I’ve been living with Leopard for a couple weeks now and as I’m finally getting a little time from my mammoth project list, I had a few observations. I’ve been a long time Mac user and admit to being an Apple fanboy. That said, Leopard has me feeling a little teased.

Expectations

I followed the development… drooled over the rare screenshots… held my breath at the year’s keynote addresses. I felt I had a pretty good idea what to expect from Mac OS X 10.5. Some GUI tweaks, a lot of under-the-hood work and the big Apple freebie for this release – “easy” backups ala Time Machine. For the most part, I wasn’t looking for huge dramatic improvements, but a lot of little tweaks that would add up to a whole lot more usability.

Installation

I received my shiny black space-motif box on Friday morning right around 10 AM. Speaking of space motif, is Apple suffering from a bit of a marketing identity crisis? They obviously pushed the space-motif because of Spaces and Time Machine. Why even continue to call it Leopard? Why not develop a new moniker that fits the rest of the marketing message? That only bothers me because I’ve always seen Apple as a company that makes smarter decisions than that. Guess that’s my fanboy reality distortion field and my marketing experience colliding. Anyways…

Except for a bit of a hiccup getting the install process going, the actual installation was a breeze. When I initially ran the installer, it showed that there were no disks capable of installing on. Oh really? Turned out, I had to wipe out my Boot Camp partition since version 1.3 was a beta that expired with Leopard’s release. No biggie, I only use Windows to test websites in IE and I have no qualms about obliterating Microsoft bits from my hard drive.

The Good, Bad & Ugly

When the 3-hour install completed, I was really able to get to work immediately. Most all of the applications I use on a regular basis worked as expected.

I’ve seen and worked in multi-desktop environments before. I know Apple didn’t invent the feature. I wasn’t really expecting much from Spaces. I can’t believe how I’ve lived with out it on Mac OS X. Apple really nailed the implementation. It’s fast – a key to it being usable – but graceful with transitions that not only add eye-candy but also provide subtle information. For example, arrow right to the next desktop space has the windows flying in from the right side of the screen to help you follow where things are coming from.

On the other hand, Stacks are probably the worst decision I’ve seen Apple make. That’s not to say I don’t like the concept of stacks, just that the implementation wasn’t as well thought out as Spaces. If you’ve used them at all, or read about the complaints elsewhere then you already know what I’m going to rant about. Not being able to customize the top icon introduces an almost crippling blow to the Dock’s usability. I don’t customize most of my folders with custom icons. I do some, but not all. However, I am avid about organizing files into folders. So, dragging these folders to my dock gives me a dock full of those plain blue “eco-friendly-recycled-materials-look” folders. Not very helpful at informing me of what is in those folders at a glance. Can’t even really tell them apart. That’s not what I would call the highlight of Apple’s interface design decisions.

Cover flow, while neat, just isn’t terribly useful for me. Most of my folders contain more folders. And what folders have files, are not stuffed to the brim with hundreds and hundreds of them. Most of the time, they are of like files. So cover flow shows me an endless row of identical icons.

QuickLook is just a fantastic feature. It works as expected and does exactly what it needs to do. BAM! Spacebar… there’s my document. Now that’s just sweet.

Time Machine, however, makes me cry. Perhaps my single most anticipated feature and it doesn’t work with my Linux server. So much for my utopian back-up scenario. I realize that part of the magic of Time Machine is accomplished with some fancy new filesystem retooling in Leopard, but it would have been nice to know about it before getting my hopes up. Apparently, there are some new filesystem links that Leopard uses to help keep back-up iterations from duplicating a lot of data. You can backup to drives on networked machines, they just have to be running Leopard.

Overall the system does feel snappier. Spotlight has obviously been rewritten though I still just don’t get a tremendous amount of utility out of it since I’m so anal about being organized anyways.

The real problems with Leopard didn’t fully materialize until a couple days down the road. Safari, Mail, Finder all seem to be rather crash prone. Printer support seems a bit of a game of roulette right now. That’s to be expected since Apple was burning the midnight oil to get the OS to GM and ship it out the door on time.

Development Environment

By far the biggest challenge was getting my web development environment back up to working order. I’m elated Apple shipped a modern distribution of Apache 2 (2.2.6) and PHP 5. I had to compile versions of both for Tiger to keep pace with the industry. Now it feels like my OS has finally caught up on it’s own. For Apache, I needed to setup some specialized VirtualHosts to handle my SVN projects. The VirtualHosts were easy to setup, but a weird permissions issue had me stumped for a bit.

On the other hand, getting MySQL working on Leopard was a more demanding exercise. No more NetInfo and the transition to LaunchDaemons instead of StartupItems made for a confusing time at the command-line. And, even with a completely fresh install of MySQL, I had filesystem permission issues in the MySQL directories. I’ll be posting a walkthrough to my setup in case there are others that ran into the same problems.

Leopard Release = Teaser

My overall reaction, as I said before, is feeling a bit teased. Sure there are a few great usability enhancements available as soon as you install it, but the core of Leopard’s value is in its potential. It’s obvious that a lot has changed in the frameworks, and all of that means waiting for developers to release new goodies. So we’ll just have to wait for the really good stuff. Is Leopard worth it? Yes. Especially for moving the Mac platform into the future. That’s always worth it.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.