Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: A Spotty Release

By Kelmon

Mail, iCal & Address Book

More so than in previous releases, Mail, iCal and Address Book are well integrated in Leopard but still much their own applications, an approach contrary to that taken by all-in-one applications like Microsoft Outlook or Entourage. This is not to suggest that Leopard’s applications are better than Outlook since that’s a more powerful beast but rather separate, lighter, applications that you can switch easily between and choose not to run if you don’t need them is nice.

The lynchpin between these applications is Mail. Email is a common means through which you receive new contacts, work to perform and meetings. While Mail continues to support creating contacts from the addresses of emails received or appointments in iCal from meeting requests generated by Outlook or other calendaring applications, it also now searches the text of the mails themselves for key information. For example, you can add the address and phone number information that appears in a lot of people’s email signatures to an existing or new Address Book contact. Equally, dates or references to dates can be turned into appointments in iCal. In difference to previous releases of OS X, Leopard performs the addition of the new contact/appointment within Mail itself via a sort of dialog that is displayed besides the information that you are importing with the same controls as you see in Address Book and iCal. For example, if you receive an email that says something like “let’s meet tomorrow at 3pm in the meeting room” then hovering over that text will result in “tomorrow at 3pm” being highlighted so that you can select to create an appointment in iCal from it. Selecting this option results in a dialog appearing with the title of the meeting set to the subject of the email and the meeting starting at 3pm with a 1-hour duration. It’s very impressive and damned useful, not least because even in Outlook I find that some meeting requests generated using someone’s calendar results in a normal email rather than one that automatically updates my calendar so those I have to manually enter.

Beyond the information searching that Mail does the new version also provides Notes and To-Dos. Notes are fairly self explanatory but the To-Dos requires some further explanation. To-Dos can be created by simply clicking the To-Do button, adding the requisite information like what you need to do and when and then this information is stored in Mail, iCal and any other application that cares to plug into the new To-Do framework added in Leopard. Further, you can select text in a mail, request to create a To-Do and Mail creates a new To-Do that is linked to the email that generated it. The font and background used to create a To-Do in Mail is bit silly (Apple was going for the handwritten note look) but you can change that in the preferences. The only shame here is that the data mining that Mail does for contact and appointment information doesn’t yet extend to finding actions that could be a To-Do but I’m willing to overlook that one.

The other great feature of Mail this time around is that it also supports Quick Look so now attachments can be viewed really quickly. This is kinda similar to Outlook 2007’s ability to view some file attachments in the mail window itself rather than launching a reader application directly but there are differences. Firstly, Quick Look works much faster and you can view all attachments simultaneously using the index view, if you so wish. Secondly, Quick Look is read-only so you can’t interact with the contents of the mail to, for example, copy some text or make an update. I am not sure why that last restriction exists since hovering the cursor over the Quick Look content turns the cursor into a the normal text insertion cursor so it clearly recognizes the content below as text.

Unfortunately, I do have a couple of complaints about Mail. I’d much prefer that Mail by default does not load images from emails unless I tell it to do so for security since loading an image linked to a spam email is a surefire way to tell the spammers that you’re there and would like some more. Mail still doesn’t allow the creation of HTML emails unless you want to use the awful HTML templates that are provided (it’s a love it or hate it thing and I’m definitely on the hate it side of this argument), although this omission is tempered by providing lists (numbered or bulleted) for Rich Text emails. Finally, while I really like the Quick Look function for viewing attachments I’d like to know who thought it was a good idea to start a slideshow of the attachments by default since Quick Look doesn’t do this elsewhere.

I’m not going to say much about iCal or Address Book. Address Book has been updated the least but definitely feels more responsive and now incorporates a tool to merge duplicate contacts together, which came in very useful when I accidentally imported all my contacts again. iCal has a much improved interface that feels a lot faster than prior versions and now incorporates a thin bar that runs across the calendar to show the current time relative to your appointments. This is a nice touch but I can’t help wishing that past appointments were dimmed when they’re past so I can quickly see what’s past and what’s coming up.

Running Windows

I’d dearly love to never have to leave the Mac OS during my computing time but sometimes you have to and that’s a fact of life. Prior to installing Leopard I had been running Windows XP Pro as a virtual machine using Parallels Desktop 3 and had experimented with the Boot Camp beta earlier in the year but given up on that since the game I wanted to use it for (Dark Crusade) kept crashing the entire OS. So, to test Leopard I tried running Windows both virtualized and via Boot Camp. For those not familiar with these terms the following is a quick breakdown:

• Boot Camp: Apple’s name for enabling your Mac to start up in either Windows or Mac OS X (or dual-booting, as it is called). Under this you can run Windows at full speed and can play games since the graphics hardware is supported but you need to reboot if you want to access a Mac OS X application.
• Virtualization: Enables you to run Windows (and other operating systems) while you are running Mac OS X. Windows does not run at full speed, although performance is still impressive, but it is much easier to share data. Graphics hardware is not well supported under virtualization so gaming is normally not an option.

