| |
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is Apple's first major
operating system upgrade since Tiger more than two
years ago. The changes include more than 300 new
features, which, while not earth-shattering, further
streamline the experience of using a Mac.
Should you pay for Leopard? If you're happy with the
way Tiger works, then maybe not. If you need
Bootcamp, however, then you must have Leopard. And
if you're considering the purchase of a new
computer, Leopard makes Macs more enticing than
Tiger did. Plus, Leopard makes it far easier to find
documents and applications than Windows Vista.
Leopard's interface niceties made the daily
mechanics of using the computer more pleasurable.
Mundane chores, such as finding files and backing up
data, become a visual treat (See our photo gallery
of screenshots.)
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard costs $129 out of the box, or
$199 for up to five users. Those who bought Macs
after October 1 must pay $9.95 to have Leopard
shipped to them.
Setup and installation
It took us about 40 minutes to install Mac OS X 10.5
Leopard on an Intel-based MacBook. That's a bit
longer than it took to install than Windows Vista,
but not by much. However, installation didn't run so
smoothly on some systems. Leopard took a painfully
long hour or so to install on an iBook G4, the 933
Mhz processor just grazing the minimum requirements.
You should proceed carefully when migrating the
files and applications you'll need. Apple steps you
through the process, but take your time to avoid
overwriting valuable data. Leopard changed the
personal desktop image during one migration from
Tiger, while leaving the desktop photo alone in
other cases. After installing Leopard on MacBook Pro
2.33 Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM, there were problems
with various applications, including Parallels and
GroupCal.
Leopard ran bug-free on a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook.
Some users, however, reported the fabled "blue
screen of death" historically associated with
Microsoft Windows; Apple addressed the issue.
To run Leopard, you'll need an Intel or PowerPC G5
Mac. A PowerPC-based G4 Mac with an 867MHz or better
processor will work, as well. Apple suggests having
512MB of RAM. Additionally, you'll need a USB or
FireWire external backup drive (or a file-sharing
volume on a network) to use Time Machine. Features
on iChat require a Webcam.
Interface
The new look and feel of Leopard is different
without demanding that you relearn the layout. The
Dock organizing applications and files becomes a bit
more transparent. Bump it over to one side, and the
Dock looks a bit flatter. A drop shadow now
highlights the active window, and all windows share
a unified visual design.
Click on an icon on the Dock and related items fan
out in the order you last accessed them. New Stacks
help to unclutter your desktop by showing icons of
items in the order they were last accessed. This is
especially helpful for keeping downloads in one
place, although you can't resize the icons. If the
Stack is packed with items, you can display them as
a grid.
The souped-up Finder introduces a sidebar that
allows you to rearrange items in the Places section,
while Search For submenus can locate files based on
type and when you last worked on them. Click on
Today, for instance, and you'll see everything
you've touched lately in chronological order. If you
work on a network, checking out another person's
desktop starts with the simple Share Screen option.
Spotlight scours through files in shared folders on
a network, as well as within Safari's Web History
(which you should regularly dump to fend off
snoops). It gets smarter, reading "Not" and "Or,"
dates and phrases, and even serving as a calculator
for trig equations.
Many new design elements reflect what you've already
seen in iTunes and iPhone. Cover Flow, for instance,
shuffles through folders as you hold down an arrow
key. This makes perfect sense for browsing files.
Plus, you can peek at most documents instantly.
Quick Look provides previews that can pop up files
from iWork, iLife, Microsoft Office, PDFs, as well
as popular image and video formats. In each instance
appear relevant options, such as Full Screen view or
Add to iPhoto. Select several files, double-click
them, and you've got a custom slide show.
In addition to making it easier to find your work,
interface additions are intended to make
multitasking less stressful. Virtual desktops,
called Spaces, cluster open windows into categories
or boxes. This can cut the number of windows you may
otherwise stack around your desktop, especially
helpful for tiny monitors. For example, you could
move everything you need to edit a vacation video
into one space, and in another Space place the files
and apps needed to write a dissertation. Spaces were
a cinch to set up (such as drawing a chart in a word
processor), but a tad awkward for us to master until
we learned the keyboard shortcuts. You can also use
the mouse to drag items between Spaces, and to drag
the Spaces themselves around.
Features
If you rarely back up your work because the process
is too boring or confusing, Time Machine is likely
to change that. The spaced-out interface is about as
sexy as backup can get, displaying a dynamic
timeline alongside snapshots of selected folders and
files throughout their history. To restore a file
you lost, just go to an earlier time, click the
Restore button, and you'll zoom back to your present
Desktop. For a current period of 24 hours, Time
Machine backs up automatically every hour. It backs
up each day for the past month and each week for
content updated earlier than that.
