Kitsimons

Journal Feed

The Good

New Features

Spaces is one new feature I didn't think would make much of a difference for me. I'd gotten into the habit of hiding applications when not needed, and thought it would be hard to abandon that habit. I was wrong. Spaces is brilliantly executed and makes flicking between applications even more of a breeze.

Time Machine certainly lives up to hype. Previously I was very remiss when it came to making backups, but now I'm making use of the Lacie brick plugged into my Mac.

Quick Look is also very handy, when I remember to use it.

As for the other major new features, such as Stacks and Coverflow, I can't say I've found them particularly useful. Not to say they aren't useful, but they certainly haven't grabbed me and got me using them in the same manner that something like Spaces has.

Elsewhere

Features aside, from a performance standpoint the machine really does feel quicker. I don't have any benchmarks to compare Tiger and Leopard on my Mac Pro, but Photoshop is noticeably brisker in pretty much all areas. Overall there seems to be less stalling when working with OS X - I certainly see less of the spinning beach ball in Leopard than I did in Tiger.

From a stability point of view, Leopard is pretty solid from what I've seen. I've not had a single kernel panic as yet and all my applications, 3rd-party or otherwise, work just fine. I have to say I was somewhat surprised at Leopard's stability given it is a first release. I recall the odd kernel panic when I installed the newly released Tiger, so it's nice that Leopard is so robust right out of the gates.

The Bad

The Finder, unfortunately, is still flawed. Most frustratingly for me, folders no longer remember their view settings - even when pinned in view options. Whether or not this is an oversight I don't know, but I can't think of a single reason to why Apple would purposefully remove this feature.

I'm not a fan of the new Dock, in particular the way collapsed stacks are handled. Stacks on the Dock place the icon of first item in the stack at the top, so essentially all you see is the icon belonging to that file. In the above screenshot, the Word icon is my downloads folder, while the Address Book icon is my applications folder. This behaviour is utterly and totally infuriating. Thankfully there are workarounds, though I would much prefer Apple come up with a better thought-out solution.

Sticking with the Dock, I'm not keen on the new lights indicating an open application. The little triangles used in Tiger weren't exactly perfect, but at least they contrasted with the Dock background. The blue blobs of light in Leopard are harder to spot and deviate from an otherwise unified and cohesive user interface.

The Ugly

Finally, in the Dock (not doing too well, is it?) there is a strange new separator. Lord only knows what this is supposed to be - it looks like squashed road markings to me. In any case, it's an unsightly aberration in what is an otherwise beautiful interface. It is a testament to how well designed the OS X interface is, and how much I take it for granted, that I am picking on something as minor as a separator. Still, the Dock is one of the most prominent aspects of the interface. Apple could have done better.