Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard, may be the most analyzed release of an operating system upgrade in Apple’s history, coming as it does into a flourishing blogosphere after a multi-month (and leaky) beta cycle and an extra six months of rumination, contemplation, and investigation.

 

There's a lot to like about Leopard - and a few things we don't like.

 

Apple has done their part to stoke the excitement, as well. If you’re a true MacLifer, you’ve watched the Guided Tour and have pored over the oh-so-comprehensive list of Leopard's "300+ New Features." You've also perused Leopard's system requirements and have taken note of the more-demanding requirements for iChat. If you're a tech type, you've dug into the Leopard Dev Center and have given the Leopard Technology Overview more than a passing glance.

 

But the question remains: What's it like to actually use Leopard for day-to-day work?

Well, after picking up my copy of Leopard at a briefing in the Apple mothership on Thursday afternoon, I've spent over 30 hours communing with the big kitty. (I'm writing this on the morning of Sunday, October 28th.) I've worked in Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Microsoft Office, iWork, and more. I've emailed, surfed, and iChatted. I've FTPed and PDFed. I've even taken a couple of breaks, listening to tunes and podcasts, and watching The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

 

But part of that emailing was of head-scratching messages back and forth to my contacts at Apple, trying to ferret out reasons for the cat's occasional misbehavior. And part of that iChatting was with Mac|Life reviews editor Roman Loyola, trying to get some of iChat's much-vaunted new features to work as advertised. And then there was simply time spent rebooting, hoping that a fresh start would quash a bug.

 

Bottom line: There's a lot to like in Leopard - a lot - including a gorgeous new Finder, efficiency-boosting Spaces and Quick Look, enhanced support apps such as Mail and Preview, under-the-hood muscle such as Core Animation and a broad range of security advances, and - finally - improved font management.

 

But Leopard is buggy. If you're a geek like me and can handle the slings and arrows of a version .0 release, go for it - but be prepared for the bumps you'll find in the road. But don't install Leopard on your mom's machine. Not yet, at least - keep your eye on Software Update and wait for the bug fixes that are sure to arrive sooner rather than later.

 

Click the Next link below to read on.

 

Next: The Finder & the Desktop

 

If you want to skip around, click on one of the links below.

 

1. Introduction

2. The Finder & the Desktop

3. Screen Sharing, Stacks, & Spotlight

4. Quick Look & Spaces

5. Bugs

6. Time Machine

7. iChat

8. Other Apps (Mail, Safari, Preview)

 

---

The Finder & the Desktop. As I mentioned, there are approximately eleventy squillion places on the Web to find out about all of Leopard's new features, so I'll try to focus on things you can discover only by putting it through its paces.

 

Take the Finder, for example. The new Cover Flow view is truly remarkable, especially if you resize your Finder windows to be larger than Leopard's rather small default size. You may notice, however, that some of the file images and application icons in Cover Flow view appear jagged, as Roman discovered is true with JPEGs created by Photoshop.

 

The solution is simple for images: Just turn off the thumbnail-creating feature of that app (in Photoshop CS3, for example, it's in Photoshop > Preferences > File Handling > Image Previews) and resave the file. Those third-party app icons, however, will remain jaggy until their publishers offer updates.

 

If you're a photographer, Cover Flow view is a godsend - as is View > Show Path Bar (check out the file path at the bottom of the window).

 

The new Sidebar in Finder windows is most definitely all it's cracked up to be. Most impressive are the Shared section, which lists all the active Macs on your local network (the ones that have System Preferences > Sharing > Personal File Sharing enabled, in any case), and the Search For section, which comes populated with a handful of time- and type-based searches for files and apps, though, oddly enough, not folders. You can, however, easily add your own custom searches, including folder searches, by opening a search window with File > Find, adding your criteria (which can be remarkably refined), then clicking Save.

 

If you're on a local network, you'll notice that the Shared section lists Macs running either Leopard or Tiger. (I was unable to test with Macs running older versions of Mac OS X - if you've have a Panther, Jaguar, Cheetah, or Puma roaming around your LAN, let everybody know how it responds in the Comments section below.) For File Sharing, Leopards and Tigers get along just fine – you’ll also notice that Tiger Macs have generic icons while Leopard Macs have Mac-specific icons. Spotlight searches, however, come up with erratic results unless the Mac being searched is running Leopard.

