Computerworld’s Michael DeAgonia, Ryan Faas, Ken Mingis and Seth Weintraub have used Apple’s new Mac OS X Leopard for a week and made a list of hits and misses:
Misses:
• Time Machine preferences a “tad confusing”
• Dock changes its look depending on placement
• Stacks inconsistent at times and lack hierarchical navigation capabilities
• Mail’s main Inbox issue
• Active Directory not completely reliable so far
• Finder’s Cover Flow display sizing
• iPhone integration could be much better
• Older Macs unsupported
Hits:
• TIme Machine makes backup painless and reliable
• Stacks is both useful and visually impressive
• Front Row, a hit from Day One, just gets better
• Quick Look is quite the timesaver
• Data detectors a little-touted feature that you’ll be using all the time
• Screen Sharing is done very well in Leopard
• NSOperation allows developers to optimize their code to automatically scale to take advantage of multiple processors
• Core Animation opens a lot of exciting possibilities for both users and developers
• Development environment will soon bring us a whole new level of applications
Full article here.
How about “Hit: Spotlight is way faster, especially for apps.” or “Hit: The new dictionary.”?
just upgraded yesterday, and i’ve been very impressed so far. tried screen sharing with my dad and it worked flawlessly. iChat theatre was fun. The only thing that irks me is the new look of the dock, but that’s easily changed.
first?
If you don’t like stacks, replace it with an alias of whatever folder you wish to use. Only complaint with time machine is it’s not easily moved, say you want to use a different drive or restore a drive after you make a RAID, etc. Airport disk works much better but still some quirks that need to be fixed. Best features are the new DVD player, Spaces, and Finder. I wish you could add album art to cover flow or quick look, that would just be killer, esp if you ahve a TON of stuff that needs art.
Time Machine makes me want to delete something “accidentally”.
For an OS rebuild, I would say it’s very impressive if that’s all you can find wrong with it… Look at Vista…
-Pi
Overall… great!
A few suggestions:
– Need setting to set/change the ‘Stacks’ display icon. Overlaying icons a bit unsightly in some cases.
– ‘Notes’ & ‘To Do’ lists should synch with iPhone (coming with next update I hope)
Minor stuff . .
If I could choose opaque menu bar? Absolutely would.
If I could return the bland moncrome folder icons to the kmore graphically distinct ones on 10.4? Absolutely would.
If I could assign a cover icon to the stacks in the dock, rather than seeing the “top page” in the stack, making for a consitent and coherent visual for that stack? Absolutely would.
Can anybody figure out why Expose now shows up as an appplication in the finder?
The quoted miss about the dock changing look depending on placement shouldn’t counted as a miss. It’s an improvement over early builds with a consistent look.
I forgot to delete a ripped DVD from my desktop before I did my first Time Machine backup and I’m now I’m regretting 7 GB of unnecessarily used backup space. I couldn’t see a way to go back in time and delete it, but maybe I need to RTFM. Still, I’m not complaining. I love Time Machine.
Yeah, frontrow is nice and stuff.. but what about airtunes support? I really miss laying in bed, selecting the tunes I want to hear and enjoy them through my home speakers. Just groovin’ away into a deep sleep…
TIme Machine hard drive is not bootable
That means no hardware protection. If your boot drive fails, you can’t just boot off a Time Machine drive and keep going until you get a new drive.
So what is the frigging use?
How stupid can Apple be? Oh that’s right, glossy screens, my bad.
Hit: iChat screen share
Misses: MBP won’t sleep anymore.
I just like it that everything looks crisper and sharper and cleaner.
“Oh that’s right, glossy screens, my bad.”
Get over the fscking glossy screen nonsense already.
And dude, if you want a boot drive, make a dedicated boot drive.
I suppose you’d like Apple to wipe your ass every day too.
To BIG MISS:
It’s nice to see a woman not ashamed about her weight or marital status.
As to booting off the Time Machine drive, I think you can do that as long as you partition it in advance and include a bootable copy of your OS on the drive. See MacFixit for the how-to and why.
I agree with Big Miss. Why couldn’t they do this so you can boot off the external if needed and restore in case of hard drive failure, etc, something that carbon copy cloner does?
Am I the only one that really dislikes how the new “Show All” feature works in Spotlight as opposed to the way it worked in Tiger’s Spotlight?
Following is an email I sent to the authors of this article at Computerworld:
Messrs. Michael DeAgonia, Ryan Faas, Ken Mingis and Seth Weintraub:
Is it really necessary to review a product from such a negative perspective?
