Filed under: Analysis / Opinion
Seven cool features of Leopard that might get stubborn friends to upgrade
There are dozens of little niceties in Leopard: like how Front Row now lives on my iBook (sans remote) and allows me to operate the thing as a sort of thin-client media jukebox (courtesy a Mac mini server). Or how Font Book now prints books of your fonts (especially nice for those non-techies). With the 300+ new features, I still have yet to fully explore this thing, but I'm certainly starting to believe this is the Mac OS Apple really wanted to deliver a few years back. There's no doubt in my mind this is a big turning point for the platform, and I really believe user adoption in 2008 will be unprecedented as a result.Following is a list of features and specific "cool things" I think you can point out if you are trying to explain to a friend why they should upgrade.
For the record, I installed Leopard on a 1.24 GHz iBook G4, and it runs beautifully, which in itself is a selling point.
1. Finally, a Record button for your actions
Automator now has a UI recorder. Anyone who remembers the good old days of macro recorders before OS 8 will look at this and sigh, but I, for one, welcome my new robot overlord. Automator is finally useful for mortals with UI recording. Oh sure, it isn't perfect, but it really beats trying to explain just the concept of Automator to the average human. Never mind the metaphors and the workflow within Automator itself -- eyes will glaze over. UI recording is absolute heaven when you do a lot of drudge work, like contracts, filling, prepping photos, etc.
2. Mail gets GTD fever
If power users turn up their noses at Stationary in Mail, point out how they can now put their notes, to-do's and RSS into Mail. I haven't really set all this up as I'd like yet (the iBook isn't my primary work machine), but my unfettered hatred of Mail.app is somewhat lessened now by the fact that it is starting to behave like a "real" email client. The notes and to-do's are icing on the cake, but also very important if you like to get things done and stay organized. A few smart folders and you have a truly powerful system. Still, it is disappointing to see Apple take half a decade to figure out the whole "archive mailbox" thing, but pobody's nerfect I guess.
3. Web clipping makes Dashboard relevant again
My wife quit using Dashboard long ago. It simply served no purpose for her. But web clipping, baked right in to Safari? That had her mildly interested. Tracking the top 3 Twitters, or whatever the top story on Perez or TMZ happens to be with a keystroke is a selling point for folks who aren't using RSS. The only downside is that you need a pretty big screen if you want more than a couple of pages to appear.
4. Shared drives finally "just work" and Shared Screens work with other OS'es
Granted, there have been issues with networking in Leopard, but seeing shared Macs in my sidebar? That's pretty sweet. In previous versions of OS X you had to click on Network, now it just shows up. Is a few clicks a big deal? Well, for the average user, yes, this is a big deal. The average user doesn't like to explore. They can be timid, and frankly, don't necessarily know (or care) what the Network thing even is. Displaying networked components directly in Finder will greatly increase the probability that users will at least see everything. It has already saved me time when trying to reconnect and move things around my home LAN. For me, the real fun was seeing how VNC "just worked" when I was able to access my Mac mini (which was already running as a VNC server) via Screen Sharing. Even though the mini runs Tiger, and despite a slightly wonky connection, overall it was super easy to set-up. Think about it another way: average users don't want to run a third-party application like Chicken of the VNC. Average users don't necessarily trust those apps (thank you, Bonzi Buddy) and it is a lot easier to remotely control a machine if the functionality is built into the OS. Oh, and did I mention you can share screens with Linux? I finally have a use for that old Dell laptop and my Ubuntu CD!
5. Spaces gets GTD
Even on my iBook G4, Spaces works like a dream. Since the iBook sports a whopping 12-inch screen, Spaces makes it all better. I never liked the clutter of having all apps in one space. Sure, you can hide things, you can spirit them away, but moving them out of sight yet whisking them back into view with a keystroke is somehow "better." I can't explain why I never got into VirtueDesktops (constant crashes maybe?), but Spaces has me reconsidering the concept. The real bottom line is that Spaces can help you focus on one task at a time, ignoring distractions.
6. Cover Flow does magic things
OK, Apple has touted Cover Flow, and prepped the audience by putting it in iTunes a while back. The really cool thing about Cover Flow isn't the previews (which are pretty tiny on my iBook), it's the companion to CoverFlow: Quick Look, and how it surprises you. Our own Mike Rose discovered that fonts are not only appearing in Cover Flow, but we learned you can also Quick Look an entire set of characters with the space bar.