 

An Apple rep told me that they don't support Spotlight searches on shared Tiger Macs; my experience showed that sometime the searches work and sometimes they don't. Your mileage may vary. Speaking of searching shared Macs: Make sure to enable View > Show Path Bar in the Finder when you're searching multiple shared Macs - it makes it a lot easier to discover a file's residence.

 

Click the Next link below to read on.

 

Next: Screen Sharing, Stacks, & Spotlight

 

If you want to skip around, click on one of the links below.

 

1. Introduction

2. The Finder & the Desktop

3. Screen Sharing, Stacks, & Spotlight

4. Quick Look & Spaces

5. Bugs

6. Time Machine

7. iChat

8. Other Apps (Mail, Safari, Preview)

 

 

---

Screen Sharing, Stacks, & Spotlight. Screen Sharing is a Leopard-only feature. To enjoy this trick in the Finder (it's also available through iChat), turn on Screen Sharing in System Preferences > Sharing, click Computer Settings, choose the configuration with which you're comfortable, and choose to whom you would like to allow access.

 

If the Mac with which you want to share screens has deemed you allowable, when you highlight it in the Shared list you'll be presented with a Share Screen button; click it, and the Screen Sharing app launches and the shared Mac's desktop appears in a window on your display, where you can either scale the image by dragging a handle in the lower right corner or view it full-size by choosing View > Turn Scaling Off. You now have total control over the Mac whose screen you are sharing.

 

Don't, however, then have the Mac whose screen you are sharing share your screen, as well – if you do, you’ll drop into a black hole of recursion from which a reboot may be your only recovery.

 

Here's a photo of how Leopard crashes when you try to have two Macs share each other's screens simultaneously – as if there'd every be a reason to do that other than geeky entertainment…

 

Whether or not the introduction of Stacks into the Dock is a good thing or a bad thing is simply a matter of taste. I, for one, preferred Tiger's ability to accept folders into the dock that could then be clicked and held to allow you to scroll through them - using hierarchical folders, even, a treat that's gone in Stacks - and pick the item you wanted.

 

Stacks display their contents by either fanning out in an right-leaning swoop if your Dock is on the bottom of your display, or in a translucent black grid if you have more than a certain number of items in a Stack or if you've positioned your Dock on the right of left edge of your display - the "certain number" varies depending upon the size of your display, with a MacBook, for example, fanning fewer icons than a 30-inch Cinema HD Display (my 20-inch Cinema Display maxes out at 11 fannable items).

 

Oh, and by the way, if you place your Dock on the left or right, it loses the "reflective tray" clutter of the bottom-placed Dock and becomes, instead, a more-neutral translucent black. Click and hold on a Stack to choose its sort order - although, somewhat perversely, an alphabetical ("Name") sort order sorts from the bottom up in the fan display.

 

As for Spotlight, you can now use the Spotlight search field for more than just searching for files – it’ll also perform surprisingly sophisticated math; understand Boolean queries using AND, OR, and NOT; and even perform complex searches based on a broad range of metadata attributes. Check out "Specifying criteria in the Spotlight search field" on Apple's website for more info - and a detailed list of all of Spotlight's math functions, or so Apple tells me, will be up on their site Real Soon Now.

 

Spotlight now lets your search for files using more metadata attributes - but why it thinks the Beatles' top hit was "The End" is a mystery.

 

Click the Next link below to read on.

 

Next: Quick Look & Spaces

 

If you want to skip around, click on one of the links below.

 

1. Introduction

2. The Finder & the Desktop

3. Screen Sharing, Stacks, & Spotlight

4. Quick Look & Spaces

5. Bugs

6. Time Machine

7. iChat

8. Other Apps (Mail, Safari, Preview)

 

 

---

Quick Look & Spaces. There not much to say about Quick Look other than the fact that it, along with the Cover Flow view so useful to we photographer types, is almost reason enough to upgrade to Leopard.