Leopard is an incredible piece of software – 99.xxxx% of which works extremely well – without the benefit of a single update from Apple. It installs easily. It performs so many tasks so very well. The few minor issues you point out are all correctable – if Apple and other users determine that they are desirable – through automatic software updates from Apple.
There is nothing wrong in pointing out areas in which improvements can be made – but you over emphasize their impact – inferring that Leopard is inferior.
The slant of your article – presumably to sell copies of your magazine – is far too negative. “A spotty record” in the article’s suggests poor performance. In reality, this is not true. If Leopard had been submitted from a student in class, he/she would be graded an A–minus. Your article, although informative, suggests otherwise. The tone suggests a grade of D or C-minus.
The slant of your report, frankly, is irresponsible.
Back-up drives are for……. back-ups! Booting from a back-up is not a good idea because immediately that you do it (if you could) it ceases to be an accurate back-up.
So what is the frigging use in complaining about glossy screens again? We heard already and guess what, lots and lots of people are buying them very happily.
The only gripe I have with the new dock is the blue chicklet used to identify the applications that are running- it blends in too much with the glassy dock and is hard to see. I much preferred the black triangle under the running apps.
My other gripes are quite minor in the grand scheme of what they pulled off here. One being the default cover flow window size when used in the finder- that ought to be something that can be set in the view options, like you can with the icon size.
Overall I’m very impressed with Leopard- I was a bit wary on installing a .0 release, but have been pleasantly surprised so far. I only did this after having a bootable clone of my system before I made the switch. I can easily reboot into Tiger if I need to use an app that is fully supported yet.
leopard has been great thus far, but i am surprised to hear that time machine drives are not bootable. i’m not going to go nuts and start bashing apple for it, but it would be cool to get that functionality at some point, because it does seem like kind of an obvious thing.
as for glossy screens, i agree with macromancer – let it go. you want matte? get a pro, or stick with the powerbooks/ibooks. i love the screen on my macbook, and i’ve only once been distracted by the gloss. my solution? turn around. problem solved.
anyhow, leopard has been fantastic – the only problems i’ve run into involve programs that broke during the upgrade from tiger. fortunately, those apps have since been updated and it’s all good now. =)
i’ve noticed that apps seem to be getting updated for leopard faster than they were for tiger. devs are getting their acts together!
Misses: 10.5’s interface is ugly. I long for the days of Click-Change.
Tiger’s interface is better than 10.5’s and Vista is crap, but it looks a lot better than Leopard!
Stacks is the most bogus feature thus far.
If you put a folder in dock earlier, you could see what the files were and navigate hierarchically. This was in tiger (in Panther and for ever!).
They simply removed the hierarchical navigation capability; and now with jazzed up way of seeing the documents, it’s touted as a new feature!
Shame on you Apple.
@ Big Miss, RTFM! You boot your Leopard DVD, and run Time Machine from there to get your stuff back. Why do you think Time Machine is one of the apps available within the installer? Sheesh. Not only that, but this info popped up when I turned on Time Machine, IIRC.
Relatively Minor Things I Don’t Like:
Menu Bar: I want my menu bar opaque again, but I am getting used to it. I just hate the way it sometimes looks “disabled”. Maybe if the text were darker or something. The “opaqe menubar” hacks I’ve found so far must have been written for Leopard seeds, because they’re not working for me.
Stacks: Wish that when you right click a stack, the view options were “Auto, Fan, Grid, Menu”, with Menu being the old hierarchical view. That way you could choose certain stacks to behave like before, but leave others as stacks. I love my Downloads stack. kmac1036, gonna try your alias trick when I get home.
Notes & To Do syncing: I was surprised this wasn’t there, but I’m hoping it will be in an iTunes update, since iTunes is what does the syncing to the iPhone anyway. Hopefully relatively trivial for the iTunes programmers.
Things I Totally Love:
Tiime Machine. Nuff said.
The New Dictionary! Did you know the new Developer Tools has a development kit for making your own dictionaries that will act just like those pre-installed? Serious coolness. Goofed around yesterday and wrote a Perl script to convert a text-based Tibetan dictionary into one that is fully usable in Dictionary.app! Built a small one by hand, too. It’s all XML!
Just about everything in the new Finder, including Coverflow and Quick Look. Changable Column View sort! Ginormous icons!
Core Text! No one’s heard of it, but it replaces the old ATSUI and stuff, making my Tibetan dictionary look awesome with the new Tibetan fonts. New input methods support more languages and scripts, including Tibetan! Wow!
It’s just plain pretty, too.
For me:
Hits: Increased speed and more consistent interface.
Misses: Lack of hierarchical menus in Stacks and poor definition of running apps in the dock.
Overall, a very good upgrade.