7. Search in Safari 3
Search can suck. Spotlight scrolls by too fast, Firefox is too subtle, and Safari 2.x is downright amateur. But Safari 3? That, folks, is what we call intuitive. The words turn yellow and pop up at you-- no one is squinting around trying to interpret an ancient tablet. This one feature has me updating my Tiger machines for Safari 3 (which I avoided, as I felt Safari 2 was "beta" enough what with the crashing and wonky js frameworks).
Sure, Leopard has bugs. Leopard breaks stuff. I'm still not convinced my wife cares about all the ballyhooed features (even Time Machine, which still isn't as necessary as you might think if you've already got a working backup solution and don't store much local, frequently changed data on your machine). But for me, this is what OS X should have been a few years ago.
Get a WordPress.com Blog
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Wojtek said 2:41PM on 11-16-2007
'Shared drives just work'?!
You must be kidding me. The OS X.5 has massive problems with Windows Networking (AKA SMB, AKA Samba), that have been unseen before. And Leopard is by far recognized as the buggiest .0 release of the OS X ever.
After forking out 85 quid for the system that broke my all networking at home AND after X 5.1 hasn't corrected a thing, I honestly believe there is only one reason for upgrading to Leopard: in some time Apple will release the OS X 5.9.
And this will be about the very time it will make sense to upgrade a Tiger machine with Leopard.
Reply
George H said 2:48PM on 11-16-2007
I partially agree with the comments on dashboard becoming a bit irrelevant.
Here are a few widgets though that have been *really* useful:
Wikipedia
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference/wikipedia.html
Apple.com Store Discounts
http://www.macintoshos.com/widget.html
Visual Voicemail
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/email_messaging/callwavevisualvoicemail.html
I'm sure there are many others -- but these are ones I use daily.
Reply
Joseph Agreda said 2:56PM on 11-16-2007
So far I haven't had any problems with my SMB shares, but that aside, this is far from the "buggiest" release of OS X I've ever seen. I don't know if anyone remembers 10.0 or 10.1, but really, that was an adventure. 10.5 has been surprisingly stable and resilient for all that little hacks I had done to my Tiger install and a week in I haven't had a single show-stopping error, crash, or bug.
Reply
m said 2:58PM on 11-16-2007
by far the best feature of leopard is when you double click a file to rename it, and it doesn't select the extension.
Reply
merc669 said 3:06PM on 11-16-2007
10.5 & 10.5.1 is so screwed up with network, permission issues. I went back to 10.4.11 last night. Definitely would not recommend "Leopard" until maybe 10.5.2 or .3 . Or at least I hear more positive than negative. Apple needs to get their act together on "Leopard" otherwise (Leopard = Vista)and that's pretty bad.
Reply
Rhywun said 3:06PM on 11-16-2007
Time Machine may not be "necessary" but it makes restoring an old version of a file soooooo much easier than ever before, I would not want to go back to the old way.
As for Dashboard, put CouchPotato in it and I guarantee you will be hitting F12 (or F20, in my case) dozens of times a day. I haven't even tried out "web clipping" yet but it sounds useful.
Reply
Joshua Ochs said 3:07PM on 11-16-2007
I've also found my transition to Leopard to be a very smooth one - MUCH moreso than Tiger, whose version of Mail.app caused me no end of grief (there were major bugs in its mbox conversion in 10.4.0). I upgraded one machine the day it came out as a testbed and had no major issues. I waited until 10.5.1 to move my production machine over, and it was flawless.
Networking in particular is better, as mount is multithreaded (i.e., the Finder no longer beachballs over slow or disconnected servers). The interface for accessing shares is finally what it always should have been - that old "Network" icon was just damn confusing for the 99% of us not on a NetInfo network.
Also, Time Machine for all its ballyhooed interface, really has changed the way I backup. I thought I was being good by backing up daily/weekly - I set it up this morning and it's already created half a dozen checkpoints. Simply too awesome for words. :) As soon as they get the bugs out of AirDisk, I can't wait to move this all out on the network.
Reply
Chad said 3:37PM on 11-16-2007
@1 Your comments are pretty sensational
The SMB problems certainly do not affect everyone, and from the reports most aren't having any problems.