 

Quick Look lets you watch videos without having to launch QuickTime.

 

As you probably know, you simply highlight a file in any Finder view and press the space bar, and Quick Look displays a large image of that file - one that's even readable if the file is a text or spreadsheet document. You can also click a small icon at the bottom of the Quick Look display to view the file full-screen - but don't go looking for a way to default to full-screen view; Apple told me that there's no option to do that.

 

One oddity - bug? - that I discovered in Quick Look: Files created by iWork '08's Numbers expanded each cell to contain all the information in it when viewed in Quick Look, even when in the actual file that expansion hadn't been performed and didn't display in the Cover Flow view.

 

And speaking of Cover Flow, you already knew that you can play QuickTime files right in the Cover Flow view. But did you know that you can also view AVI and WMV files, as well, if you have the correct plug-ins installed? You did? Then never mind.

 

Imagine what a jumble it would be if all the apps divided into these four Spaces (seen here in the "bird's-eye" view) were all crammed into one Desktop.

 

Although Spaces is technically an app, it's such an integral part of working in the Finder that I'll discuss it here. In System Preferences > Exposé & Spaces you can create up to 16 virtual Desktops that you can quickly jump to by using a modifier key of your choice with the arrow or number keys, a pull-down menu item, or the Spaces app itself. You can also assign - or as Apple calls it, "bind" - specific apps to specific numbered Spaces

 

I know it was only a couple of paragraphs ago that I said that Quick Look and the Cover Flow view were reason enough to upgrade to Leopard. Let me assign Spaces to that group, as well. I designated one Space for all my Web work (email, browsing, and the like), another for image work, another for website design, and a fourth for writing (Word and Dictionary), and I flip quickly between them using the default Control-Arrow key set-up. It's easy to change the order of the Spaces, and simple to move apps among them; just click on the Spaces icon in the Dock and you're presented with a modifiable top-down view of all your Spaces that Apple calls the “bird’s-eye view” - drag and drop to your heart's content.

 

After working with Spaces for a day or two, I had to go back into Tiger for some system maintenance and backups, and was immediately frustrated with all the windows that cluttered my single "space" while I tried to get some work done during the long backup. Sure, Exposé helped, but Spaces is so much more elegant and so much easier to use that I was already spoiled by it.

 

One Spaces niggle: An Apple rep told me that I could move windows from one Space to an adjacent one by simply dragging the window and "bumping" it into an adjacent Space, but this seems to work only sporadically. Which brings me to…

 

Next: Bugs

 

If you want to skip around, click on one of the links below.

 

1. Introduction

2. The Finder & the Desktop

3. Screen Sharing, Stacks, & Spotlight

4. Quick Look & Spaces

5. Bugs

6. Time Machine

7. iChat

8. Other Apps (Mail, Safari, Preview)

 

---

Bugs. On my two main test Macs - a Dual 2.66GHz Dual-Core Mac Pro and a Dual 2.7GHz Power Mac G5 - I encountered a couple of bugs that reared their ugly heads when I was digging around in the Finder.

 

But before I dig into them, a word on bugs in general. First of all, they're inevitable in a .0 release of anything. There's no way on god's green earth that any software developer - even one as experienced and deep-pockets as Apple - can test every possible configuration of software and hardware.

 

The bugs that I've run into may be widespread, or they may be of a species only to be found on my particular combination of hardware and software. And, to be honest, being a bit of a geek I have a rather tricked-out set of stuff on my desk 'n' drives. As mentioned above in a different context, your mileage may vary. Or, in this case, I should say "will," not "may."

 

The most annoying bug I've encountered is that sometimes when I'm working in an app, clicking on the Desktop doesn't return me to the Finder; to get back to the Finder I need to jump to a different Space, access the Finder there, then jump back and try again - sometimes more than once. As with most bugs, this only happens occasionally - as I type this in Word right now, for example, my Mac is behaving quite obediently; last night, however, it was quite recalcitrant. Also, sometimes rebooting helps and sometimes is doesn't. Sigh...

 

If you're looking for help, the Finder's new ability to point out specific menu items is a big ... well ... help.

