The northlondonhippy

I brought a new kitty-cat home yes­ter­day and I don’t mean the fuzzy vari­ety. I pur­chased my very own copy of Leop­ard from my local Apple Store!

I did debate going last to the Apple Store last Fri­day night at 6pm, when they launched their lat­est and great­est oper­at­ing sys­tem, but I hate crowds and I hate peo­ple and quickly thought bet­ter of it. Besides, did I really need a free tee-shirt?

When I bought my first iMac, nearly 3 years ago, it came installed with Pan­ther, but a few months after that, I upgraded to Tiger, which I ran on all my Macs until yesterday.

Tiger is a great OS, sta­ble, easy and intu­itive to use and it brought me 2 and 1/2 years of com­put­ing bliss. Leop­ard appears to be the next log­i­cal step in the devel­op­ment of OS X.

The “300 new fea­tures” Apple keeps tout­ing is prob­a­bly a bit of an exag­ger­a­tion, but over all the changes appear to be welcome.

I spent yes­ter­day upgrad­ing my 3 main sys­tems, my new 24” iMac, my Mac­Book and my Mac mini. Each sys­tem took around an hour and I upgraded, rather than clean-install or archive-and-install. Apple soft­ware tends to be sta­ble and trust­wor­thy, plus I had the weekend’s field reports online to warn me of poten­tial instal­la­tion hazards.

One of the issues flagged up by the first installers, was some­thing called Appli­ca­tion Enhancer, a 3rd party frame­work, utilised by some 3rd party soft­ware. This frame­work causes a con­flict in the instal­la­tion which bricks your Mac, leav­ing you with the dreaded blue screen of death! Updat­ing to the lat­est ver­sion of Appli­ca­tion Enhancer will pre­vent this and if its too late, there are fixes posted on the net which show you how to rem­edy the situation.

Only one of my Macs, the Mini, had AE installed and I caught it before upgrad­ing, so no wor­ries there. The Mini was the first sys­tem I upgraded, because at a year old, it’s the old­est of my 3 systems.

The upgrade was a breeze, the installer walked me through a few screens, rebooted from the DVD and presto-change-o, it rebooted into Leop­ard, with all my orig­i­nal set­tings and files right where I left them.

After that, I did the iMac, which was extremely quick, around 40–45 min­utes from start to fin­ish. I fol­lowed that up with the Mac­Book, which took a lit­tle over an hour.

As each sys­tem booted up into Leop­ard for the first time, I had the chance to explore the new sys­tem. The first thing you notice is the login screen has a new back­ground, the Leop­ard desk­top photo. That makes a nice change from the plain blue back­ground, though I know there’s a sim­ple Ter­mi­nal com­mand to change it.

The sys­tems all boot up faster under Leop­ard. I don’t really know how Apple do this, it was the same with Tiger. Appli­ca­tions also seem to launch faster and in gen­eral all three sys­tems seem slightly more responsive.

I like the new look, the change in folder icons, the slightly translu­cent menu bar and the redesigned dock, all work very well. The Stacks con­cept is also very cool; when you click on a folder in the dock, the con­tents are quickly revealed for easy access. Put your Appli­ca­tion folder on the dock, if you haven’t already and you’ll have a very quick, easy way to launch any App you have installed. It’s sim­ple and clever.

Speak­ing of sim­ple and clever, the new-look Finder win­dow is much bet­ter too. The side­bar has been reor­gan­ised and is much more use­ful, with group­ings that make explor­ing your hard drive and other com­put­ers on your net­work that much easier.

Cov­er­flow, a fea­ture added to iTunes last year, is now part of the Finder and it makes brows­ing through files a pain­less task. Even bet­ter is Quick­Look, which does exactly what it says on the tin — select an item, hit the space bar and you can see just what’s inside the file, whether it’s a text doc­u­ment, spread­sheet or video — it’s all preview-able!

By far the most use­ful new addi­tion to the Finder is the screen-sharing func­tion, some­thing I do quite a bit with my Mac Mini.

My Mini is con­nected to my LCD TV and I use it pri­mar­ily for media, music and video. When I want to down­load some­thing on Bit­Tor­rent, I nor­mally con­trol the Mini from my iMac via an open source pro­gram called “Chicken of the VNC”, but I don’t need to use that any more, because a bet­ter, ver­sion of it is now part of the OS.

The screen shar­ing is fast, faster than Chicken of the VNC, but by far the best thing is it can repro­duce my Mighty Mouse’s right click. I could see how this func­tion would be of use to peo­ple with fam­ily and friends who have Macs, you can effort­lessly con­trol their machine and show the per­son on the remote Mac how to do some­thing, with­out too much trou­ble. If you have more than one Mac on your home net­work, I’m sure you will find this a use­ful tool.

The other major change I’ve noticed while using my Mac Mini is the com­pletely redesigned Fron­tRow. The user inter­face now matches the Apple TV, it’s more respon­sive and reacts to the remote con­trol faster. It’s also organ­ised more log­i­cally and you have finer con­trol over media play­back. This is a very solid and wel­come upgrade, espe­cially for me because I use Fron­tRow so much.

Another wel­come change is the new Down­loads folder, which is a new cat­e­gory of Home Folder. It lives on the Dock and I’ve already set up my Bit­Tor­rent client to use it. It means never hav­ing to hunt around for a down­loaded file again, that’s a very good thing!

In gen­eral, all of my Apps are work­ing well, as is every­thing on all three com­put­ers and I’m lik­ing every­thing I’ve seen so far.

I’ve yet to get my head around Spaces, the vir­tual desk­top tool, though I can see how it would be use­ful to man­age and run groups of related appli­ca­tions. I need to exper­i­ment with it a bit.

My one dis­ap­point­ment so far is Time Machine, which I haven’t set up yet. I upgraded to the new Air­port Extreme last sum­mer, in antic­i­pa­tion of Leop­ard and Time Machine, because of the AirDisk func­tion. AirDisk is the abil­ity to attach a USB hard drive to the Extreme and have it func­tion as a net­work attached stor­age (NAS) drive and use it for Time Machine. Apple touted this func­tion right up until recently and then all ref­er­ences to it disappeared.

I’m guess­ing that the func­tion­al­ity is still not work­ing prop­erly and at some point, it will be added back to Leop­ard. I hope so, any­way. Until then, it will only work with dri­ves attached to each Mac, locally and that makes it just too involved and expen­sive. My plan was to have one cen­tral drive work­ing with Time Machine on all 3 Macs and I’m prob­a­bly going to wait for this fea­ture before set­ting up this great new auto­mated back-up sys­tem. It’s a minor dis­ap­point­ment and one I am sure they are work­ing hard to address.

If you’re con­sid­er­ing an upgrade to Leop­ard and any of the new fea­tures appeal to you, then go for it! It’s solid, sta­ble and adds lots of cool new fea­tures to your already very cool com­puter! Apple will con­tinue to tweak Leop­ard over the com­ing years, with bug fixes and new fea­tures, just as they have with Tiger.

Rumour has it that Tiger is due for an update as well, which means Apple will con­tinue to sup­port it for some time to come. That means there’s no rush to upgrade to Leop­ard, but there’s noth­ing stop­ping you from tak­ing that next step in Apple’s OS evo­lu­tion! Fol­low in the hippy’s foot­steps and you’ll be run­ning the most advanced oper­at­ing sys­tem in the world!

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