'And Leopard is by far recognized as the buggiest .0 release of the OS X ever.'
LOL! Recognized by whom? You? As Joseph said, 10.0 and 10.1 were far and away the worst. I've found Leopard to be the most mature and most stable OS X release ever.
Reply
herfy said 3:11PM on 11-16-2007
I am a little confused by:
"For the record, I installed Leopard on a 1.24 GHz iBook G4, and it runs beautifully, which in itself is a selling point."
Is this the 1.42 GHz ibook 14" with 512MB of ram? Currently I have that system and I wanted to know how Leopard would run on a system with only 512MB of ram.
Reply
mike Buettner said 3:48PM on 11-16-2007
I did a simple upgrade on my PPC G5 Dual. Everything works just dandy and I love Leopard. I am a graphics pro and use Adobe CS3 with no problems in Leopard. Logitech mouse, Wacom tablet, EyeTV, external Firewire drives are nice and happy.
Reply
dal20402 said 3:13PM on 11-16-2007
Anyone saying 10.5.0 is the buggiest 10.x.0 release ever has an awfully short memory.
10.4.0 was far worse, with data loss bugs in Mail (that you couldn't avoid by just not copying files) and serious system instabilities in Spotlight.
And don't even get me started on the first two Mac OS X versions. What a nightmare.
The fact is, a major OS upgrade on any platform will break stuff, and have bugs. You have two choices: either hop on the bleeding edge and deal with some instability (make sure your backups are good!), or wait until things settle down. Trust me, 10.5.1 is *far* better than 10.4.1 was. It's basically usable, except for scattered problems with Windows networking (which not everyone is having). Tiger took until 10.4.3 to get to that state.
Reply
mechelaar said 3:20PM on 11-16-2007
Yeah, but how do you get the "auto-font-turner-on-er" feature to work with InDesign?
Reply
Sam said 3:21PM on 11-16-2007
I need to know how to share a screen with Vista/XP
is there anyway how to do this? I know you (or some other tech blog) mentioned that the standards they use are universal but for some reason have restricted it to just other Leopard computers. Give TUAW fans a way to communicate to its Tiger/Vista/XP brethren please!
Reply
Greg G said 3:23PM on 11-16-2007
I was waiting until 10.5.1
Now I'm waiting for a trip to the apple store to get a student discount on it (a real one)
Reply
jonathan ober said 3:30PM on 11-16-2007
Was I the only one who saw the word perfect in point 2 spelled wrong? (nerfect)...thus making the Tuaw bloggers, not perfect. Ironic.
Reply
Victor Agreda, Jr. said 3:38PM on 11-16-2007
jonathan, your copy editing skillz are beyond compare. please refer to this for the joke you missed:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pobody's+nerfect
Reply
Chad said 3:47PM on 11-16-2007
Perhaps the op or someone could explain this comment of his
'Still, it is disappointing to see Apple take half a decade to figure out the whole "archive mailbox" thing, but pobody's nerfect I guess.'
I've been archiving my mailboxes in Mail for years, so I'm a little confused.
Reply
Eric Carroll said 3:42PM on 11-16-2007
I am have to echo others people's sentiments here and state that Networking, ESPECIALLY with PCs and SMB shares has improved dramatically for me in Leopard. Tiger worked okay, but required a lot of maintenance... Leopard seems to find all machines on my network, Mac or PC, let me file and screen share and all without the constant hand-holding Tiger needed...
Not to mention If you think this is buggy, man oh man, you must be new to OS X. Tiger wiped 2 FireWire hard drives of mine. THATS a bug, THATS inconvenient...
Leopard has been SMOOTH, in fact the biggest bug I have come across regularly (and mind you I am an Apple Technician who has put Leopard though its paces) is not being able to delete drafts in Mail. and that fixed itself with 10.5.1
Reply
Jon said 3:46PM on 11-16-2007
#13: You're joking, right?
Reply
Victor Agreda, Jr. said 3:54PM on 11-16-2007
My iBook has 768 MB of RAM, so I dunno if 512 will do.
Chad, that is one of the 300+ features listed on Apple's site. They are referring to a method other than grabbing the mbox files and copying them. You know, like Outlook has been doing for years-- archiving email.
Mail archiving was something that made my wife give up on Mail for business (well, that and those stupid white folders you couldn't get rid of)
Reply