Blog FeedMac OS X 10.5 Leopard: A Spotty Release
Revised Desktop & Spotlight
There’s no denying that Apple is on a space-kick with Leopard. With the box art and install video both showing scenes from space it came as no surprise that the default wallpaper was also space-based. The overall appearance is quite pleasing with your default collection of applications arranged on the new 3D Dock, mounted drives in the top-right of the screen and the Finder open to your home directory. The menu bar can be observed to be slightly transparent but I have confess that I preferred the blue Spotlight icon from Tiger - using the same look as other menu bar icons makes Spotlight seem less special and certainly less apparent despite it being even more important in this release.
Aside from the new 3D Dock (which can be positioned at the side of the screen with a non-3D look) the new stand-out feature of the revised desktop are Stacks.
Simply, Stacks are folders that you can use to quickly access documents that you use most often without needing to clutter up either your Dock or the Desktop itself. Depending on the number of documents in a Stack the results of clicking on a Stack is either a fan of documents (for around 10 or less files) or grid view (for anything more). By default the files are ordered by when they were added to the Stack with the most recent appearing closest to the base of the Stack and therefore closest to your mouse cursor but they can be ordered name, date created, date modified and kind. Unfortunately, if none of these automated sorts works for you then you are out of luck since it is not possible to reorganize the contents of the Stack manually. Clicking on a file/folder in a Stack opens it and all files are shown as a preview of the file itself within the Stack. Any folder can be a Stack by dragging it to the Dock so you may find this handy for creating a folder of files that you are working on at the time and accessing them via the Stack since this is certainly faster than using the Finder or even Spotlight. However, while you can add Aliases to files/folders located elsewhere on your computer to a Stack, doing so won’t give you a preview of the file and you’ll have to make do with the plain old application icon.
Spotlight has seen a reasonable overhaul in Leopard. As well as adding a few new functions to the Spotlight menu itself it is now able to search networked resources as well, although from my testing you needed to be viewing the shared computer in the Finder for results from the remote computer to be displayed. While I often used Spotlight as an application launcher under Tiger it is now better under Leopard because not only do application results appear faster but they are also selected by default so you only need to press Enter to launch the app. Speed of searches is very impressive and the menu will now also allow you to search for dictionary definitions and even perform calculations, which is often much faster than changing to a dedicated application. Finally, the Show All command at the top of the menu now opens the results of a search in a full Finder window rather than the old Spotlight-specific window that was difficult to switch back to. This is quite important since Spotlight and the new Finder are a very powerful combination in Leopard and I’ll be discussing this next. My only complaint about Spotlight in this release, apart from not searching network shares when using the menu bar icon, is that it can be pain to configure it not to search system folders. Spotlight can be configured to ignore files and folders specified by the user (sub-folders and their contents are ignored as well) but I don’t know why system folders are indexed by default. Making it easy to ignore these folder or even any folder that I don’t select myself would be appreciated since messing with the files is typically a recipe for disaster so not showing them to users by default is surely a good idea.
Finder, Cover Flow & Quick Look
When Apple added Cover Flow to iTunes last year I think it’s fair to say that everyone thought it was quite pretty but ultimately a bit useless. When Apple announced that they were adding Cover Flow to the Finder in Leopard I have to confess that I had a ho-hum moment and paid it no attention. Today, however, I’m willing to say that Cover Flow is probably the best feature in Leopard for me but it’s power is only really achieved with what I’m going to call Leopard’s Holy Trinity:
- Cover Flow
- Quick Look
- Spotlight
This makes more sense in a context: using Spotlight under Tiger performing a search would typically result in a lot of results that you needed to sort your way through. Beyond the name of the files returned in the results (plus standard meta data like size, date created, etc.) there wasn’t much of an alternative than to open the files and have a look at their contents, which was a slow and often tedious process. Under Leopard, however, the same results can be returned in a Finder window where you can quickly flip through the results using the Cover Flow view and where you can see what the file contains by the preview that is rendered by Quick Look. Documents pages can be flipped through using the left and right arrows that appear over the preview while videos and music files can also be played.
Quick Look is definitely the technology that makes this all happen. Out-of-the-box Quick Look supports most common file formats for documents (including Office 2007 XML files and older), images, audio and video files. File previews are rendered very quickly and appear to be cached for faster viewing later. The readability of the preview depends on the size of the Finder window and how much space has been given to the Cover Flow aspect of the view (document details are listed in the 2nd half of the window) and pressing Space on the keyboard presents a large-scale preview of the document along with controls to, for example, skip through a video or add a photo to your iPhoto library, plus you can switch to a full-screen view. Select multiple files and you also gain the option to view them in a slideshow and view an index page that shows large previews of all the documents that you selected, space permitting. The speed that all this happens at is highly impressive even when the files are stored on a USB/Firewire drive or even a remote computer.