Time Machine immediately detected our external hard
drive via two USB ports and we started backing up
within a few minutes. You cannot back up to your
Mac's hard drive. You can check out the drives of
fellow Leopard users with Time Machine, too.
However, Apple doesn't offer password-protection and
encryption options upfront showing you how to lock
that drive from curious outsiders. Only longtime Mac
users are likely to know to explore such options
within Leopard's Security settings.
iChat lets you and Leopard-using buddies share files
and control each others' desktops, expanding the
tool's potential professional use. And you can
record iChat sessions as AAC audio or MPEG video
files ready for an iPod, which is a great feature
for podcasters.
iChat Theater's silly effects can distort your face
like you're looking in a fun-house mirror.
Green-screen backgrounds within iChat Theater let
your talking head appear in a video conference in
front of, say, included images of the moon or your
own pictures. (We still wish the "Star Wars R2D2"
theme were included.) Other chat buddies can see
these, whether they're using an older iteration of
OS X or they're using AIM on a Windows PC. iChat
enables you to share files as you gab via video, so
you and a friend can watch the same movie clip or
flip through the same PowerPoint presentation. Photo
Booth integrates with iChat, letting you record
videos and show off full-screen slide shows.
Mac's new Mail application integrates rich
note-taking into e-mail. These notes can serve as
scrapbooks containing images. Some 32 e-mail
templates enable you to drop in pictures and resize
them with a built-in photo browser. Mail's RSS feeds
tie into those in Safari. The e-mail application
also detects addresses for mapping via Google, as
well as contacts for a quick save. Natural language
capabilities, similar to those within Gmail,
recognize phrases such as "next Saturday" for
scheduling. Changes are synchronized between Mail
and iCal. Setting up Mail is less complicated than
Outlook, and it works with accounts from 27
services, including Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail.
However, we wish we could access RSS feeds from Mail
without signing into our e-mail account. We
encountered delays with several different Gmail
accounts. In one case, the most current Gmail
message that loaded in Mail--15 minutes after we had
logged in--was from December 2006. We kept leaning
on the Get Mail button for an unsatisfactory, slow
and incomplete refresh.
Finally, the Safari browser default is tabbed
without making you turn on the feature. Safari's
cool new Web Clips tool lets you turn any snippet
from a Web page into a widget for your Dashboard.
Potential plug-ins from third parties that would be
nice to have already include the Web Clips feature
for the popular Mozilla Firefox browser.
Leopard offers many tie-ins to Web-based content
(see the Webware video). Among them is Wikipedia as
a new companion to the Dictionary. Although you can
access the open-source encyclopedia from the
Desktop, no entries are saved locally.
Geotagging is a cool addition to Leopard, enabling
you to tie photos to latitude and longitude through
built-in GPS on digital cameras so you can put
picture galleries on a map.
Leopard offers 17 new features. There's support for
Braille output devices as well as contracted and
non-contracted Braille. It's the first operating
system that can use a Braille display during
installation. VoiceOver makes it easier to jump to
sections on a Web page, and its preferences can be
transported to other Macs. However, for people with
repetitive stress injuries, Leopard supports
voice-activated commands only--not dictation.
There are updates to less glamorous elements such as
Automator and Dashcode, and Network Preferences has
been streamlined. Developers can enjoy full 64-bit
support, and get to tinker with fun extras, which we
wish were integrated already within iChat Theater.
ColorSync reads EXIF sRGB data from cameras, and
there's support for connecting more cameras via
cable or Wi-Fi, and for other gadgets via Bluetooth.
Security
More firewall controls are among several security
enhancements to Leopard. Yet the firewall isn't
turned on by default, and we consider it vulnerable
to outside threats. To fend off Trojans and spoofing
attempts, you'll be grilled more when downloading
materials. A mechanism called Sandboxing is supposed
to prevent potential external threats from hijacking
your applications. Parental controls are now
featured more prominently in the System and offer
content filters, time limits, and Internet activity
loggers to keep tabs on young Web surfers.
Performance
We saw only a 1 percent to 3 percent improvement
with Leopard over Tiger on our performance tests. As
this falls within our typical margin of error (5
percent), we saw no significant difference with
application performance when moving from Tiger to
Leopard.
We were unable to complete our Photoshop CS3 test
because our automation routine tests, which
typically run fine under Tiger, had problems with
Leopard. Adobe's Web site indicates that Photoshop
CS3 should be compatible with Leopard--other than
the automation snafu, Photoshop CS3 appears to
operate normally.
This underlies the point that some applications
might not be 100 percent compatible yet with
Leopard. For instance, Adobe is rolling out updates
to various CS3 image, video and audio editing
applications within the next four months. FileMaker
is warning users of FileMaker Pro 9 that there are
some compatibility problems with Leopard. However,
FileMaker expects to have an update available by
November 19.
|
