Leopard: The First 48 Hours
Posted on: 12.06.2007
After arriving home from the office I noticed a little Amazon box waiting on my porch. It’s only been a few hours since I posted my excitement about my copy of Leopard being in the mail. These are my initial impressions of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard after 48 hours of use…
Speed
Everything about Leopard is quicker. From booting up to launching apps to mounting volumes. In Tiger it would take a good 30+ seconds for my Mini Stack FW drive to mount after logging in. The mount should have taken place during boot time, but that’s a rant for another time. Leopard mounts this same drive almost instantly. As a result, Quicksilver launches at login almost instantly as well.
Hidden Litter
My biggest beef with Mac OS X since its release was the hidden files it leaves behind as the Finder is used to navigate a drive whether it be flash or disk based. It’s annoying as hell to be working on a PC, opening a folder, and seeing a bunch of .DS_Store, icns, and resource forks spilled all over the place. I’ve loathed Mac users for years because of this and it has kept me from switching for even longer.
I have good news! I’ve spent a good 1 to 2 hours digging through my portable FAT32 formatted USB drive with Leopard’s Finder and not a single .DS_Store file was created! Similar browsing exercises with Tiger’s Finder would cause that same portable drive to be crawling with useless .DS_Store files. It looks like Apple has finally listened to annoyed Mac/PC/Linux users everywhere.
MainMenu’s .DS_Store removal feature is now going to get good and dusty on my Leopard-ized Mac! Now if only there was a ._* cleaner to get rid of the other crap that OS X creates.
Front Row
I’ve always liked the idea of being able to use my Mac as an HTPC, and Front Row was a step in the right direction. The only problem was that the Tiger’s Front Row had some serious flaws. Thankfully, Leopard fixes nearly all of the issues that I’ve run across.
Best of all Front Row is now blazingly fast. Before, it would take quite a few seconds for iTunes/iPhoto to launch in the background and load my music/video/photo libraries (I shutter to think how long it would take if I had large libraries). Now, Front Row reads my aliased media folders instantly and all files are queued up as I select them. Beautiful!
I also noticed that iTunes and iPhoto are no longer running and hidden in the background after quiting Front Row. I wonder if they are even loaded up anymore or if Front Row has built in media handling.
Spotlight
We’ve all heard it was faster than Tiger’s implementation, but I just didn’t think it would be that noticeable. I’m going on record to say it is just as fast, if not faster, than Quicksilver. If you use Quicksilver strictly as an app launcher/document locater and you do not have a portable drive that you’d like exclude from the index, then you can safely switch to Spotlight.
Finder
I really like the new iTunes inspired side bar. Things are much easier to get at and far less bulky than Tiger’s monstrous side bar.
Don’t get me wrong though, Finder is far from perfect. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done before it’s even close to Explorer’s usability:
- The ability to sort folders first
- Useful status bar information
- A CMD + X(cut) equivalent
- Full Finder integration into file requesters (so we can move, copy, get info, etc. any file without having to leave the current running app requester)
Cover Flow
Love it or hate it, there is no better way, on any operating system, to browse a folder filled with hundreds of images. I use Windows XP’s Filmstrip view nearly every day on my office PC. Sometimes I would even wait to get to the office to browse images from a client CD because OS X had no good way to do this without importing the images into iPhoto or downloading some 3rd party app. Cover Flow is the solution I was looking for. Plus, it generates folder content thumbnails much quicker than expected.
Preview
The new preview is exactly what I wanted. I can finally resize images from my digital camera and still retain the EXIF data! The icon viewer is nice as well.
Spaces
I haven’t found a need to use it yet. At most I might have 3-4 apps running at one time. I’ll really only need to use 2 in close proximity. That scenario can easily be accomplished without the help of Spaces. In fact, Spaces would hinder my productivity.
Stacks
One word… useless. I can get at my apps and documents much faster while conserving Dock space by using Quicksilver.
Time Machine
I’m not sold on this yet. I don’t want my computer trying to outsmart me by backing up files that I really want to delete. And what about really large files like virtual OS images from Parallels and VMware? Those files change as you use them, and they can be up to 20+GB. Time Machine doesn’t care and will back it up just the same. Even a 1TB HDD will fill up very, very fast in this instance. There needs to be more customization options in Time Machine’s preferences. Until then I’ll backup manually, thank you very much.
