Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2007 > November > 14 > Entry
Slightly late first impressions of OS X Leopard
I ordered a new Apple MacBook last week and it finally arrived today (it’s a long way from Shanghai). So far, I’m very impressed with it after just a few hours of play. The screen is slightly smaller than my old iBook G4 (13.3” compared to 14”), but it’s a brighter display and the resolution seems a bit crisper.
I haven’t gotten to explore Leopard fully yet, but the things that make great Mac laptops are all there from the beginning: I was able to import all of my settings, passwords, bookmarks, applications and files from my old laptop simply by connecting a Firewire cable from the old computer to the new. It took less than 20 minutes and when it was done, all my familiar icons were on the desktop. My photos were all in iPhoto and all my iTunes music and TV shows were ready to go. There was no need to reinstall applications like Microsoft Word or to reconfigure my wireless network preference and Firefox bookmarks.
Front Row, which wasn’t available when my old laptop was purchased, is fantastic, as is the included tiny white remote controller. The built-in iSight camera, which has also been around for a while, works wonderfully with iChat and its new video backgrounds, even with low lighting conditions.
Finder improvements like Cover Flow and Quick Look are impressive, but I’m not sure yet how useful they’ll be in everyday use. I love the idea of being able to view PDFs, Word documents and other files without opening applications, but given how quickly applications open on the Macbook, it may not be that much of a necessity.
The new Dock looks sharp and the Draft-N wireless Internet blazes with the Airport Extreme Router I have set up at home. Web pages appear quickly and podcasts from the Apple Store were quick to download. The computer itself is fast. Applications pop open almost instantly and I’m getting a lot less of the spinning beach ball than on the old machine.
Now, the not-so-good: The semi-transparent menus are stylish, but a misfire in terms of usability. It would be nice to be able to disable them, but depending on your screen background, the menus can become close to unreadable. There are workarounds, but it feels like a mistake on Apple’s part to force transparency on users.
Time Machine sounds fantastic, but it requires an external hard drive to work. I have one, but it already has all my Windows desktop data backed up on it. In order to use Time Machine, I’d have to completely erase the contents of the external drive. There’s no way for a Leopard Time Machine backup to peacefully co-exist with content already on the drive. And as of now, there’s no way to do backups to an external drive connected to the Airport Extreme’s USB port.
“Stacks” are a mixed bag. The “Grid” view is much easier to use than the “Fan” view. For some weird reason, Stacks chooses the first file in a folder as the folder icon and there’s no easy way to change it. Once again, Mac users come to the rescue with their own fix for an Apple oversight.
So, overall, Leopard is a winner for me running on a new laptop. Some upgraders to the OS have had problems when not doing a clean install. For new Mac purchasers, though, a built-in copy of Leopard on a brand new machine promises some handy new features along with the streamlined, speedy performance we’ve come to expect from OS X.
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By Jacob
November 14, 2007 5:02 PM | Link to this
My favorite feature are stacks and spaces.
I work in interactive design so I use a large variety of programs. Stacks allows me to group these programs together in my menu bar, and spaces helps me group specialized work spaces together.
Quicklook is also pretty cool. Almost negates the reason for iPhoto.
I like the idea of Time Machine for the average user, but for me it is just extra bloat compared to standard backup solutions.
Omar replies: Spaces is one of those features that sounds interesting, but I haven't figured out a way yet to see how I'd make it useful for myself. I'll have to play around with it.
I only ever use iPhone for resizing/light photo editing. I don't have PhotoShop for Mac, so it's what I use for minor retouching.
I love the idea of Time Machine for people who don't ever backup at all but since all my important data is on my Windows PC and I back that up regularly already, not sure I'll get much use out of it.