Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
If you want a proper review of Leopard you’re in the wrong place. I’m not qualified enough or enthusiastic enough to bash out thousands of words about the latest version of OS X, so instead I’m just going to list a few of my initial impressions.
- TimeMachine won’t use my iPod Classic as a backup location. There’s more than enough room on there for a full backup, and apparently you can use network shares (at your own risk, naturally), so there’s no technical reason why it can’t be done, but I can’t figure out how to make it happen. Apparently Apple just want me to buy more techno-junk to use their new OS’s headline feature, but I don’t want yet another disk to cart around with all the rest of my silicon-based rubbish. Fortunately I already have both Mozy and iPodBackup doing a reasonable job on this front, although the versioning stuff would have been nice to play with.
- I’ve never really used this sort of thing when it’s been available to me before now, but Spaces is rather lovely. It’s certainly the best implementation of multiple desktops that I’ve encountered. I doubt I’ll need it with all the other fancy workspace management stuff that’s built into OS X already, but I’ll leave it turned on and see what happens.
- Mail still won’t start hidden if you set it as a login item. Why not? This is a tiny but irritating bug that’s been present since 10.4 launched, and it should have been fixed ages ago.
- The firewall is turned off by default, and some people claim that it’s flawed anyway. Now, this is probably just a bit of a publicity-generating storm in a teacup, because, as I’m sure you all know, the firewall is the last resort for securing your *NIX box. If your services are all set up correctly then it shouldn’t really matter if you’re not running any firewall at all, because there’s nothing there to hack that couldn’t be hacked anyway with a firewall in place. And Tiger’s firewall did pretty much the same thing with its services, letting traffic through by default, the only difference was it was a bit more clear about what it was doing. Oh, and the new OS X trojan is similarly hyped up FUD too, there’s no security flaw there, and the only thing being exploited is user stupidity. Don’t install programs from porn sites, and you’ll be okay.
- The program I use for syncing my phone, Mark/Space’s Missing Sync for Windows Mobile, is totally broken in 10.5 (as opposed to just intermittently broken as in 10.4). Apparently there’s a Leopard compliant version on the way, but I’ve had so many problems with that piece of software I’m not sure I’ll bother reinstalling it. Oh well. I have a suspicion that I’m expecting far too much of everyone involved to even imagine that a Microsoft based phone could interoperate with an Apple OS via some third party application. I suppose I should really be grateful that just linking up the two devices didn’t result in some sort of trans-dimensional rift in space-time.
- The transparent menus, stacks and the 3D dock don’t bother me in the least. I actually think they’re alright, neutral at worst, which apparently makes me some sort of freak. Mac users are a conservative bunch, for all their fancy hairdos and silly glasses.
Overall, I’d say don’t rush to upgrade unless you have a specific reason for doing so. There’s nothing earth-shattering in either direction, there are some nice small improvements, and there are a few little items that could still do with some attention. It could have been much worse: compared with the state of Windows Vista, Apple have done a good job with their latest release.