Big Cat Diary: Leopard

Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 30th October, 2007 @ 16:53

Well it's been a few days since I started using Leopard, and so far it's turned into a bit of a love/hate relationship for me. For a more detailed look at what Apple have been up to in the past couple of years, take a look at this rather detailed review at Ars Technica. It boils down to lots of fantastic stuff going on underneath, but some really painful stuff at user level.

My highlights so far have been...

• Networking - not only has the preference pane been completely overhauled to make it much more usable, but Leopard is now much nicer at dealing with file sharing with other PCs and Macs you might happen to own. It's both more intuitive than before through the improved Finder interface, and more functional because it doesn't hang when servers go away.
• Screen Sharing - remote controlling another Mac with the built in VNC server in Tiger was doable, but not a pleasant experience, screen updates were slow on a local network and glacial on a remote connection. Apple have done some fantastic engineering in Leopard to make remote control again more intuitive, but also massively more functional, thanks to dynamic screen scaling and adaptive quality. So I can now access my iMac at home when I'm out and about with my 3G dongle without making a cup of tea between clicks. And the 1680x1050 desktop appears in it's entirety on my 1280x800 MacBook screen.
• Time Machine - not much to say on this one, except that it's totally brilliant! Whenever I'm at home my MacBook connects up silently each hour to my iMac over wifi and updates the backup. I've always tried to backup my Macs before, but keeping the backup up to date was never something I was good at doing. Now it's done for me, and took only a handful of button clicks to set up.
• Paths - okay, so this one's a really simple one, but it makes me happy. Having installed MacPorts from source to open up a world of UNIXy software I was hunting around for the best place to add /opt/local/bin to the path, ideally at a system wide level. A quick look in /etc/bashrc and /etc/profile didn't seem particularly ideal. Then I stumbled upon /etc/paths, and from it, /etc/paths.d. All a package needs to do to add to the PATH is drop a text file in this directory with a list of the paths it wants to add. Simple. But brilliant.

But not everything has been good...

• Dock - I'm not a fan of the new 3D look, especially of the little (actually miniscule) blue glowing blob to indicate running apps, it's barely visible due to a lack of contrast with the colour of the rest of the dock. So I've turned off the 3D effect (defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES) and the result is much more usable. But what's with the white line around the now flat dock?! Can't I have it looking the way it used to?
• Stacks - are nice in one regard, it's a very visual way for me to start apps I've chosen not to put in the Dock because I don't use them often. But there are two flaws for me. Firstly, stop it with putting the icons of the contents of the folder in place of the folder when it's on the Dock, I've no idea what the folder is half the time! Second, whereas I used to be able to drop into a subfolder (say Utilities in Applications) whilst staying in the pop up, clicking on it within a Stack opens a Finder window. So some functionality has actually disappeared!
• Folder icons - are just not that attractive anymore, and much harder to distinguish between. See the Ars article for a much more complete and constructive rant on this.
• Icon previews - work fast, and well, especially combined with QuickLook. However, do I have to have them on or off globally? Connecting to a folder on another computer via wifi, especially when that folder is full of videos makes the preview function really rather annoying, saturating the network to grab a preview for each file. Can I have an option to turn off icon previews for remote folders please?
• Downloads folder - I can see that it's good for some people. But my personal choice is to have things land on the desktop when they've downloaded. Safari respects this and allows me to set the download location back to the desktop. However, trying to delete the Downloads folder from my home folder results in "Mac OS X needs this folder and it cannot be deleted" or there abouts. It doesn't need it anymore as far as I'm concerned! I try from the terminal with an "rm -R Downloads", permission denied! Once more, this time with sudo and I'm finally rid of it. Maybe next time I try and reboot it'll refuse to start? :)

So that's my non-exhaustive list of things from the Leopard experience so far. Overall I'm very happy with it. But the niggles are annoying, especially when it's so clear from other things that Apple knows, and can do much better.

I like it

Posted by stephen on Sunday, 07th October, 2007 @ 18:06

No further explanation will be provided.