Things did not start well. After installing Parallels 3 (remember, the Leopard was a clean install) I started up my working virtual machine of Windows XP and was immediately greeted with a kernel panic (for those not familiar with the Mac OS, that’s the equivalent of the Windows Blue Screen Of Death and requires a reboot). Making a visit to Parallels’ web site I found that others were having the same trouble (random kernel panics) and therefore can say that, on release, Parallels Desktop was most certainly not Leopard-compatible as they had stated. To a degree I blame Apple for this since the final version of Leopard was not distributed to developers to test with until it arrived on the shelves so there was no way for Parallels to be sure that their application would work beyond experience with the earlier betas. That said I wonder how much Leopard can have changed since the last beta to version that shipped. Still, it does speak volumes that some of Apple’s own applications aren’t fully Leopard compatible, such as FileMaker and the issues with Aperture. Anyway, given reports read about Parallels’ competitor, VMWare, I’ve switched to the Fusion application and that works great under Leopard. However, I will note that Parallels did release an update for the application a day or so ago so maybe that would have fixed the issue but it’s too late for me.

So, onto Boot Camp and yet more issues. In order to install Windows onto your Mac under Boot Camp it is necessary to partition your hard drive. The Boot Camp Assistant application provides a nice GUI to do this allowing the user to size the Mac and Windows partitions by dragging a border between the two left or right, or by selecting preset size. After this the utility goes to work and partitions your disk ready for the installation of Windows. Or at least that’s the theory. In my case the utility corrupted the header record of my hard drive and there was an anxious few minutes while I rebooted using the Leopard DVD and ran the Disk Utility on it to repair the drive, which succeeded. On the second attempt the partition was successfully established and installation of Windows XP Pro SP2 was achieved after the usual tedium. Drivers for Apple’s hardware are provided on the Leopard DVD so all you need to do after Windows has been installed and logged on is to insert the disk and the drivers are installed. Since previous betas of Boot Camp the drivers are now Windows Certified so no annoying pop-ups and the overall experience of running Windows on the MacBook Pro was actually pretty good. For example, keyboard shortcuts for changing the volume work exactly as they do under OS X including the semi-transparent bezel that appears showing you the current volume level. Full marks to Apple on this front for making Windows feel a bit like a Mac. Boot Camp also installs a System Tray utility that enables you to control some of the functions but more importantly provides a “Reboot in Mac OS X” option if you right-click it, and that’s really handy.

Unfortunately, for Boot Camp the full version still crashes with Dark Crusade so I’ve given up on that game now and this probably means that I’ll uninstall Windows entirely. However, for the sake of it I also downloaded and played through the Half-Life 2 demo to see if games in general crash and that was OK, although I didn’t like the game itself.

Further gripes include the Windows volume levels that were set far too high. By default even the lowest setting that I could set was loud and I had to open the Windows Volume Control utility to reduce the volume of one of the inputs (Wave, I think, but I reduced everything I could find) to something acceptable. I wonder whether that’s a driver issue…

Finally, Windows via Boot Camp and Leopard seem to be in competition for my system clock since whenever I run Boot Camp and then reboot back into OS X I have to manually remove an hour from the Date/Time settings. I didn’t have this problem in earlier versions of Boot Camp so I have no idea what is going wrong this time. However, if I nuke the Boot Camp partition then I expect that will sort things out.

iChat

iChat in Leopard appears to be another attack of the Reality Distortion Field (RDF). iChat does a lot of what it was demonstrated to do very well. As a chat client it’s easy enough to use, the new option for tabbed chats works very well, and video conferencing over is good if both users don’t have iChat set to use a minimum bandwidth. However, the iChat Theatre feature just does not work to an acceptable standard. This is a strong statement to make but I’ve tested this both at home over a wireless network (802.11g for the PowerBook) and a 100Mb LAN at work with a contractor who had a MacBook Pro running Tiger. Perhaps both users need to be running Leopard for this to work properly but Keynote presentations presented over iChat were just completely illegible. Photos worked better over the LAN but the image quality wasn’t great and the audio that iPhoto generated was just terrible (not just the tune itself but it kept cutting out). I honestly don’t know how Apple achieved its demos but nothing I did made this feature work to any acceptable degree. In all honesty, good ol’ Microsoft NetMeeting did a much better job of showing a presentation remotely than iChat in Leopard and that’s about 10-years old. Additionally, I don’t know how they do it but I also couldn’t find a way to set up iChat Theatre so that it shows my image beside the document that I’m presenting - we only ever saw the document itself.

The comments about NetMeeting aren’t strictly fair on iChat since it does do quite a good job at sharing desktops between Leopard users. While desktop sharing can be performed best over a LAN setting using the Finder, sharing over the Internet does work pretty well. When sharing a remote desktop you get a full-screen view of it with a small window showing your own desktop; select that to get back to your own desktop complete with a nice transition effect. The only problem here is that working with large elements on the remote computer, such as moving a large window, doesn’t perform so well with a noticeable deterioration in image quality.

The Leopard version also comes with video effects that were previously found in the Photo Booth application that shipped on Macs with a built-in iSight camera. These are fun but ultimately completely useless and the green-screen effect so that you can put animated backgrounds behind you works about as well as you can expect. As best as I can tell when you are instructed to step away from the camera so that it can read the real background it looks at the colors present and uses that to replace them with the animated background that you selected. The problem here is that if you or the clothing that you are wearing incorporates any of the colors that are in your real background then the fake background shows through. When I did the iChat Theatre tests with the contractor I spent a bit of time with the aquarium background with fish showing through my shirt!

As an instant messaging client iChat works fine and the tabbed interface is a nice addition. I’d like to see more protocols supported and it would be good to be able to combine all your contacts into a single list rather than one per protocol (I use AIM and Jabber at work), although the tabbed aspect does combine chats from all protocols together. Unfortunately, I have encountered a few bugs with just text messaging people with messages not going through until I restarted iChat or on one occasion an odd message from AIM telling me that I was sending too much data and to try again later (restart of iChat sorted that problem).