Mac OS X Leopard, 10.5

Yeah I know, all people in the Mac (blog)sphere are talking about it, waiting for the release. Some already have Leopard installed on their system, of which I am one and I’d just like to share my view of Leopard after a few hours of usage.

To start of, the install procedure was greatly simplified. To install Mac OS Leopard from scratch or to upgrade takes about 5 clicks and you’re on your way. The install procedure itself is also a lot quicker, the semi-live environment is much more responsive too. I installed from and image I had written to my external HDD (I don’t like to install from DVD-Rom, takes too long) and that took me about 15 minutes for a clean install of a first-generation Intel iMac (Core Duo) and about 22 minutes on a MacBook Pro (Core Duo). After the installer is finished and your system reboots you get the usual Welcome to Mac OS X animation in a bunch of languages, after which you can proceed to create your machine account and setup the machine. One thing that bugged me, you can’t transfer account information from another Mac unless it’s connected over firewire. This is a ridiculous limitation, USB2 and AFP should be possible too.

Time to log in!

First things you notice, the metallic semi-transparent Menu-bar and the new shiny dock and thank god, a unified interface for all the apps. I personally like the new dock, other people prefer the old style, just have a look at this TUAW article on how to get the old dock back.

The Finder, well damn what a difference! We can debate over the addition of Coverflow for ages but I think it’s a nice extra when browsing your pictures and documents but utterly useless when browsing the Applications folder for example. What I especially like is that it detects all other network shares. Connecting to a network share in Mac OS X Tiger was a pain-in-the-ass, having to use Command+K to open the Connect To dialog, then type in the share location, hitting Connect and than getting prompted about user credentials while most of the time it were anonymous samba shares I was connecting to. Those days are over, all shares pop-up nicely and when you click on a computer it will try to authenticate as a Guest user and if not prompt you for user credentials (or hit the Connect As) button.

System Preferences up next! Though System Preferences looks overly familiar when first fired up a lot of the applets have been updated. Network and Sharing, Bluetooth, Print & Fax have been completely redesigned, for the best and quite a few useful features have been added.

Safari we all know but people tend to forget about Webclip (the widget creator in Safari) which tuns out the be very handy. Mail has been revamped too, Todo’s and Events and RSS functionality but other than that, it’s still Mail and I like it that way. FrontRow looks a bit different too and had some options added to it, resembling more to Apple TV. QuickLook is (besides Time Machine) one of the most valuable additions to the user experience I think. Instead of having to open up six PDF-files to find the right one I previewed them first with QuickLook and then fired up Adobe Acrobat, it spares you time and irritation. Time Machine is the most noticeable feature. People have been screaming over the net that Time Machine isn’t much more than Windows Shadow Copy but they couldn’t be more wrong. Besides offering a Shadow Copy functionality it also includes full and incremental backup making it stand-out from the crowd, and not just because of it’s very sleek interface.

There is still a whole bunch I haven’t covered or touched yet concerning Leopard but I must say, I’m impressed. Some stuff that really bugged the hell out of me in Tiger was fixed, some very nice features added and I can’t help but notice that Leopard is excruciatingly fast on my Macs, much faster than Tiger is after a fresh install.