A got seriously tired yesterday night, shortly before midnight. I wanted to write this entry yesterday night or during the night, but my brain wanted me to sleep, I could not win that battle. So here’s an overview of everything, hopefully giving non-Mac users also something nice to read. Just for a quick recap: The installation on the iMac G5 was fairly painless, pretty much 3 clicks or 4, and off it went. It took about an hour, which is okay considering all the things on this machine.
Aurora, the new wallpaper, shines on Leopard’s desktop with its new dock, and all-new menu bar on top. It has a metal-ish appearance.
So today I wanna talk about the things that people got so excited about (including me) and check how nice the Leopard plays along with the rest of us. Let’s get started then!
Finder
The new Finder is very smooth, has a clean interface. What everyone pretty much loves is the Cover Flow view for, uhm, everything, really. This is how it looks like for the Applications folder:
The new sidebar is pretty cool as well. It shows all machines in the network (to which you can connect to), most common places of files, as well as searches you can also customize. This is pretty cool and will help me a lot.
Moving on!
QuickLook
Now this is something seriously cool. Imagine you have an interesting number of documents, and you have lost track of what is where, the only thing you know is the folder inside which all of your documents are stored. Like Word, Excel, images, that kind of stuff. You go into the folder, and open Cover Flow. Alright? Then you select any file, of which you already see a preview of, and hit the spacebar. The result is this:
Each time you hit the spacebar, it kind of flies out of the Cover Flow, and presents you this new window. It works with all kind of file types. You can browse through Word Documents, Excel Sheets, PDFs… you can see all pages of multi-page-documents already inside Cover Flow, but also in QuickLook. You can go full-screen as well, and browse through the file. All of that in the Finder without even opening the required application which you usually open to see a filetype. Super cool.
Time Machine
If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 7200 rotations per minute, you gonna see some serious shit!
I connected my new external drive before the Leopard upgrade. When the update was done, the first thing I was asked was if I want to use this drive for Time Machine. I confirmed this and let is back up over night (more than 200,000 files altogether, came out at 88 GB). Transferring such an interesting amount of data via USB requires some time. When I came back this morning, it had completed. The cool thing is that I won’t have to wait that long again for a backup to complete. Like I said in my previous post, it has only one setting: The On/Off switch. That’s pretty much it. Set it to on, and it’ll do the rest. When completed, you can open ANYTHING, then go to Time Machine, and restore everything. It’s THAT simple.
When you open it the first time: “Wow, it’s full of stars, and they all move!” I named my Time Machine disk ‘DeLorean’. I thought it would be a nice name.
Next thing I wanna quickly talk about is…
Safari
The first thing you will definitely notice is the new Webclip button. It allows you to take pretty much any part of a website and then make a widget out of it. With that, I literally mean everything. In this case, I created a widget for the latest posts on MacRumors.com. Easy peasy.
Another thing I have noticed is that Safari appears to be no longer in Beta. It is now listed as Version 3.0.4, does not say anything like Beta anywhere. Maybe I’m wrong with this, but I think it’s no longer Beta.
What is pretty cool is that you can now change the settings of the proxy within Safari. I don’t think this was the case before in the version you could get as Beta, at least not for Tiger.
Alright. So let me quickly move on to…
Spaces
Virtual desktops are seriously nothing new. They have been around in Linux for a long long time, and there have even been freeware tools for all kinds of Windows flavors to get virtual desktops. Most of the time they integrated themselves as sort of a pager in a bar in Linux, or in the System Tray under Windows. Now these desktops make it into Mac OS X under the name Spaces.
You can configure as many as you want in the control panel. It however placed itself on F8 as activation key, which is Play/Pause on the new keyboard. I changed it to F6. You can move windows around as advertised in Bird’s Eye view, and assign applications to certain spaces, or make them follow you as you switch your desks. In terms of clutter, it ends it pretty much on Macs, friggin’ finally.
Next thing I wanna talk about is…
Front Row
Now my iMac is one of these old-schoolers, not even a camera built-in. Therefore also no sensor for the ultra-simple remote. Whenever you tried to get Front Row to work on a machine that does not have the sensor, you were out. Thanks to Andrew Escobar’s well known hack, it works also on non-Front Row machines. But what about Front Row in Leopard, on a machine, that does have no sensor and no camera, like mine? IT WORKS!!
