Does Apple’s Leopard Roar?

Apologies for the hackneyed headline, but it’s not copyrighted, so I figured why not. This Sunday afternoon I upgraded my MacBook Pro in eager anticipation by installing the Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard, the sixth release of Mac OS X in six years. There are, I’m told, over 300 new features, so I wondered from the start how many I would use. There have been many reviews posted over the last week or so, but here are my impressions.

Immediately it’s clear, this is definitely a more web-aware OS than previous versions. A Downloads folder now sits comfortably next to my Trash Can - and Dashboard is now customisable so that I can insert live updateable widgets copied (to my desired size) from any web site I choose. As an iGoogle user, this type of cut and paste action is already something I’m comfortable with, but I guess this gives me access to the entire web rather than just the widgets that Google thinks I might have wanted such as gmail, weather and word of the day.

It’s remarkable to see that many of the developments are tasks that I had previously been “finding another way to achieve”. Chief among these is the Stacks function. Up until now I had been leaving minimised folders down in the Dock (which is now in 3-D!) for each different project I was working on. Now I can access them all in half the time from the ‘Stack’ either by leaving them in the Documents directory or dragging down a new stack for each project.

Time Machine is widely regarded as the killer app to be brought to the party. The product is intended to allow you to recover deleted or lost files by providing an instantly restored file version from the system’s auto save functionality. Whether this has implications for system security I’m not sure. But it does raise the question – “what about when I really really want to delete something and don’t want anyone else to ever see it?”

Quick Look is a welcome addition, it allows me to get a glimpse of a document, image file or other by simply hitting APPLE-KEY Y. But better, in my opinion, is Spaces – now I can keep my two work e-mail accounts and hotmail running and in a completely separate pigpen to the rest of what I’m doing. When I want to do mail, I go to my mail space – when I want to write, I open up my editorial space where I run Word, Acrobat and Adobe InDesign. The only drawback is that if I want to quickly look up something on the web while writing in Word, I have to move to my mail space (where my browser is open to access hotmail) to do so, well – actually, it throws me over automatically, but then I manually have to make the journey back.

Safari is behaving more like Firefox with better tab design, no major surprise there, but good news none-the-less. The Cover Flow feature in Finder is just a joy, you’ll never choose between icons, a list or columns again when selecting your method of file search, how much nicer is it to have a slideshow graphical preview of each file – and it’s fast too.

There are also upgrades to iChat, Parental Controls, a more semantic approach to data detection with, you guessed it, Data Detector – and Boot Camp is here for Intel processor–based Macs to be able to run Vista at native speed. There are a host of other features I’ve picked up in my first day with Leopard, such as Front Row for viewing ALL digital content from music, to video etc. But you can only take in so many features in one go.

From a more technical perspective, it’s interesting to see that Leopard extends the 64-bit capabilities of Mac OS X to allow applications to address vast amounts of memory - up to four billion times the memory of 32-bit applications. Leopard also makes it easy for developers to take advantage of 64-bit technology in Mac OS X by providing a full set of 64-bit development tools as a part of Xcode, as well as highly optimised arithmetic and vector processing libraries.

Enough already, time to get back to playing with the new backgrounds feature in Photo Booth. So it is worth the effort to upgrade? Hell yes. Is it a better experience all round? You can’t argue that it’s not. Is Apple pushing out too many versions of its OS one after another? Maybe, but it seems to a smoother transition curve than another well know OS vendor one could mention right?