Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Updated 29.10.07

Ever since I first laid my hands on a PC 14 years ago, I have been fascinated by operating systems; in the early days, there was MS-DOS 5.0, 6.0, 6.22, and Windows 3.11 Windows for Workgroups. Then came 32-bit operating systems such as OS/2 Warp 3.0, Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95, Windows 2000, and OS/2 Warp 4, all of which I dabbled and played around. You could say I was promiscuous with operating systems. And, of course, I broke many machines along the way.

Fast-forward into the early 21st century, I was pretty much settled on Windows XP until I made the switch to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in mid-2007. Today, I took another step forward and installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, the highly-anticipated successor to OS X 10.4 Tiger.

I won’t go into the new features of Leopard that you would have already known by now. If you are really keen, here is a complete list from Apple (take it with a pinch of salt, though; some of the so-called ‘features’ are really corrections on shortcomings).

What I like about Leopard:

• Cover Flow in the Finder is a great way to browse files and folders, helped in no small parts by the addition of Quick Look. I do confess, though, that I had to look up in the help file how to invoke Quick Look by keyboard shortcut (it’s CMD+Y, or hit the spacebar).

• Generally, the redesigned Finder is a breath of fresh air, though I suspect I’ll still be using Path Finder more; its stack and tabs features makes Path Finder immensely more productive than the Finder.

• Scrolling non-active, background windows, though this didn’t work with Mozilla Firefox.

• The CMD+SHIFT+4 screen capture crosshair cursor now sports screen coordinates!

• The redesigned Network preference pane – it is now neater and more logically laid-out.

• Spaces – It’s not a new thing in computing, I know, but now I don’t have to rely on the occasionally-misbehaving VirtueDesktops or purchase You Control: Desktops. However, I’d much prefer if Spaces gave a visual indication of some sorts when an application window has been dragged from one space to another, like You Control: Desktops does. Update: Spaces apparently does inform you via overlay graphics that you’re dragging an application window from one space to another, but it disappears so quickly.

• The redesigned Front Row – its interface is slicker and seems more responsive, and Front Row finally gets its own icon in the Applications folder; in OS X 10.4 Tiger, you can start Front Row only by hitting OPT+ESC or with the Apple Remote Control.

• The improved DVD Player is a big leap forward from its previous version, which was really anemic in features and controls.

• Web Clips – You can clip any portion of a web page and send it to the Dashboard. This web clip is live and will update when its original page does.

• iLife Media Browser in Open Panel – Photos, movies and music in the iLife suite is now readily-accessible in any Open (open file) Panel, which really extends Apple’s intent for the Mac to be a digital lifestyle hub.

What I do not like about Leopard:

• The first time I started the Leopard installation process off the DVD, I thought it had hung when it came to the dialog box that asked for a destination drive to be specified. For a full minute, the dialog box was blank. No spinner progress indicator, no nothing, which was strange considering how the typical Mac installer would at least show a destination hard drive grayed out even if it was not yet ready to be chosen.

• The translucent menu bar. Why? Now, your wallpaper shows through behind the menu bar, which means the menu bar will take on the color of whatever the wallpaper is. This results in the legibility of the items on the menu bar varying wildly with your choice of wallpapers. And with some wallpapers that are visually heavy—photographs, especially—you can’t see a thing. Ten minutes after I had booted into Leopard, I fired up Photoshop and added a 22px-high white bar to the top of my wallpaper of choice. No more transulcent menu bar. Update: Wow, that was certainly fast; md softworks has just released LeoColorBar, an application that “adjusts your desktop picture on Mac OS X 10.5 so it doesn’t bleed through the transparent menu bar. It also lets you round the edges of the menu bar and display the whole image (so none is covered by the menu bar).”

• More spinning beach balls than usual – In the first two hours spent poking around Leopard, I noticed more spinning beach balls (busy cursor) than usual. I suspect this is due to the incompatibility of certain applications, or perhaps it is Spotlight doing its initial round of indexing. I expect this issue to ease off in the days after.

• I am ambivalent about Stacks. I presume most users will have quite a fair number of files in their Document and Download folders—the two stacks that are in the Dock by default. It is a good idea if you have only have 9 or ten files or folders; otherwise, Stacks default to a grid view that is simply a mess to look at, with icons grouped so closely their filenames get truncated and are hardly readable.

• When browsing files in the Finder, hitting the Return key triggers a rename instead of opening the file. In Path Finder, the two Enter keys give two unique functions; hitting the Return key opens a file, while hitting the small Enter key (to the right of the CMD key on the right of the spacebar) triggers a file rename.

• Quick Look in the Finder sometimes chokes with QuickTime video files that are 1GB or more in size. Once or twice, attempting to open such files in Quick Look would only crash the Finder.

As for application incompatibility, the main showshopper was SideTrack 1.5. After Leopard was successfully installed, the keyboard on my MacBook Pro became unresponsive. I was stuck at the login screen. The only solution was to plug in an external keyboard, login and uninstall SideTrack. Raging Menace, the developer of SideTrack has posted an advisory on this unfortunate problem.

Also, I ran into the “Blue Screen of Death” problem that many other Leopard users had run into; after Leopard has finished installing and has rebooted, a Mac may get stuck at a blue screen, with only a cursor and no activity. I can confirm that removing Application Enhancer has solved the problem, and now Apple has posted a support document regarding this issue.

Most of the applications I use work fine with Leopard except for the following:

• Speed Download (needs to be updated to version 4.1.16)
• Journler (needs to be updated to version 2.5.4, still in beta)
• Path Finder (previous version works fine, but version 4.8.1 offers some enhancements)
• Mouseposé (needs to be updated to version 2.5.2)
• WiFind (version 1.3.2 installs but does not appear in the wifi menu in the menu bar)
• Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8 generally works fine in Leopard, but there are known bugs, such as that of certain Firefox extensions causing Leopard to display security alerts.

More to come after I’d put Leopard through the paces…