First Look At Leopard

I've had Leopard up and running on four Macs for 24 hours now and I think I've seen enough to talk a little about it. I installed the shrink wrapped version (10.5 build 9A581) on a brand new iMac, an original MacBook, and a nine-month old MacBook Pro using the upgrade method. In all three cases the upgrade took around 90 minutes and went perfectly. (The installer checks the install DVD before installing and this took an additional half-hour or so on my iMac, but once the disc was verified I skipped that process on subsequent installs.) Apple told me in my briefing Thursday that the default upgrade install should work fine, and it did. Leopard disabled the now incompatible Mail extensions (Spam Sieve, GPG, Mail Act-On) and left everything else intact. I had to re-enter my .Mac settings and resynch my data, but all my installed apps seem to work fine, including Photoshop and Lightroom. Normally I recommend at least the "Archive and Install" option, but in this case Leopard seems to handle the upgrade smoothly. I did an Archive and Install on my production machine, the Mac Pro, just in case, but I probably didn't need to. My experience was very much the same. Despite the negative experiences some had had with the Betas, Leopard seems completely cooked. The install experience is flawless. The new look and feel is beautiful, and overall performance seems much snappier. Now for a look at a few of the new features. The new Finder is beautiful, fast, and functional. Coverflow makes a lot of sense for previewing your documents - I won't be able to go back to the old column view - and I like the new 3D dock so much that I actually moved mine back to the bottom of the screen from the more sensible left-hand side. But it's not just eye-candy. The Leaning-Tower-Of-Pisa Stacks folder display, as silly as it looks, make sense. Like the rest of Leopard the new finder feels very solid and polished with small changes that make a big difference in work flow. I didn't think I'd use Spaces, but Apple has done it better than other workspace implementations and I'm actually liking it a lot. For example, you can attach programs to specific spaces; Safari always loads in Space 3 for me, Mail in space 4. That little difference means you spend no time organizing your workspaces. They organize themselves. And that slight difference makes it useful. It even works with VMWare in Full Screen mode - so one of my Spaces is full screen Vista. Similarly the implementation of notes and tasks in Mail is so logical and seamless that I've found myself relying on it almost instantly. Notes automatically migrate to your IMAP server by the way - they're treated like message drafts - which is another nice touch. Time Machine is a simplified backup for people who never backup. It's turned off by default but it's on the dock, and I suspect most people will want to turn it on. Keep in mind you'll need a second drive that has enough free space to copy everything on your system. Leopard clearly wants to dedicate an external hard drive to Time Machine - it even changes the icon to a Time Machine icon. Configuration is very limited. You can tell Time Machine to leave out drives or folders, but there's no wildcard ignore. Time Machine runs all the time in the background but it doesn't seem to slow the system at all. Despite what Apple told me, Time Machine only seems to work on local disks. I couldn't get it to recognize a mounted NAS drive. But if you're at all sophisticated you'll probably prefer the flexibility of something like ChronoSync anyway. I'm using Time Machine on the iMac but will continue to use ChronoSync to backup to my NAS on the Mac Pro. I won't bother with Time Machine at all on the laptops. (Update: some commenters say it works if the NAS supports AFP - I've been using CIFS. I'll give it a try.) Spotlight works with Time Machine, and is much much faster. I turned off Spotlight on Tiger and turned to Quicksilver instead. On Leopard I'm turning off Quicksilver and using Spotlight. It's that much better. The Parental Controls offer per login site filtering, time limits, and controlled hours of use. I've already turned them on for my kids. iChat looks amazing with high quality audio and video recording, plus desktop sharing, and playback of Keynote presentations. I think we'll be able to use it to produce an amazing net@nite - I'm playing with it this weekend and I'll keep you posted. I'm hoping it won't require a prohibitive amount of bandwidth. Overall I have a few strong impressions of Leopard. First, it's rock solid. The extra time Apple took developing this shows. It works right right out of the box. Second, there are lots of little changes everywhere - subtle changes that accumulate to make a big difference in usability. For example, Spotlight now automatically selects the Top Hit during a search, so instead of hitting Command then Return to launch an app you just hit return. The new Help menu features a search box as the top item. You can search for a command in a program and it will open that menu and point to it. It's a small thing, but something you'll appreciate. Leopard is not a revolutionary release - I wouldn't expect it to be, it's a mature operating system - but it is easily the best OS X ever, the culmination of a decade of UI research and OS refinement. It's elegant, fast, and eminently usable. Amazingly there are no showstoppers or major compatibility issues. I've only found a few tiny things I don't like - where's the Info Panel in iCal, for instance, and what happened to the nice transitions in Front Row - but I've been stumbling across dozens of little touches that just make me smile. If you have an Intel Mac the Leopard upgrade is a must have. (If you'd like to hear the new Leopard voice synthesizer reading this post press play here: Alex speaks.)

RIM Throws A Curve

I've been setting up my new Blackberry Curve 8320 and it provides a striking contrast to the iPhone, both positive and negative. The 8320 is a lot more complicated and harder to setup, but then it's much more functional. It supports third-party applications but so far I've only felt a need for two, Bee Jive - a multi-client IM program, and Google maps, both recommended by Dan Hendricks. It comes with a nice range of programs including a password vault, very capable voice dialing, it's own mapping program designed for use with a third-party GPS unit, and a Breakout game. There's an ok browser that's not as good as Safari and a media player also not as good as the iPod but with limited storage you're not going to be using this as a music player. Blackberry is a phone first, email and messaging device second, and media player/browser a distant third. It doesn't have a touch interface but the pearl trackball works nearly as well with Google Maps, and the physical keyboard is lightyears easier to use, and more accurate, than the on-screen keyboard. I do greatly miss the classic Blackberry thumbwheel. The pearl just feels cheesy and seems less practical even though it does give you a broader range of motion. The two-megapixel camera is not much better than the iPhone's although it does seem to offer better white balance and optics. It's too slow to use for anything but the occasional snapshot. Of most interest in the 8230 is Wi-Fi support. The phone comes out of the box with integrated VOiP (!) and will use the Wi-Fi for calls in lieu of the T-Mobile network when it's available. This is exactly the kind of thing AT&T must most have dreaded on the iPhone, but T-Mobile encourages it. Talk about different world views. The 8320 out-of-the-box experience is nothing near as slick as the iPhone's. If I hadn't had a lot of experience with Blackberries I'd be lost. It's pretty obviously intended for an IT department to set up. As it is I'm having trouble configuring email. T-Mobile doesn't seem to know I have a Blackberry and hasn't sent the needed software down. Beside the usual Blackberry corporate support, the phone also works with Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and other POP systems. It appears to poll these systems periodically for mail. Bottom line: The 8320 is a complicated device and there's a steep learning curve. It's not as beautiful as the iPhone, or as functional as a browser and media player, but it's many times more useful for email and messaging. I've always loved Blackberries, and the 8320 is the most elegant Blackberry yet.