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Leopard, Day 2

All righty then. The installation went smoothly and here we are with a brand new operating system to play with. Do I have time for this? Well, not really, but my curiousity forces me into looking around.

Speaking of that, what are we supposed to do with those two white Apple logo decals that were in the Leopard box? I never noticed these things before, but apparently people stick 'em on their cars, on glassware, and who knows where else. Older logos are sold on e-bay.. I guess this is a whole sub-culture I never noticed. Sure, what the heck, I'll stick one on my car.

So back to Leopard: what works and what doesn't? Well, Parallels didn't, even though I had made sure I upgraded to the latest build before installing Leopard. But that was easily fixed: I just downloaded Parallels again and all was fine. VMWare Fusion survived the upgrade and worked immediately. Well, sort of: networking still doesn't work in the SCO image. Kerio didn't make it, but again a quick download and re-install fixed that.

Speaking of downloads, Leopard has that new "stacks" feature for downloads, but you need to tell Firefox that you want to use your Downloads folder if you expect stuff it downloads to show up there.. no, I still can't see using Safari - I like my Firefox extensions.

Though there is something screwy with Firefox since the upgrade. Sometimes (and only sometimes) Firefox doesn't move to the front when I Command-Tab to it. I haven't yet figured out what circumstances trigger this behavior; of course "Hide Others" takes care of that.

I'm not sure how I feel about the new tabbed Terminal. As it is still possible to open new windows instead, there is nothing to complain about..

Spaces

I do like Spaces. We had this years ago on SCO systems: they called it Panner or "SCO Panorama" but they didn't invent it, and it was always called "workspaces", but the idea goes all the way back to Xerox PARC "rooms". There's a very complete explanation of the how and why of Spaces at AppleInsider. Good addition for OS X.

Cover Flow

I'm not immediately enthusiastic about Cover Flow. Oh, yes, it's very cool, incredible, big wow factor, all that. But I just can't imagine using it all that often. However, I could be wrong - it could be very handy for pawing through a pile of PDF docs, for example. It might also sometimes be useful when cleaning house; deciding whether or not to delete something would be easier with Cover Flow, and if the preview isn't quite enough, tapping the space bar to bring up Quick View probably is.

One thing that was not immediately obvious to me was how you navigate in and out of folders when using Cover Flow. Command down arrow takes you into a folder, and Command up arrow brings you back up. You can also double click or use Command-O to go in, but I do not like not knowing exactly where I am. For example, if I have a folder "/Users/tony/mystuff/pictures/tony" and have browsed down to it with Cover Flow, I have no immediate clue that I'm not back at "Users/tony" - the window title just says "tony".

I am still a little confused about when and why Finder switches away from Cover Flow. For example, if I am in that mode, and call up Time Machine (which will come up in Cover Flow mode as it should) and then Escape back, Finder is no longer using Cover Flow. Yet if I Cmd-Tab to somewhere else, then back to Finder, the Cover Flow view is back.. it's a little confusing.

Time Machine

Speaking of Time Machine: Time Machine is great.. it took a few hours for the initial backup, of course, but has been kicking off every hour since then. I like that it is smart enough not to get upset if I want to disconnect from the backup drive and take my computer off with me - it just picks up when I get back and reconnect. The interface is dead on, and when combined with Quick View, simply beyond fantastic. Move on back, find what you want, Quick View to be sure it really is, click on Restore.. what could be better?

The secret behind Time Machine is the FSEventer Framework which notifies applications of file system changes. Arstechnica explains what's changed with Leopard in this area. I really need to look into that - I can think of all kinds of silly and useful things I could use it for.

Spotlight

I find it highly amusing that I now like Spotlight - it's now quick enough and smooth enough to be used as an application launcher - a feature that I just could not imagine using when I looked at Quicksilver. Did they change Spotlight to make it more useful as an App launcher? It sure looks that way.. applications seem to get top billing now, and I do not recall the old Spotlight working that way (though I disliked it so much I hardly ever used it). Recently used items also get more credit, so will show up first. Those are good improvements.

Network

Much improved. All my network shares just showed up, and I just had to click "Connect as" to get actual access. Finder moves through these files almost as smoothly as it would on a local drive. I read somewhere that Spotlight can index shares, but I don't see it doing that.. more research needed.

And that's true of a lot of things. I'd love to spend the whole day playing with this and digging in more, but I do have other projects pressing..

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Tue Nov 6 15:58:43 2007:   bruceg


Not sure if you have noticed, but if you go into Coverflow, browsing network machines, all Windows machines show an icon of an old CRT monitor, with the BSOD! Very funny. Someone has a sense of humor at Apple. I bet that just drives Steve Ballmer nuts.



Tue Nov 6 18:17:07 2007:   TonyLawrence


I did notice that :-)

I was just going through System Preferences - Spotlight lets you control the order of things found.. I do not remember that in 10.4, but as I said, I hardly used it.

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