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.
Leopard looks good so far. I loaded it on a separate hard drive to take it for a spin and let Apple (and others) work out some of the kinks before committing to it permanently. There are some drivers and utilities I need that haven’t been updated yet: Missing Sync for Palm, Cocktail and Disk Warrior, to name a few..
My main grumble is with the sidebar. It’s DARK. The text and icon size is too small and not adjustable (unless I’m missing some preference somewhere.
Stacks are okay. A bit of a shrug at this point.
So far, Leopard looks really good for the most part. I can’t WAIT to see what third party developers come up with in terms of interface enhancements, etc.
Leopard has absolutely revitalized my Dual 2.3 G5 PowerMac. It has turned that lackluster machine into a dazzling AV server.
Does anyone know how to put Front Row on a Powermac? I presume I’ll have to get some kind of remote, and an IR receiver.
I have a Macbook Pro and a G5 iMac.
Started to install Leopard on my Macbook Pro: informed that the only way to install it was to wipe the hard drive clean. Something to to with GUIP formatting, or something like that (I don’t have the screen in front of me).
No I have to make sure I have a bootable back-up ( I know, I should have one anyway – Time Machine was one of the major reasons I was getting Leopard) before I can install the software.
Not simple, not intuitive, should have been anticipated by Apple. A real pain in the ass disappointment.
How’s that for a miss?
I have no issue with the glossy screen on my Macbook, but some of the attitutes to valid complaints disgust me.
Stick with the nearly-obsolete laptops, or fork out almost another grand for a MBP? WTF kind of “solution” is that!? Does Apple make a sub-15″ consumer laptop with Intel CPUs that I somehow missed?
Or how about “We heard already and guess what, lots and lots of people are buying them very happily.” I hate hearing this and similar from Mac users, who should know better. Millions are buying Windows PCs, but are THEY all happy!? Hell no, in many cases they have no choice, just as if you want a Mac laptop with small screen (or any modern iMac), there is no choice but to buy a glossy screen.
This isn’t a case of iPod vs. Zune/whatever, where consumers have choice and MS just doesn’t like what people chose. People sometimes pay MORE just to get an iPod instead of a non-Apple MP3 player. With the matte/glossy debate, there is NO choice on Apple’s consumer line.
Dismissing legitimate and constructive feedback as “whining” or telling people to essentially to bend over and take it is behaviour typical of Windows fanbois and sheep. Mac users legitimately complain a lot about Windows and why it sucks, and there’s no reason to defend Apple over legitimate complaints.
Constructive complaints is partly why we got color Labels back into OSX Finder, why the iPhone is virtually unscratchable vs. older iPods, why network drive connections are properly threaded in Leopard now, and why the menubar is less transparent that it was in earlier betas. If you want a company that doesn’t listen to consumers, look at Microsoft, who only really listens to the big enterprises and bent over for the “entertainment” industry.
Business decisions (e.g. separating consumer and pro laptop lines) aren’t a shield against legitimate complaints. If there’s technical reasons behind an issue (e.g. not using a Time Machine drive as a boot disk), say so, as Gandalf did. Macromancer’s “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.” is beyond not helpful and just being an arrogant ass.
2 things as misses
1) Windows shares are broken – can’t log into Windows server shares. This worked in Tiger, and is broken in Leopard. Using a Mac as a consultant in clients that are all Windows, and if it doesn’t work on the Mac, it’s the Mac’s fault … Period.
2) Modified dates in Tiger reflected up through the directory structure. If you changed a file 3 levels deep, the top level sorted to the top of recent changed files in an open/save dialog. Now, finding a file based on having worked on it recently, requires finding the directory that that file is in (or using the smart folder stuff in finder, just not in the open dialog.)
HIT! Spaces is awesome. Turning it on, creates a hotcorner selection in Expose for Spaces. Mouse to the hot corner, and bang, up comes SPACES. Click on your workspace and go. Way cool!
Minor complaint:
Why can’t I exit from the Front Row interface, while letting my music continue playing, like I use to 10.4?
Hit: DVD Player is clearly the best designed DVD program ever.
@Zorrin
I was used to the Tiger Spotlight menu, too. Actually liked it. I’m hoping that I’ll get used to the Leopard format, too.
@B.M. re: bootable Time Machine
Everyone, altogether now: “Time Machine is bootable using your Leopard Install Disc.”
Leopard installed correctly but when I tried to update the software from the Apple web site it wouldn’t recognize my user admin password. I couldn’t installed anything. I then rebooted the machine thinking that would fix the problem but then I couldn’t even log on. I was completely shut out. After waiting about an hour on the phone, Apple tech support walked me thru changing the root password and logging on as root. Then I was able to create a new user account. But all my presets (Safari links, Desktop setup, iCal, Address Book, iTunes lists, etc.) were gone. Two days later I went into the Apple store and they had to manually copy my old user account data into the new user account. The Apple Store employee said that not recognizing a user account password was a known issue and that several people at the store had exactly the same issue. At the end they had everything working fine. But it sure wasn’t the pleasent upgrade experience I was hoping for.
MW: Miss
Since upgrading to Leopard, no matter how many times I try, I haven’t been able to connect to the free Wi-Fi that is provided by my employer.
It just sits there with an annoying “connection timed out” message.
“Time Machine preferences a “tad confusing””
there is like…. 3 buttons. he can’t handle that?!?
