Apple Grrl

Y’all I just installed Leopard, and I can’t even begin to describe the gorgeous eye candy that is this software. I haven’t even really begun to play with all of the shiny new features yet, and I’m already in love.

For those who were wondering, installation was, as usual with Apple products, a complete breeze on my MacBook. I put the installation disk in at 9:30 and by 10:30 had a brand new operating system up and running. On the eMac, it was a touch slower because I was testing the minimum requirements on the box, but still hassle free. The eMac was upgrading from a much older version of OS X Tiger, to be fair.

So far, my thoughts on Leopard pretty much consist of the not-very-articulate “OOOOOOOOO PREEEETTYYYYYY”. I’m going to stop drooling and start playing with it and write a little bit more informative review as I go.

As a test, I removed the additional RAM in the eMac and put the original cards back in to make it barely meet the minimum requirements for Leopard. I wanted to see how it would install. The answer is slooowly. But, as promised, it did install a fully featured version of Mac OS X Leopard, and automatically kept honey’s Mac OS 9.2 installed and active so he could play his older games without my having to do anything special. Nice!

Running on the eMac with the bare minimum of RAM installed Leopard was functional. If you used more than two programs at a time you got some system drag, but no crashes. It performed as promised. Of course, being used to more RAM the drag was too annoying to play with for long, so soon after installing it and nosing around I flipped the newer SDRAM back into it, giving it the full 1GB. What a difference! Leopard running on the eMac with the maximum RAM is a complete improvement over Tiger – fast, interesting, useful and more intuitive. Honey loves it. On my MacBook, running 1.25GB RAM and with plenty of room on the hard drive, Leopard runs like lightening. I’m so pleased with this installation, not to mention each new feature I discover.

My favorite feature so far is Stacks. Clicking a folder or application package in your dock and seeing all of the contents without having to commit to opening anything is a definite must-have feature. It has saved me tons of time already. So far the biggest drawback is having to resort some of my filing so that I have room in my dock for the things I use daily, without having to set the dock size to “microscopic”.

Dashboard is still here, and still a nice collection of widgets. I like Dashboard for its novelty, but I have to admit I don’t use it all the time. I keep a few widgets going, like weather and word count widgets, but often forget to click over to see them. It’s more of a matter of personal work habits than anything else. Exposé helps handle that, but still Dashboard sometimes gets ignored in this house.

TimeMachine was quick to set up to work with our external drive, and it was easy to create different backup areas on the same external drive for both computers. Even honey should be able to back up his machine regularly without frustration. (He isn’t bad at computers, he just doesn’t like to play with them the way I do – he wants to do what he has to, finish then go play his games without hassle.)

I always opt out of .Mac – I have plenty of storage using external drives and JungleDisk, and .Mac so far doesn’t offer enough space for me. I’d love to hear from a .Mac user how TimeMachine and .Mac worked together for them in the comments. Right now I’m sticking with the TimeMachine/external drive set up.

Leopard comes with a variety of goodies, including two good games: Tony Hawk and Daemos Rising. Other new features include using the Cover Flow application for your files. The cover art browsing system you have come to love in iTunes has been applied to your folders and files. It’s pretty fun, actually, especially when browsing photographs or web pages where there is plenty of visual input.

You can also “cheat” with Leopard, “seeing” what’s in your files before you open them using Quick Look. Seeing the first bit of a file before you open it has been saving me time all afternoon. As a writer who earns most of her bread and butter on non fiction writing, its easy for articles on similar topics to start to blend together in your memory. Quick Look saves tons of time when I need to go back and revise or reference earlier work.

I’ve already discussed Time Machine’s backup capabilities, but it also offers you a way to see how your files looked day by day, or restore to a specific time frame. Even Mail has had an upgrade. I haven’t had a chance to test this out yet, but it is supposed to integrate with iCal and online calendars like Google calendar. It also is supposed to let you create your own stationary and other cool things. I’ll have to keep you posted on that. Up until now I’ve hated the Apple Mail application and have used Thunderbird instead.

More fun things arrive with the new iChat, which now includes special effects, art effects and visual options for how you display your video self in your chat sessions. I’ll try this at some point, though I am quite camera shy and dislike video chat intensely myself. Nothing says “Fuuuuck. Me.” like having to do an 8 AM video conference with new clients groggy, uncoifed and uncoffeed. Luckily, you can even change your “backdrop” and mess around with your chat text if you want.

Another groovy program is called Spaces. This basically gives you visual work flow and sorting for any project. You can dump files from any program into the Space for that project, keeping them together in a fast, easy to remember conceptual sort pattern. You then use a combination of Spaces and Exposé to flip back and forth from file to file and project to project. I have so many uses for this in keeping my majillion blogs, web sites, forums, and web sites sorted it isn’t even funny. This is a great feature, especially combined with Quick Look and Stacks.

Safari supposedly has a plethora of new features. As a general rule I tend not to use Safari. Unless one of those new features is being compatible with forms and web sites like FireFox is, it won’t be in my repertoire, still. It simply doesn’t see the web the way I need it to in order to work. But if it is your browser of choice, read all about its new features (tabbed browsing, inline search, clippings, and more) here. Also on the “meh” list for me is the Parental Controls feature (no kids) and integrated BootCamp (no Windoze shall ever touch my Mac. The end.).

All in all Leopard is a solid, multifaceted release that has significant performance upgrades and new features. I’m definitely happy I invested the time and money in putting it on our home and home office network. I can’t wait to hear how you are using the new features in your work and play!

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