Unfortunately, searching isn’t all good even with the Holy Trinity. While Spotlight now supports searches based only on the name of a file it seems to only work the first part of the file name so searches using a partial file name from the end, for example, don’t work and that’s really surprising. Further, results from a Spotlight search using the Show All option from the Spotlight menu opens a Finder window that is too small, especially when half the view is given over to Cover Flow. This is particularly annoying when attempting to perform drag-n-drop operations on folders stored in a Stack since the List view presented in the 2nd half of the Finder window that appears is too small and scrolls very fast if you aren’t careful. Finally, while Quick View supports the common file formats for previews it doesn’t support all so we will have to wait for 3rd party developers to develop Quick View plug-ins that support their own file formats (I’m particularly waiting for support for the Omnigraffle diagram format).
The Finder itself remains largely unchanged in operation to what it was in Tiger and previous releases, although the shortcuts section on the left-side of the screen has had a reasonable makeover and you can now hide sections that you don’t need. Connecting to remote computers is easy (when it works since I’ve had computers drop from the list for no apparent reason) and you can connect either using a guess account or a registered user’s account with the logon details stored in your Keychain so that you can connect immediately to that account in the future without the logon procedure. If the other computer is running Leopard you can also share the screen of the other computer and this works really well (I need to see if this will work on a PC if the PC is running a VNC server). Unfortunately, despite seeing a performance increase the Finder is still subject to issues, such as not allowing the user to sort the contents of folders so that the folders appear on top (the closest you get to this is a sort by Kind) and still not providing a means to move a file from one location to another without drag-n-drop. Amazingly there is a Cut option in the Finder’s Edit menu but it is disabled for file operations. I honestly don’t understand the reason for this since the underlying UNIX OS (certified as being UNIX in this version) provides the mv command that the Finder could use.
Finally, I have to say that the new folder icons are a step backwards. The old “normal” folder icons have been improved with Leopard and look more stylish but the “special” folders, like the Documents, Music and Library folders in your Home directory are much harder to recognize visually since their logos are printed on a basic folder and the logo doesn’t show up very well, particularly if the icons are small in the current view. In my opinion the icons need to different to a standard folder icon in much the same way as they were in prior releases.
6th November | Reply
I’m kind of glad I didn’t fork out the bucks to upgrade in that case. Spaces is certainly something I’m looking forward to once it works right. I have a macbook and the screen on that is itty bitty so some more surface area should be blessing. Spotlight sounds pretty spiffy as well and a general performance boost is always going to be welcome.
But I don’t use a lot of the 1st party Apple Apps, and I don’t know that they’ve really given me any reason to change that as I really like being able to change from windows desktop to Mac Laptop and not really have to do anything differently.
Maybe I’d feel differently if I only used a mac, or maybe I’d feel differently if i used my mac for more than school work and websurfing but while it looks like a worthy upgrade there just isn’t anything that makes me scream oh i’ve got to have that right now. Spaces could end up being it when i have the money to buy a new OS.
6th November | Reply
It should be noted that all Mac users will need this release at some time in the not too distant future since there’s a lot of developers making their applications Leopard-only. The reason for me (I can’t speak for others) is Objective-C 2.0. Objective-C is the native programming language of Cocoa applications on the Mac and it’s basically an object-oriented extension to C. Having come from a Java background the need to manage memory came as a bit of a shock with all the associated problems when I started writing Cocoa applications and I think all my programs have leaks in them somewhere. Objective-C 2.0 gives you the speed of a native language with the convenience of an automatic garbage collector that should mean you don’t need to manage memory to the micro-management degree that you did in prior releases. Not only should this ensure that memory leaks are not as prevalent in software but it should also speed up the development process itself. There are a few other developer toys as well that should increase overall application performance when applications are updated for Leopard to enable better use of multiple processor cores.
Leopard is another release like Tiger where the end-users get some new toys but the developers probably get more so that it’s easier to write good applications and therefore the Mac universe benefits in the medium- to long-term. Now that I’ve finished this article I start to spend some time learning what all the new tools are since without full Apple Developer Connection (ADC) membership there’s been a lot under Non-Disclosure Agreements until the release last month. This should be interesting stuff.
6th November | Reply
Hmm, iTunes 7.5 got pushed out this morning and still no support for Time Machine. Now I’m really shocked since I felt sure that Apple would address this problem in the next iTunes update. Again, if Apple can’t get this right themselves then what chance does everyone else have? Mind you, it might be iTune’s legacy code that is holding it back. I need to do some reading into the developer documentation and see what it is that needs to be done to enable Time Machine support for an application - if this is only possible in a Cocoa application then that would explain the problem.
7th November | Reply
Wow, excellent review Kelmon! Really enjoyed reading it (on the job actually
) Overall there’s a few annoying bugs in there it seems but nothing all that hard to fix in a short time. I’m glad I haven’t shelled out immediately and decided to wait for at least a “.1″ release. Still, looking forward to installing the Leopard on my iMac.