 

I also ran into some trouble with the Trash. For reasons unknown, yesterday it decided that it held 20 items when, in fact, it was empty. When I tried to use the Finder > Secure Empty Trash command, any files that actually were in the Trash would be securely deleted, but then the Emptying the Trash dialog would hang at 20 and I'd have to relaunch the Finder (the Stop Emptying the Trash X-button didn't work).

 

The Trash this morning was fine, but this afternoon it's returned to the same bad mood, except that now it believes that there are 21 items in the Trash when there are actually none. (Excuse me for a moment while I relaunch the Finder.)

 

Also, this might be as good a place as any to mention two hardware incompatibilities that I've discovered - one trivial, one less so. In the first category is the fact that the thumb-click button on my Logitech Cordless MouseMan optical refused to allow me to assign it a keystroke as I could in Tiger.

 

In the second category is the fact that, when booted into Leopard, my Power Mac G5 won't recognize my Seagate eSATA 500GB External Hard Drive (ST3500601XS-RK, bundled with a 2-port eSATA PCI card). The good folks at Seagate tell me that they're working on a fix, but until they upgrade the driver to be Leopard-compatible, I must reboot into Tiger to backup my entire 10-volume base system. And speaking of backup...

 

Next: Time Machine

 

If you want to skip around, click on one of the links below.

 

1. Introduction

2. The Finder & the Desktop

3. Screen Sharing, Stacks, & Spotlight

4. Quick Look & Spaces

5. Bugs

6. Time Machine

7. iChat

8. Other Apps (Mail, Safari, Preview)

 

---

Time Machine. Leopard's new backup system, Time Machine, is an odd piece of work. Designed for the Average Joe, Time Machine - when in its default setup - backs up your entire Mac to one folder on one external drive.

 

Using it couldn't be easier. When you plug in an external drive for the first time, Time Machine ask you if you want to use it for backup, and if you say yes, it starts backing up everything on your Mac.

 

Time Machine then takes hourly snapshots of your Mac, and backs up any changes; it then wraps those hourly changes into a daily backup until it has a month's worth, at which point it wraps the most recent week's backups into a weekly backup, and so on until you run out of hard-drive space. Then it asks you whether you want to delete the older backups or start afresh with a new external hard drive.

 

One man's fine design is another man's pure, unmitigated cheesiness. Mmmmm, gouda...

 

You access your timed and dated backups through a full-screen interface in which you click on arrow-shaped buttons to move back and forward in "time." (Why you can't use your mouse's scroll button puzzles me - seems like an ideal use for it.) The "Lost in Space" design of this interface is ... well ... let's say one can love it or think it's hopelessly cheesy, and put me down as a member of the latter category.

 

Restoring a file is a simple matter of highlighting it and clicking the (cheesy) Restore button and returning back to your Mac by clicking the (cheesy) Cancel button. In my tests, everything worked like a charm.

 

In System Preferences > Time Machine, you can, if you'd like, tell Time Machine not to back something up, be it a volume, folder, or even a file. To me, this works a bit in the reverse of how I usually think of backups - it'd feel more comfortable telling a utility what to back up, and not what not to back up.

 

This exclusion methodology also unfortunately suffers from the same buggy forgetfulness as does Spotlight's Privacy exclusion system (System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy) - meaning that it sometimes forgets that you told it to exclude something, and backs it up anyway.

 

The more-major quibble with Time Machine is that your backups must all reside in one folder on either one external drive or on an extra internal drive in a tower Mac; since Time Machine just needs access to that folder, the same drive can have other stuff on it, as well. If you have a setup like mine with around a terabyte stashed into five separate primary volumes, Time Machine will force you to use an external drive of around a terabyte to perform even your first backup.

 

That may not seem too onerous of a burden, since you can find terabyte drives for under five hundred bucks these days - but remember that Time Machine takes snapshots of changes on the hour. If, for example, you have a 20GB password-protected DMG in which you keep, say, your business records, and you frequently modify files in it, you're going to be adding 20GB to your total backup every hour, on the hour. That'll eat up any drive quicker than you can say "Where's my MasterCard?"

