Valhalla Island

It’s been almost two weeks since I performed a clean Leopard install on my Macintosh computer. I’ve never looked forward to software like I looked forward to Leopard. As a Mac user that’s never been through a major OS update until now, it was a special experience.

User Interface

As a whole, 10.5 looks better and feels better. The complete abolishment of horizontal stripes, brushed metal, most aqua (the exception being scroll bars, which remain deeply aqua) and the resulting consistency of the new window look makes a massive difference. Applications that use the standard toolbar control — the type used in iWork — look amazing. Preference panes which once look ordinary now look beautiful. The inset type used in toolbars could not look any better.

I used Uno to unify the window appearance in 10.4 but Leopard brings it to brilliant new levels.

That said, the menu bar, contextual menus and dock (both kinds) suck. The transparent menu is not useful and it doesn’t look good. There is no advantage to a slightly transparent menus while there’s the major disadvantage of making menu items harder to read. There’s crude workarounds to get the menu bar’s opacity back but the transparency also runs into contextual menus and menu bar drop downs so theirs no complete fix. It’s hard to believe there’s not a system preference to turn it off.

Both dock variations are hideous monstrosities. The common consensus seems to be that the alternate, shown-when-on-the-side-or-when-using-a-defaults-setting is much better. Despite the ridiculous, useless, noise creating reflections I prefer the look of the default bottom dock.

I was a Clear Dock user in Tiger that just modified the dock look without completely removing the background. Still, the default Tiger dock was leaps and bounds better than both Leopard options. Dan Benjamin got it right on The Talk Show saying it’s so unMac OS X like. I agree, nothing else uses semi-transparent black with a white border or a zebra-crossing separator. It’s tough when nothing else is anything like the dock in OS X but Leopard’s alternate dock looks like it’s been pulled from a wannabe-OS X Linux distribution.

As ugly as the default bottom dock is, at least it feels like it’s part of the OS.

In my features I’m looking forward to post I cited a more prominent and obvious active window as a big one. I had no idea all they’d do is give it a bigger drop shadow. Effectively no improvement whatsoever.

Applications

The new Mail is relatively unchanged when it comes to my use for Mail — that is, sending and receiving email. Almost a completely unchanged interface and functionality. Setting up accounts is now much, much easier — as is managing outgoing mail servers when outside of your home internet connection.

Why Mail now includes notes and to dos, I have no idea. Same goes for RSS. When did email applications become do-everything applications? Worse is that notes and to dos use the hideous Marker Felt on a yellow notepad background.

One positive addition is stationery. Every stationery template that comes with Mail is gorgeous. I’m dying for a reason to use it.

Updated iCal is beautiful. It sucks that clicking an event doesn’t display the inline details as editable but command-e can be used. The interface has been dramatically simplified and I love it. It’s everything I hoped it would be.

Time Machine was the big card in Leopard’s deck. The only backup drive I’m able to power here is half the size of my internal so I’m not backing up everything but it’s been doing it’s thing on what it can. It’s far and away the ideal solution for backing up — easily set up, easy recovery but I find it hard to get too excited about any kind of back up. It’s a mundane task that just has to be done. Time Machine does it perfectly and it’s boring but that’s how it should be.

Finder

The new Finder sidebar is great, Mail’s also adopted this sidebar. It’s funny that iTunes is definitely leading the way in Apple’s UI department. Everything happens in iTunes before it’s taken anywhere else. Although I haven’t had the chance to use it in a realistic situation, shared computer handling had been dramatically improved.

Cover flow in the Finder is a waste of time. Hell, it’s a waste of time in iTunes. It’s a gimmick and nothing more. Anyone that uses cover flow to find anything is wasting time.

Maybe I’ll use quick look when I get home and start working more often but not once have I been in a situation where quick look would have been useful. Maybe it’s because I haven’t trained myself to tap space bar when I need a quick preview, maybe I just don’t need it.

Stacks

I’m a side docker so stack contents are always shown in a grid — a rounded rectangle with a transparent background that takes a second to fan out. Each item receives very little space so it’s filename is usually shortened. That, on top of the transparency makes trying to find something in a stack almost impossible. I’d much prefer an opaque Finder window that spaces out icons in a readable format.

The downloads folder is obviously made for the huge majority of users who’s desktop looks like recycling station. As someone who keeps a tidy desktop, not being able to change the destination away from the downloads directory for downloads is frustrating.

Spotlight

Spotlight is amazing. It spent about three hours indexing the contents of my hard drive. After that it’s lighting quick, so fast that I haven’t had the need to install Quicksilver. Insane speeds plus changing the default selected item to the top result make the once ridiculed Spotlight into a highly respectable and useful application.

Miscellaneous

The new voice - “Alex” is the most impressive digital voice you’ll ever hear.

The ridiculous border that is added around screen grabs using cmd-shift-4 spacebar annoys me a lot.

Overall the speed and new unified UI make Leopard worth the money to upgrade. It just feels better. While there’s a bunch of things I dislike, they’ll soon be able to be easily modified with some third party software.