…and people made fun of the one button mouse! it was made for this guy!
hey shen – little rocket-scientist – save your “sarcasm” for better times. and between you and me, you are not really good at it.
“tad confusing” as in “not really configurable”. how about that? where did you learn that only 3 buttons necessarily make things right? because apple did it? LULZ!
Updated my eMac with no problems at all. Love it. Love spaces, Front Row, Time Machine.
Updated my mac mini and it made a mess. Had to erase the drive to install as the machine would not start up with any disks- 10.4 or 10.5. Glad I had all my program disks to put back on after the upgrade. Timbuktu still doesn’t work though…
I just wasted my weekend trying to get Leopard running on my 14″ 1.2 Ghz G4 iBook. Did archive and install but once the desktop is there I get the frigging beachball. I was able to bring up Activity Monitor which said Finder wasn’t responding. Was also able to click on Spotlight which said it was indexing but appeared to be frozen. I let it run for hours but no go. I had forgotten that I had trouble with Spotlight when I upgraded to Tiger. Might do a clean install next weekend. Thanks to my Super Duper backup clone I still have a functioning laptop. Don’t leave home without it.
@ Dale Eckerman
Following is an email I sent to the authors of this article at Computerworld:
Is it really necessary to review a product from such a negative perspective?”
Couldn’t agree more Dale. Why couldn’t these people just say that Leopard is absolutely perfect in every way. They must be Microsoft Plant on Ballmar’s payroll….
Let’s face it fanboys, there are no “misses” in Leopard. Like everything Apple has ever made, makes, or will ever make, it’s absolutely perfect… I say we all write whining letters to anyone who dares to point out any possible flaw in any Apple product..
You boot your Leopard DVD, and run Time Machine from there to get your stuff back.
Oh that’s all fine and dandy if you have all the necessary drivers on the Leopard DVD.
But say for instance you get a new video card or monitor for your MacPro and the drivers are not on the original Leopard DVD? Now what? You can’t see anything on your monitor. It’s not like Apple updates the Leopard DVD so you get the latest drivers.
You might even decide to get a off-brand monitor that Apple won’t do business with, so no drivers period.
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.
Well I guess you haven’t heard of backing up a boot drive then? Otherwise known as cloning, because a bit level copy is necessary to capture all the hidden files to make the drive boot-able.
There is considerable effort in rebuilding boot drives now a days. Apps, iTunes playlists, updates, files, fonts, drivers, utilities, etc., etc. It can take hours or even days to fully restore things to a new boot drive.
What happens if you got a important job to get out and your boot drive dies on you?
If you made a complete clone once a week, backed up files daily, you can option boot from the clone in minutes and be right back to work.
Time Machine DOES NOT offer this option, which is essential for a lot of people.
Carbon Copy Cloner HAS SAVED MY ASS when my boot drive just failed to boot one morning. I option booted off my clone, attempted repairs on my original boot drive, when that failed I called Apple with the error codes and the next morning there was a new boot drive at my door. I reversed cloned and was back up and running by late afternoon that day. No downtime what so ever.
Time Machine can’t do this.
My suggestion is for Carbon Copy Cloner and forget Time Machine. It’s half-assed candy coated dog shit of a backup system.
With the matte/glossy debate, there is NO choice on Apple’s consumer line.
EXACTLY. Since 86% prefer matte. All we matte users want is CHOICE FOR EVERYONE.
You 8% can have your glossy, no problem. But it shouldn’t come at the expense of the rest of us, epecially the majority.
Dismissing legitimate and constructive feedback as “whining” or telling people to essentially to bend over and take it is behaviour typical of Windows fanbois and sheep.
Constructive complaints is partly why we got color Labels back into OSX Finder, why the iPhone is virtually unscratchable vs. older iPods, why network drive connections are properly threaded in Leopard now, and why the menubar is less transparent that it was in earlier betas. If you want a company that doesn’t listen to consumers, look at Microsoft, who only really listens to the big enterprises and bent over for the “entertainment” industry.
EXACTLY. How can Apple understand what we need or correct a mistake if we don’t say something?
It’s not like I’m alone about this glossy screen issue.
TELL APPLE YOU WANT MATTE OR GLOSSY OPTION IN ALL COMPUTERS!
Refuse to buy and tell them why. Why damage your eyesight pernamently like I did years staring at glossy CRTs?
seriously bitches, shut up about the gloss screens. It was only the chunky white plastic iMacs that had matte screens. The original gumdrop iMacs had glossy screens, the desk lamp imacs had glossy screens, and now the aluminum iMacs have glossy screens. And they’re beautiful.
Had so many problems with Leopard on my brand new 24″ iMac that I reverted to Tiger earlier today. Parly Apple’s fault for changing so many things last minute, and partly the developer’s fault for not letting their customers know about issues (Nemetschek, who makes Vectorworks). Also had NUMEROUS problems with my existing printers in Leopard. I will be waiting until an update comes along to go back to Leopard. Apple should have done this a little better, what with having over two years to work on it.
There are a small number of problems with Leopard, some very aggravating: some users have found that Leopard will change an administrator account to a standard account, and I have had it freeze at the boot screen with the Apple logo and rotating wheel.
Apart from these problems, I’m pleased with Leopard.
Ran into a problem with sending mail in Mail 3.0, but I think it was a problem with the funky WiFi at the hotel I was at — working just fine on the home WiFi network.
Older Macs unsupported??? Leopard runs on 4 year old Macs. Let’s see Vista do that?