You missed a spot
The blogosphere is alive and buzzing with activity as many a Mac-user installs their shiny new copy of Leopard. While Time Machine does an initial backup of my system (which seems to be taking eternity), I thought it would be a good opportunity to share some of my initial thoughts about this edition of Apple’s operating system.
Overall, I’m really impressed. I just want to say that up front, because the rest of this post will probably go into any quirks/annoyances I have, but on the whole it’s thumbs up from me. There’s plenty of great posts out there listing off the new features of leopard and of course the Apple website does a flawless job of flaunting the Leopard eye-candy, so I’ll try not to regurgitate any of that stuff in the remainder of this post.
One of the things I’ve always found annoying with any *nix based system is having to “mount” external shares. While it’s probably never taken a whole lot of effort, it’s just one of those things you wish they’d hurry up and improve. Well, Leopard makes me smile when it comes to this very issue. The finder now automatically recognises available shares on the network and puts them in a “Shared” list ready to use. This probably comes about 10 years after Microsoft put similar functionality into Windows, so it’s not a revolutionary feature as such, just something to make the average users’ life easier.
Another thing that has often annoyed me about Mac’s is that you can’t display the date anywhere immediately available. Sure, you can click on the time and it tells you the date, but why should I have to click - every other OS gives me the date in the taskbar??? Well, Apple have done something a little cheeky in that instead of putting the date in the taskbar (menubar), they have instead made the iCal icon dynamic - so you can get todays date from that. I guess if you don’t have iCal in the dock, you’re pretty much back to square one, but I like it and it scratches my itch sufficiently.
That pretty much sums up the issues I had with Tiger (the previous version of OS X) that they have now fixed in Leopard, so you could say I’m a pretty happy camper. However, there are a lot of “extra” little niceties in Leopard that I wanted to quickly touch on.
Previously I was a big fan of VirtueDesktops, it allowed me to un-clutter my workspace and speed up my development workflow. Unfortunately, there were a couple of things that annoyed me about it; Namely, the fact that every time I closed an application (no matter what else I had open in that pane) it would switch windows. So, for instance when Firefox had an update and needed to restart, VirtueDesktops would switch panes right before Firefox restarted. This forced me to close firefox, change panes and re-open it again… Very annoying! The other thing was that I basically had a certain setup I liked; Browser in one pane, TextMate in another, etc, etc… And there was no way of forcing certain applications to open in particular panes.
Well, Apple has of course inadvertently replaced Virtue with their own concoction known as Spaces. I can’t speak highly enough of this application - it fixes all the issues I had with Virtue and introduces even more useful ingredients to my workflow. Each application can be assigned to a particular pane and it only switches panes on close if there are no other applications in that pane. Brilliant!
Some good friends of mine came to Brisbane recently and I got to showing them some of the nicer things about OS X. As I was showing off the speed of Spotlight, I realised it wasn’t really as fast as I thought it was. Well, thankfully the speed of spotlight has improved ten-fold and so has its’ usefulness.
A lot of people (in fact probably most) in the Mac community swear by Quicksilver to speed up their workflow and launch applications quickly (amongst other things). In all honesty, I’ve never really understood it. I’ve watched the screencasts and I’ve tried the thing, but it just doesn’t do it for me. Well, it seems that Spotlight has taken a few cue’s from Quicksilver and as a result has become my preferred way of launching applications. Just hit Command-space, type the first couple characters of the application you want to launch and hit enter. Launching applications this way is blisteringly fast.
It’s not every day that you get to say an upgrade or a “new version” is faster, so Leopard is a pleasant surprise in the speed department. I’ve already installed copies on both new and old machines all of which appear to run faster than with previous versions of OS X. This says to me that the boys at Apple have been doing quite a bit of work under the hood and not just on aesthetics and “features”. Unfortunately, Firefox is still as slow as ever and looks ridiculous in a launch race against Safari. But, they tell me version 3.0 won’t disappoint.
For a long time I’ve been using MAMP as a local web-development server, which has been great - it’s super easy to install and has all the options you could need. However, I have for a while wanted to utilise the Apache server built into OS X and the new setup for Leopard was touted as being a major improvement with PHP5 and Ruby On Rails built in. However, what they don’t tell you is that when you turn on “Web Sharing”, PHP doesn’t run in Apache (even though it’s in the config) and there’s no MySQL installed - which renders it just about useless. Trying to install MySQL is a fun time also as I quickly found out. If you use the Mac OS X installer, the preference pane, which you use to start and stop the server, doesn’t work. If you use the source code and try to compile you’ll quickly find out that there’s no root access and no easy way of turning it on. So, I’m back to MAMP, which quite frankly works!
These issues with root access bring me to my next point though… In previous versions of Mac OS X you could simply use the NetInfo application to turn on the root account and setup a password, however there has been a big change under the hood of Leopard which may catch you by surprise (as it did me). NetInfo is OUT and LDAP is in. I personally count this as a good thing, because NetInfo was proprietary and not overly amazing, while LDAP is not Proprietary and quite highly thought of. Unfortunately, there’s no GUI currently available for managing LDAP (on Mac anyway) and even via the command line, simple tasks like adding users appear to be an arduous procedure.
I could very well be way off with this LDAP stuff and I will happily submit to anyone who has a better understanding of it than I, but for the time being there’s not a lot of info out there about the new user/group management. Like I said before, I still consider it a move in the right direction. It’s probably also worth mentioning that having root access locked down like this, is great from a security perspective and aside from having wasted half an hour searching for a solution, I’m actually glad it forced me back to MAMP.
Terminal has had a welcome update and I love that I could simply set it to use the “Pro” profile (White text on black/semi-transparent background), which matches exactly how I had my terminal setup under Tiger. Sweet! Unfortunately, as soon as I hit Command-T (open a new tab), it doesn’t retain the profile, it switches back to defaults (black text on white background) and I personally can’t think why it would do that… I have my fingers crossed for the next update though. ;-)
Wikipedia is now available from the dictionary! I know some people have a great aversion to Wiki and I think if you don’t know how to discern credible (from dodgy) information you should tread carefully. But, for someone like me who has the Wikipedia search engine in the browser, it’s great news!
The new FrontRow has been greatly improved. One of the things that let down the previous version was that a lot of time was spent waiting for animations and previews to load. The new version feels really snappy and there seems to be less animation-cruft to wait for.
Over all 10.5 has been improved in many areas. I really like the new unified look, I love that it’s faster and there are some nice little features here and there that make it even easier to use. I do feel it was a little bit wound up - as in they made it feel bigger than it actually is. From what I can tell, that’s because there has been a lot of attention given to the architecture and the underlying OS, so the hard yards have been put in, but not all on the interface where a regular user would notice.
I haven’t got the Developer Tools installed yet (that’s my next job), but word on the street is that Developers have hit the jackpot with Leopard.
So… There’s my two-cents on Leopard. For a more general overview of the OS, you might like to check out this article and accompanying video by Walt Mossberg, which I found fairly accurate.
