Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: A Spotty Release

By Kelmon

Other Applications

Before I move onto the final conclusions, here’s a few notes about applications/features that are worth mentioning.

• Air Disk: It was known prior to Leopard’s release that the Air Disk function of the current Airport Extreme wireless routers that allows you to share a USB hard drive across the network would not be supported as a Time Machine drive. This was unsurprising since the reliability has been poor with dropped connections or the WAN becoming inaccessible until reboot of the router. However, Leopard ships without the Air Disk Utility that enables you to connect to the drive automatically when you connect to the Airport network, although the new Airport Utility is provided. Given this it seems that Air Disk is completely unsupported at the moment under Leopard and that’s a shame since I bought an Iomega Minimax drive months ago especially for Time Machine.
• Alex: The new Alex voiceover voice is really good. I’m not blind but the voice sounds so natural that I’m seriously considering setting things up shortcut keys so I can have my Mac read me my emails or documents.
• Automator: Nice overhaul with the addition of a recorder that will convert your actions to a workflow that you can run whenever and variables to store the results of actions for use in others. However, I haven’t tested this one that much and could certainly use some tutorials to get the most out of it.
• Dictionary: Wikipedia searching in Dictionary is excellent and you can surf the site’s contents all from within the Dictionary application itself. In addition to this Apple has added an Apple section, as well as splitting the Thesaurus into its own, but this seems practically useless. For example, the Apple search will provide definitions of terms like “iPod” and “Bonjour” but doesn’t find anything for the likes of “Boot Camp” or “Cocoa”. Seems a bit inconsistent to me. Oh, and no option for British English so I’m still stuck with silly American spellings.
• Firewall: This seems to be turned off by default (although sharing services are all disabled) and the preference pane to configure it is damned confusing. Your options appear to be All On, All Off or configured for particular applications/services. It seems to suggest that with the All On that the OS will determine an appropriate level of security but I honestly have no idea what it is doing and that’s not good.
• Front Row: Interface is now the same as that presented by AppleTV with previews floating by on the left-side of the screen. Streaming media over the local network from other Macs works well but there’s no previews of the media or album artwork for some reason. The movie trailers option now provides information about the movie trailer you currently have selected from the list but this does mean that you no longer get a screen full of movie posters, which was nice to look at before, although the movie’s poster does appear as part of the summary. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to change the slideshow settings for pictures, which I presume must be set in iPhoto itself and that’s annoying.
• Media Browser: The iLife, iWork and Automator applications use a common Media Browser to get access to photos, movies and music. However, I really wish that Apple would add the “plain vanilla” Pictures folder to this since I don’t keep all my images in iPhoto or Aperture, just my photos and being able to get access to artwork stored in my Pictures folder would help a lot.
• Networking: I had lots of problems getting a connection via my work’s proxy server initially, although this issue appears to have magically fixed itself. However, .mac synchronization doesn’t work with a proxy server and causes an application calling itself PubSubAgent to keep crashing until you turn off the synchronization feature. I’m doing this syncing process manually now.
• Parental Controls: These seem to work very well. Managed users can be restricted to which applications they can use, who they can communicate with, which sites they can view and when they can use the computer. Novice users can be restricted to using a very basic version of the Finder where everything is single-click and no scrolling. The function to prevent searching to adult content works very well but can be circumvented by using a proxy server so this won’t defeat a determined user, although the logging functions that the administrator can view will probably give the game away. Administration of the Parental Controls functions can be administered either from the local computer or remotely from another Mac that can log on as an administrator. The only issue that I found here was that I couldn’t set when specific applications could be used or for how long so you can’t, for example, prevent your child from playing games during the week. This said, the Parental Control preference pane shows what the managed account has been doing in its logs so you can see if they have been doing their homework or playing World of Warcraft all evening.
• Preview: Remains a blisteringly fast PDF reader (even faster now, I swear) and brings some new tools, such as adding notes that can be read by other PDF readers and adjusting page orders. You can now draw on non-PDF content for marking up images as well as performing image operations such as resizing (common presets are provided or specify a custom setting) and adjusting colors. It’s not going to set the world on fire but Preview is an application that I use a lot and these new functions are going to make it even better to use.
• Safari: We had already been able to play with the new tab management and find functions of Safari during its beta release so nothing much to discuss there aside to say that they’re the best that I’ve seen. However, I’ve now been able to try the Web Clip function for creating Dashboard widgets from any web page that you surf to and it works very well. Navigate to the page you want, select the Web Clip button and then select the area of the page that you want. It looks like Web Clip works using DIV elements defined on the page so that you can easily select the part that you want so this works best on standards-based web sites but you can manually resize the area to be widgetified using drag handles. This looks like it will be a lot handier than I expected.
• Screensavers: Hardly worth a mention but the Word Of The Day screensaver is a nice idea but another example of what I think is a rushed product. This screensaver displays a random word from the Dictionary application with its definition, in a stylish way, but also shows the message “Press D for more information”. I’m not certain what’s supposed to happen but when I press D all that happens is that the screensaver ends…
• Software Update: Good and bad on this front. I think Windows users have taken this for granted but now when you download an update that requires a system restart you get the option to restart later and Software Update won’t bug you about it. When you do restart the system will ask you if you want to install those updates and you don’t have to say “yes”. Unfortunately, someone thought that it would be a good idea not to tell you what you are installing and so Software Update, if it runs automatically and finds updates, won’t tell you what it will install by default, just that, for example, there are 5 updates to install.
• Terminal: You can save groups of Terminal windows for restoration later, tab your Terminal window and there’s preset window settings that you can use or customize to get your Terminal to look they way you want it to.

Conclusions

So, come the end of this article and my testing, what’s my conclusions? Leopard is undoubtably going to be the finest release of OS X so far and it’s probably going to be a required purchase for users as well. While the end-user features of Leopard are compelling enough for the upgrade a lot of the real benefits are for developers, which means that many new applications are going to be Leopard only (a reasonable number of 3rd party developers have already announced this for their products). Despite this the bugs that exist in the shipping version means that the end-user is best advised to hold off on purchasing this release until after the first few point updates (e.g. OS X 10.5.1) have been released.

From the end-user’s perspective here’s a quick list of the stand-out features:

• Holy Trinity of Spotlight, Cover Flow and Quick Look makes finding files so much easier
• Time Machine is the most accessible and yet unobtrusive backup system for end-users in creation
• Spaces helps address windows-overload
• Spotlight is much faster, flexible and an effective application launcher
• Most applications, particularly on Intel machines feel much faster than their predecessors
• Mail, Address Book and iCal work with each other beautifully

Unfortunately, there were things that just plain suck and here they are for your reference:

• Spaces can be maddening with random changes to other Spaces or not switching to the Space that you expected when changing to another application
• iChat Theatre is does not work to any acceptable standard
• 3rd Party applications probably haven’t been tested enough and any with low-level access like Parallels may cause kernel panics
  Boot Camp Assistant can cause drive problems during the partition process

Ultimately there is a lot to like in Leopard but I’ll like it a heck of a lot more when Apple starts nuking some of the more obvious bugs that, in my opinion, never should have made it into the shipping product to begin with. And that’s the unfortunate conclusion to this review - Leopard seems to have been rushed out the door and due to the issues that I’ve encountered this is the first release of Mac OS X that I feel disappointed by; given the genuinely useful nature of the features introduced that really should not have been the case.