And basically, it’s Apple TV. I have never seen the interface like this, I mean like, on my machine, and its super fluid, it’s simply staggering. Put this on your 42 inch LCD TV, and you’ll be amazed.
Right. Moving on!
I’ve got a good 1600 messages or so altogether on my Mac. When I first opened it, it said it needed to update my database. This took about one minute, and then there it was. The lower left now has a Mail Activity box, which shows what is happening to your Mail. Stationary? Good to have, but I personally don’t need it. Overall it is blazingly fast, can cope with a lot of messages in a lot of folders. Notes? I will probably use them. Data detectors? Had no chance to test them yet. But I will do so when the chance comes. I am not in the US, we have a different format of writing phone numbers and stuff, so it be interesting to see if it picks up these things too.
Okay. Quickly moving on to…
iTunes
I don’t wanna spend much time on this. There’s no notable change in the interface or anything, in fact, it looks the same. It is listed as Version 7.4.2, so not much change there. Cover Flow however seems to have gained on speed. I seriously believe it works faster. Sound? No change 
Everything else in iTunes has not lost or gained anything, only that Cover Flow seems to have picked up on speed.
Okay. Now for the Unix geek in us. Let’s look at the…
Terminal
Sometimes, or if you’re like me and working on a lot of web code, you just have to have a Terminal tool that you just love, that makes you want to do the stuff you need to do. The new Terminal not only has a new refreshed icon, it also supports Tabs now (yeah!!) and it comes with something pretty cool. Themes.
You can customize them all if you want, but admittedly, Homebrew seriously is the best of them all. Unix nerds, you’ll LOVE this.
Alright. Many things covered. What’s next? This:
iPhoto
I also bought iLife ‘08 yesterday, which, as we all know, comes with iPhoto in the package. Alongside with iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, and GarageBand. Let me talk about iPhoto in the moment, because this is the tool I use the most of all of iLife, and I admit it, I got iLife JUST for iPhoto alone. The other tools are pretty amazing too, and I’ll write about them when I test them.
When I opened it for the first time just now, it told me that my photo library needs an upgrade to work with the new tool. I confirmed this. After it had completed, it started to auto-split all my photos into events, using the gallery names and trying to figure out what belongs to what. It did a good job, but not accurate enough. However, the job was still impressively well done.
The application started pretty much the moment when I clicked on the new icon in the dock. The new appearance is pretty nice, it takes some time to get used to… especially if you have been using iPhoto ‘06 a lot. However, the “Skimming” in events is pure genius, the editing capabilities are impressive. If you got a lot of photos, and I bet you do, THIS is what you want. I kid you not.
Alright. What’s left to cover? Ah yes, one more thing I want to talk about today:
Stacks
Initially announced to be there back in Mac OS X Panther 10.3, but then pulled, were Stacks. Now two versions later, we have ‘em. I think they will be incredibly useful for me. These things kind of provide an overview of a lot of contents of folders, directly from the Dock. This will prove incredibly useful if you work on a lot of things and you need quick access to files.
There are two views, as we all know. The Fan view is seriously interesting if you have only a few files, and the type of files changes a lot. Like this:
Or, if there are too many files in one folder, it automatically selects the Grid view.
I like this. I really do.
Conclusion
So what’s SE51’s verdict? It certainly is the most impressive Mac OS X ever, without a doubt. The enhancements are just cool and well thought. Cover Flow in the Finder is already my standard view for everything, Stacks is what I will use a lot, I can see myself switching Spaces a lot for applications, to keep the desktop clean. Overall performance is incredible, MUCH faster as Tiger. Time Machine will save me from accidentally deleting files. I really need Time Machine as I am the sort of guy who has often deleted something by mistake, and never got it back. Now I finally got my DeLorean. Sure, I could have backed up before… I was too lazy. This tool does this for me now. The iLife ‘08 suite is certainly the best compliment for your digital life and Leopard, and runs very fast. The new Finder overall is eye-pleasing, and has these little enhancements, like background-blurring when a menu hovers over a window.
If you don’t have it already, RUN into the next retail store, don’t walk. Run. If you’re like me, you will be amazed and will not regret the decision of buying it, even not regretting spending extra money on a hard drive - just for the Time Machine experience alone. Trust me. Get it. Do it NOW!!
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