 

And then there are Macs with multiple users (a user doesn't need to be logged on to have his or her account backed up, by the way). If a user has his or her user area protected by File Vault, that entire user area - and not just the files changed within it - is backed up each time that user logs out, since a File Vault user area is essentially the same as the password-protected DMG file I mentioned previously.

 

Your Time Machine backup drive gets a nifty new icon.

 

So how big should a Time Machine backup drive be? The answer is, sadly, "It depends." If all you use your Mac for is email, small text and spreadsheet documents, and the like, you're going to be fine with a Time Machine drive not that much larger than your main drive. If you do a lot of image editing, however, those large image files are going to add up quickly, and if you do video editing, the accumulation of backup snapshots will accelerate even faster. As with almost anything on your Mac, you can't go wrong with getting the biggest Time Machine drive you feel comfortable paying for.

 

More Time Machine details:

 

• No, a Time Machine backup isn't bootable. If your main drive crashes, you'll need to boot using your Leopard Install DVD. Choose Utilities > Restore System From Backup, and proceed as directed.

 

• Despite rumors you may have read on the Web, Apple claims that the appearance of the Time Machine interface can't be altered. Did I just hear a gauntlet being thrown?

 

• Yes, multiple users on multiple Macs can back up to either a server or a network attached storage device (NAS).

 

• No, you can't back up to a USB-attached AirPort drive. Although this sounds like a terrible limitation - who needs backup more than mobile laptop users? - the Apple rep with whom I spoke didn't have a reason for not including this feature other than "We didn't include this feature."

 

• Your external Time Machine backup drive can be connected to your Mac over FireWire, USB, eSATA, or Fiber Channel — and, as I mentioned above, over Ethernet to a NAS or server.

 

• Time Machine can be directly addressed through the Finder, Address Book, Mail, and iPhoto, but not iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, iWeb, or other Apple apps.

 

Click the Next link below to read on.

 

Next: iChat

 

If you want to skip around, click on one of the links below.

 

1. Introduction

2. The Finder & the Desktop

3. Screen Sharing, Stacks, & Spotlight

4. Quick Look & Spaces

5. Bugs

6. Time Machine

7. iChat

8. Other Apps (Mail, Safari, Preview)

 

---

iChat. Now it's time to weigh in on the biggest disappointment that I found in the otherwise pretty damn good Leopard: iChat - more specifically, iChat Theater.

 

Don't get me wrong; I don't think that all of iChat's latest iteration is a buggy morass. Lots of the new features are quite attractive. Tabbed chats, for example, and audio and video recording. All good stuff. But I never could get iChat Theater working exactly right, and my experience with the new backdrops was a complete disappointment.

 

Let me start with the oddest bug I uncovered. Take a quick look at this photo of my Power Mac G5 (right) sharing a PDF with my Mac Pro (left) using iChat Theater's file-sharing capability and viewing the PDF in full-screen mode. Notice anything, well, amiss?

 

When I used full-screen mode to view a PDF shared in iChat Theater, the image reversed - but only on one of my test Macs.

 

I reported this oddity to Apple, but they haven't been able to replicate it - though it's completely replicable on my Mac Pro. Ah, bugs.

 

More distressing is iChat Theater's poor quality when I shared a PDF over my home network with a Dual 1GHz Mirrored Drive Door Power Mac G4 running Tiger. (Tiger-based Macs can see all of the new iChat's effects; they just can't generate them.) While the full-screen quality of the reverse PDF on the Mac Pro was quite good, the full-screen PDF shared using iChat Theater on the mirror Door looked like this:

 

Here's an actual-size detail of a PDF shared with a Tiger user on a Power Mac G4. "Crisp" is not the first word that leaps to mind, now, is it?

 

Sharing the same page with another Leopard user - Roman at the Mac|Life offices, by the way - elicited no complaints about image quality from him. I don't know whether it was the low power of the G4 here at home or the fact that it was running Tiger, but something was certainly degrading image quality.

