Leopard first impressions
30 October 2007

"The first thing to note about Leopard is the amount of work that has obviously gone in to the heart of the system. The Finder is seriously quick now and there's very little "beach ball watching" compared to Tiger"

So, I've installed Leopard on my Mac Pro and have been using it for a few days now. Time to report my initial reaction to the latest cat on the block

I won't go into great details here as I've got several pages on this web site dedicated to an in-depth discussion of Leopard's new features. Unsurprisingly installation went smoothly, I'm pleased to say. If you're planning to upgrade yourself I'd recommend the default options. Just choose your language, the drive you want to install on and then away you go - it couldn't be easier! Because I'd been fiddling around with system level files on my computer I decided to do an erase and install. This meant I had to re-install my applications such as Adobe CS3, iLife 08, NeoOffice and Adium as well as copying over my e-mail and keychain but even with this extra work I was still fully up and running in a couple of hours. If you upgrade, this could be as quick as 30 minutes.

The first thing to note about Leopard is the amount of work that has obviously gone in to the heart of the system. The Finder is seriously quick now and there's very little "beach ball watching" compared to Tiger. Apart from the new look to the desktop and, in particular, the Dock navigating around your Mac has become a whole lot easier thanks to live icons, Coverflow and Quick Look. These three features are, on their own, impressive but together are simply stunning. Live icons match the contents of the relevant file so for example PDF files look like the first page of the document with a little bit of the real second page poking through from underneath. Coverflow is an iTunes-esque horizontal scrolling view of files and folders that is amazingly quick in operation regardless of the number of items being shown. Quick Look is probably the most impressive addition. With a file selected a press of the space bar zooms up a view of the file whether this be a document, photo or movie. You can even view this full screen if you want to the Dock sliding out of the way and the rest of the desktop fading out as you do so. Multiple page documents can be scrolled through and you can even play movies or select different tabs of spreadsheets. All this without actually opening the file in whatever application created it. Simply stunning. Incidentally you can even view multiple pages of PDF files or play movies from within Coverflow itself without even launching Quick Look.

The headline feature of Leopard is Time Machine, an automated backup process that enables you to recover your entire hard drive right down to individual deleted (or altered) files. So this isn't just a great back up tool but also a version control system. I've deleted my mirrored RAID and instead opted for a single data disc with a separate Time Machine drive backing up my data, applications and operating system. This all works without any obvious overhead. Time Machine takes hourly backups for 24 hours then a weekly backup followed by a monthly backup reorganising as time goes by. Use of Unix hard links (if you don't know what these are then don't worry you don't NEED to know) means that backup file system space is kept to a minimum although I'd recommend using System Preferences to exclude things like virtual machine hard drives if you use Parallels or Fusion. In actual fact, Leopard supports non-destructive creation and re-sizing of partitions on-the-fly so you could set up a separate mounted drive for those "big files" you need to exclude. Not absolutely necessary but worth thinking about if you find yourself in this position.

Spaces is a simple but very usable multiple desktop manager. A friend of mine has experienced problems on his iMac with this new feature but I've yet to hear of anyone else having issues. I hope he's reported it to Apple as 10.5.1 is expected within a few weeks.

I must give a mention to Spotlight as this feature (first introduced in Tiger) has received a significant update. It's now much faster and works seemlessly with networked volumes. I was already using this as an application launcher in Tiger but now there's no excuse for using anything else, apps are automatically selected for you in the results so a simple push of the enter key launches a program. Spotlight also performs calculations and gives dictionary definitions. I was also very impressed with one other small addition. I'd read a web site article earlier in the day on Saturday and much later wanted to refer back to it. Safari's history for that day was very long already and I'd forgotten exactly what site I wanted so I entered some keywords from the article into Spotlight and, hey presto, there was the web page I wanted under a section called "Bookmarks" (even though I hadn't actively bookmarked that web page).

A great deal of work has gone in to making Leopard work better with multi-core processors so anyone who has bought a Mac in the last couple of years should notice speed improvements. My 4-core machine positively flies now but users with first generation MacBooks onwards are reporting that Leopard is noticably faster than Tiger. I'm also very excited about getting to grips with Objective-C 2.0, XCode 3 and Interface Builder all of which ship with the OS in shiny new versions. Perhaps my widget programming will become easier now that the Developer Tools also include Dashcode. I can't wait to test out the Javascript debugger, it's something I've wanted for years!

There are many other features that have been added to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard but I won't drone on about them here, read my dedicated pages for more. In summary, so far I'm very impressed with Leopard. For a dot zero release it's an absolute triumph and although some people have reported inevitable minor issues I have confidence that Apple will address the bulk of these in the first incremental release that can't be far away.

I'm so impressed with how good Leopard is looking at this early stage that I may upgrade my MacBook earlier than I'd originally planned (I bought an OS X Family Pack). We'll see how brave I'm feeling later in the week.

Now, I wonder what's coming in Mac OS X 10.6?