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Review: Upgrading to OS X Leopard

(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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I took the $129 plunge last night and purchased the Mac OSX Leopard upgrade for my MacBook Pro. I didn’t dash out last Friday in any rush to get it as I didn’t want to face a 3 hour wait in line, and wasn’t sure that it was going to live up to the hype. Having just used it for a few hours now, these are some of my first impressions.

The Look

The new interface is interesting. I do like the more monochromatic styled program windows. It looks like Apple has finally settled in on a more consistent look in that respect. The menu bar is now semi-transparent which at first seems cool, but depending on which desktop background you have applied, could cause it to be hard to read. I didn’t find any opacity settings to remedy this and with my default blue background, the menu bar has a powder blue color that I actually find annoying.

The Dock

The new dock functionality seems okay. They’ve added the a popup “word bubble” style view to browse folders and while the “stacks” are interesting, I don’t know how much value they’re going to have for me. If I recall, the early demos showed being able to grab a group of folders off the desktop and dragging them down to the dock to create a temporary stack. That seemed more useful for me but I guess it didn’t make this version of the os. The dock styling is okay I guess with a kind of shiny runway look. The little arrows that indicated an active program are gone in place of a little blue glowing light. Somehow, this dock just doesn’t fit in right visually for me. Personally, I think the icons sans the dock background all together would be better. I guess that’s just a personal preference.

Spaces

The new multiple desktop “Spaces” feature is a nice addition and should be welcomed by power users. The idea of multiple desktops has been around for some time, but it’s nice to see Apple include it in this iteration of the os. Some of my applications mysteriously launched in different work spaces and I didn’t realize it until I looked around and found them waiting for me. You can define in which space you prefer your applications to open, so I guess I just need to set that up. Spaces has a nice expose-like feature where you just hit the F8 key to view all your spaces at one time and toggle between them. All in all, I think it’s a good addition to the os, but could still use some refinement.

Quick Look

One thing I do really like so far is the “Quick Look” feature that has been added to the finder. Just click on a file name, press the spacebar and the file will preview in a little window without having to open it in the application that created it. It works for Word documents, text files, images, PDF files and even will preview audio and video files in the preview window. I think I’ll get more use out of that than many of the new features.

The Finder

I’m on the fence with the new iTunes style Cover Flow feature in the finder. I guess it has the whiz-bang effect on some people, but don’t know that it really enhances the file browsing experience for me. The new sidebar appears to be a little more elegant, and again resembles the iTunes version so you have a sense of consistency between applications.

Time Machine

I haven’t set up or tried the Time Machine application yet, but if it works as it’s touted to, I think that alone with be worth the upgrade cost for many people who never regularly backup their data. You can choose to create backups on an external drive although the down side is that the backups aren’t bootable. If you do suffer a hardware failure, you’ll have to rebuild the main drive, install the os, but you’re files are still safe and sound. Time Machine also does incremental backups, just backing up the files that have changed recently.

Boot Camp

Boot Camp, Apple’s method of allowing Intel-based Macs to boot into Windows, is now a part of Leopard. It’s been around in beta for about a year and a half but has finally found a place as a standard part of the os. Most power users will opt for something like VMWare Fusion or Parallels which allows you to run multiple operating systems at once, but Boot Camp is definitely a bridge for those who haven’t switched over to Macs yet due to fear of loosing their favorite window programs or features.

All Pumped Up

Several of the other applications have received significant upgrades from what I’m seeing. iCal has a host of new features. iChat has had some upgrades and supposedly the voice chat quality is much better though I have yet to personally try it. Spotlight has grown up and is faster, smarter than ever. It supports Boolean queries and you can actually search for a specific file name. Go figure. The Preview app has a lot better support for PDF’s as well as a streamlined interface as well.

A Host of Other Additions

I believe there are supposed to be over 300 upgrades to the os in Leopard, many of which are behind the scenes to help improve overall performance and security. Many of the core applications have had at least some type of updates. If you use VPN, Terminal, Parental Controls, Image Capture, Photo Booth, or just about any other feature you can think of in Mac OS X, you’ll find at least some changes.

Thumbs Up

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with Leopard so far and don’t mind recommending it. I think this is a well thought out set of changes to the os, not just another pretty skin. Check out the Leopard page on Apple’s site for more info and to decide for yourself.

          

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