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On watching Leopard's intro video

Apple has released another "guided tour" video, this time for Leopard. It's narrated by "John," a retail store employee who is evidently soporific enough to don The Black Mock Turtleneck and deliver a flawless demonstration. Seriously, Apple. The "uniform" thing is getting creepy. Even John's colleague Nicole was wearing one (though hers was a nice V-neck affair).

Anyway, I jotted down some thoughts as I watched the video.


Stacks


It appears that I can only create a stack in the dock, not a folder (If anyone knows otherwise, let me know). This seems odd at first, but a stack is really just a folder that displays its contents in an atypical way. Still, people will complain, just as they did when column view was added to the Finder. Speaking of the Finder....

The Finder


I'm eager to watch my G4 iMac freeze solid when I try coverflow view. Talk about spinning beach ball. The movie and multi-page previews are very cool, but I suspect they'll require some horsepower to pull off nicely. Apple states that a Mac with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster) processor is required for Leopard. At 1.25GHz, I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The Desktop

The desktop itself is bare bones. In fact, no hard disks are displayed at all. The show up in the new sidebar, but I'm curious to know if you can activate them with the Finder preferences. When John found the beautifully laid out PDF he needed on his networked Mac and dragged it to his own, I assume it went to the "Downloads" stack, and that he could he have dragged it to the desktop.

A bit more synergy between devices. Many have noted that the iMac resembles the iPhone (and that the G5 model looked like the iPod). I noticed that the slider to enable Time Machine in the Finder looks much like a slider on the iPhone's UI.

Time Machine


Ah, Time Machine. People either love or despise that UI. I will admit that it seems heavy on the eye candy, but for someone like my mother (and the majority of computer users are like her), it's an easy-to-understand analogy. Geeks like you and me (if you don't mind the label) forget that most users don't read the websites, subscribe to the magazines and take part in the discussions that we enjoy so much. Time Machine's look may seem silly, but I believe it will make something that many consider tricky - backup and restore - understandable.

Mail

Oh, Apple. I detest bandwidth-hogging HTML email messages. Now you've given everyone and their brother the ability to create these time-wasting monstrosities...and send them to me. I'm not happy about this. The web is for "...creating stunning templates to impress your friends, for any occasion." Email is for simply pointing to those projects. You don't cram your museum's feature content onto the brochure.

On the other hand, data detectors looks wicked cool. I'm eager to try that out.

The notes feature could be useful, but the orange-on-yellow highlight scheme has got to go. Perhaps the idea was that my To Do's would be so painful to look at, I'll be more motivated to complete and delete them.

Consider this the observations of someone who hasn't used Leopard yet. What are you looking forward to / dreading?



Apple has released another "guided tour" video, this time for Leopard. It's narrated by "John," a retail store employee who is evidently...
 

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Dan Frieber

does anybody else notice that when dave goes to play with the "pinch" photo booth effect he looks a LOT like steve jobs?

October 23 2007 at 10:45 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
George K.

I have a G4--older than yours, a 933mhz Quicksilver--and I'm not upgrading. I'll get Leopard with my next Mac. This machine has held up well over the years but I'm not expecting miracles.

October 21 2007 at 1:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Charlie

To number Eleven: if I move my mouse pointer from bottom to top of the screen, it usually follows a slight arc to the right. If this is typical in practice, then perhaps the fanning of the stack is to reflect this? I'm right-handed, so that raises the question of whether or not the stack can be made to fan to the left in the preferences if you're left-handed.

October 21 2007 at 8:51 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Stripes

@55, the Leopard DVD lets you to a "erase & install", an "upgrade install", or an "archive install" (archive install is "please move all my old system files to a Previous System folder, and keep my user accounts intact").


October 21 2007 at 12:17 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Kuswanto

Stop bitching about IE, IE should be thrown into hell..!!

Stop bitching about your old G4 machine that won't handle Leopard as good as the new iMac. G4 machines was created along with OSX 10.3, it even barely can keep up with TIger 10.4.x . I know it because i have it. And i won't even try to upgrade it to 10.5, it will burn out the GPU and CPU to the max.

October 20 2007 at 10:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
T

This is likely an obvious question that's already been answered by a thousand blogs, but I haven't seen it yet. Also, I've never upgraded a Mac before and have terrible images of Windows updates in my mind...

Is the Leopard disk a full version or an upgrade? I'd like to make sure my install is as clean as possible by wiping everything first, then putting Leopard on my MacBook.

October 20 2007 at 9:51 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Xavier C.

What??
A stack is just a folder with a "particular display"??

My only hope was to be able to put windows into stacks, not only files. I mean, allowing file-stacking only is sooo useless.

I imagined Leopard to be such an OS in which I could group my application windows (Finder window + Safari window + Whatever-great-software window) into a... well, let's call it a stack.

Please, tell me I imagined well.

October 20 2007 at 8:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jimbo

seems like the home on ipod feature is back. from the apple leopard server webpage:
External Accounts
External Accounts is a new Portable Home Directory feature that allows you to store a user’s home directory on a portable FireWire or USB drive. The account can be fully managed using Workgroup Manager and protected using FileVault.
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/client.html

October 20 2007 at 4:58 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Neil Anderson

"Column View is AWESOME.
I just wish I could make it default."

Go to Finder > Preferences > General and tick the check box for "Open new windows in column view".

October 20 2007 at 1:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Al

@46

Of course you can move it to the right side of the screen.

October 20 2007 at 1:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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