two down the road, it’ll seem like home.
Does Cover Flow (or Quick Look) allow you to preview .html pages in the Finder? That would be great if it did.
Indeed it does! I just tried this out and it rendered my test HTML page just fine. Scripting languages like PHP just show up as straight source code though.
Show off.
Seriously, thanks. Nice notes. Nice pics. With any luck, and the fedex gods smiling upon me, I should be seeing this on my own desktop tomorrow night!
Dang! Does anyone like the new dock? Come on guys! I love it!
The new Dock is not a shelf, Apple calls it a reflective floor.
Re. the low res previews of image files in Cover Flow-what image program did you save the files with? When I save an image in Photoshop it saves a (very low-res) thumbnail image with it; I wonder if it's the thumbnail that's showing in Cover Flow instead of the real image…?
Would you mind sharing your system specs? I'm just wondering if my leopard purchase should include another gig of ram.
kyre: I love the new dock and can't wait for that shelf...er... reflective floor to adorn my desktop. ;-)
These are just photos downloaded from my digital camera; I have the same problem with pics from my iPhone too, although some seem to better than others. Weird. I find it unlikely that it's just scaling up the thumbnail, but I suppose that's possible.
@MTigerV: Sure. I'm running a Core Duo 2GHz MacBook with 2GB of RAM and an 80GB HD (partitioned into 10GB Boot Camp and ~65GB OS X partitions). 2GB of RAM has proved to be pretty snappy for me. I feel like maybe they've fixed some memory leaks: right now I have Finder, Mail, Safari, Adium, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, ImageWell, Thunderbird, and Activity Monitor open (among the usual utilities) and I've still got free RAM. Very little on the spinny beachball of doom front thus far.
dan, do a piece on the lesser known, undercover features too! this one was a great read for anyone wondering about the everyday functionality of leopard, however for the extreme geeks like myself, i found that i already heard these conclusions. you still got 290 features to go! (just kidding)
What wes harden said.
@MTigerV "I'm just wondering if my Leopard purchase should include another gig of RAM."
I would say: YES. http://macsales.com/ has 1GB SODIMMs for $30 USD and 2GB ones for $87.
I have an iMac with 4GB and I use ever bit of that when I add Windows XP under VMware's Fusion to my usual assortment of programs.