 

Things got wonkier when Roman and I tried out iChat Theater's backdrops capabilities. As you'll recall, you can substitute either still-image or video backdrops for your real - and, presumably, boring - surroundings. First Roman tried instigating an iChat Theater session with him sitting in front of one of Apple's supplied still images, the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, the poor man's head appeared to be full of holes.

 

Shall we say, "suboptimal?"

 

Video whiz and MacLife.com Web guru Robbie Baldwin proffered the opinion that since iChat Theater uses a process similar to green-screen chroma-keying to map out all the colors in Roman's background, the fact that Roman was sitting in front of a dark, jumbled array of shelves, books, and equipment was throwing iChat Theater for a loop. We decided, therefore, that I should initiate the iChat Theater session from my far-more-boring home office.

 

Unfortunately, my Dual 2.7GHz Power Mac G5 wasn't up to the task, as Apple's iChat specs make clear. In fact, it wouldn't even let me try - the option to initiate a backdrop session wasn't available. Now, I wouldn't exactly call a Dual 2.7GHz Power Mac G5 a dog, but apparently the trickery needed for iChat Theater's backdrops requires some serious horsepower - I'm guessing that it relies heavily on Intel processors' advanced SSE media-processing instructions.

 

So I switched over to my Dual 2.66GHz Dual-Core Mac Pro. iChat Theater was definitely happier with my office's duller background, but the quality of the illusion was still far from anything that I have seen in any of the many Apple-managed demos I've seen of backdrops. There was still plenty of breakup in my image, and the borders between the backdrop - still or video - and my image were far from crisp and visibly unstable.

 

Roman and I then tried sharing a PDF using iChat Theater, but after our audio kept breaking up and our video froze entirely, we simply gave up - although the PDF looked quite nice, indeed. At this point in its development, Roman and I give iChat Theater two thumbs down.

 

Click the Next link below to read on.

 

Next: Other Apps

 

If you want to skip around, click on one of the links below.

 

1. Introduction

2. The Finder & the Desktop

3. Screen Sharing, Stacks, & Spotlight

4. Quick Look & Spaces

5. Bugs

6. Time Machine

7. iChat

8. Other Apps (Mail, Safari, Preview)

 

---

Other Apps. I believe it was G.K. Chesterton who said, "I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time." After the past eight hours of hammering on this keyboard, I know what he meant - so I'll wrap up this missive with a few closing thoughts on some other Leopard features and apps.

 

Mail. Well, more bug-riddled disappointments here. There's a lot to like in the new Mail - easy-to-use Notes and To-Do capabilities, Spotlight searching, real-time RSS notification, and more - but the new Stationery templates aren't part of the party, at least if the person to whom you're sending them is a user of Microsoft Office.

 

In my testing, Stationery-based messages crashed Entourage 2004 more than half the time, and were unreadable in Entourage v.X (and, yes, I had HTML turned on, smarty-pants). Apple's looking into my problems, and I hasten to add that you may have no problems whatsoever, but this was my experience. (Stationery-based messages look great when received and viewed in Mail, by the way.)

 

Oh, and the new Data Detection capabilities? They work fine when everything is laid out in a way that the AI understands, but get wonky when things aren't just so.

 

Safari. The new Web Clip capability - the ability to turn snippets of Web pages into Dashboard widgets - works great, but with a few caveats: First, you can't make a Web Clip widget that's smaller than 112 pixels high by 137 pixels wide, and the Web Clip widgets you create aren't true Dashboard widgets: They don't live in the Widgets folder, they can't be managed by the Widget Manager, and when you close them they disappear completely.

 

My daughter's in South Africa, so I created a Web Clip to track the weather in Cape Town - doing so took me about 15 seconds.

 

Preview. There are a slew of improvements to Preview, every one of which I find grand. One of them, however - the ability to reorder pages in a PDF document - doesn't work on all PDFs, notably ones which the author has protected at some level. Seems fair...

 

I could go on - and I will, in an article that'll be published in the January edition of Mac|Life, in which I'll share some tips and tricks for getting the most out of Leopard.

 

And if any of you want to take issue with some of my opinions, share some of your own, or point out bugs that I've missed, there's a Comments area right below.