7th November | Reply
I have testet iChat Theatre with video, audio, pdf and pictures and found absolutely no problems.. There where no skipping in audio, video or what so ever. However I will agree with the low quality on text in some situation. The test was done remotely, that is no local networking.
7th November | Reply
In Reply to #4:
Hi ReiUrusei! Thanks for the comment and you’ll be glad to know that Apple is apparently ready to start testing 10.5.1 so we should see this released in the coming weeks. Fingers crossed that this nukes the major problems.
In Reply to #5:
Hi rubberduck! Can you provide any details on what systems you used to test the iChat Theatre feature? I honestly tried to make this work by trying a LAN and Bonjour connections, plus using 2 high-end(ish) Macs but you can see the results in the review. The only thing that I was unable to test was doing Theatre over the Internet using a pair of Macs both running Leopard. However, if you have the facilities to test this then I’d be happy to try this with you and update my review accordingly. If you are interested then please send me a message via iChat to the screen name mpeaston at mac dot com.
I did watch a MacWorld video last night and saw that they were able to get Theatre to work OK so I really am left wondering what I was doing wrong.
7th November | Reply
To answer your question “It’s all very impressive and seems to work quite efficiently, although it remains to be seen how long my 160GB portable Firewire drive will last for (so far I have used about 60GB) and what happens when it is full.” just go til apple.com and take a look at what apple writes about Time machine. To quote apple:”Backing up to a full disk.
One day, no matter how large your backup drive is, it will run out of space. And Time Machine has an action plan. It alerts you that it will start deleting previous backups, oldest first. Before it deletes any backup, Time Machine copies files that might be needed to fully restore your disk for every remaining backup. (Moral of the story: The larger the drive, the farther back in time you can back up.)”
How can you write a review of Leopard without having spent time investigating the features of leopard.
7th November | Reply
In Reply to #7:
If there’s one thing that I’ve learnt from writing this article is that you should only use your own experience and not base judgement on marketing material. I will be very interested to see what happens but whether it is what Apple says will remains to be seen.
7th November | Reply
I guess is a matter of what angel you would except from a review. For me a review should question the features and their useability and if its worth spending the extra money on.. Not to question whether their work or not
7th November | Reply
When I press D on Word of the Day ScreenSaver, Dictionary opens up and the word gets displayed. Did you move Dictionary.app from Applications folder to any other location?
Sorry for my bad English!
7th November | Reply
In Reply to #10:
Nope. Dictionary remains in its default location of /Applications/Dictionary.app. Still, it’s nice to know both what this option was supposed to do and that it works for at least one person. It is, of course, baffling as to why it doesn’t seem to work for me having installed fresh onto a clean disk.
7th November | Reply
Re: Cut not working in the Finder, this is a deliberate design decision and it’s a good one - the Cut/Copy/Paste metaphor doesn’t work properly for files. Here’s an example of how it breaks (you can do this on Windows for example):
1. Copy a file (Edit->Copy)
2. Delete the file.
3. Try to paste the file (Edit-Paste)
Step 3 doesn’t work, because it never really copied the file, only a reference to it. In contrast, if you try this with some text in a word processor, everything will work as expected. IMHO, kudos to Apple for not allowing this feature.
7th November | Reply
In Reply to #12:
I do take your point but there has to be a better way of moving a file than the current options of either:
1. Opening 2 Finder windows and dragging the file between them
2. Attempting to navigate your folders using a single Finder window and spring-loaded folders
3. In a single Finder window copy the file, navigate to the desired destination, paste the file, return back to the original folder and delete the old copy of the file
All of those solutions are dumb and there’s no getting away from this. Cut and Paste works damned well in Windows so I honestly don’t see what the resistance is to an option to move a file rather than copy it (excluding the humongous bug discovered recently if the transfer fails). Moving a file certainly should not be as much of a faff as it is with the Finder.
10th November | Reply
Apple has now posted information about its Firewall, which is just as well since the settings are pretty meaningless:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306938
What’s particularly damning is the following note from the article:
So, by default, and even if you had your firewall enabled under Tiger when you upgraded, Apple will setup Leopard to allow anyone to try and attack your computer. Who’s stupid idea what this? While I realise that attacks against the Mac are rare and so far don’t seem to work unless you manage to con someone into handing over their administrator password, surely this is asking for trouble if someone DOES succeed in developing a remote hack.
For a company that advertises its security Apple sure has a funny way of displaying their commitment to it.
10th November | Reply
Well, having the Windows Firewall in XP SP2 turned on has been nothing but a headache at work. Obviously when we install Windows ourselves on a PC we have the option of turning the firewall on or off during the installation procedure - which I think it what Leopard should be doing.
But each time we get a new computer from Lenovo it’s already got it installed and it’s a pain if you forget to turn it off. And we need it off to get a bunch of our remote applications working properly across the board.