I think the means to sum up the correct level of expectation for Leopard is to compare it to a pic that star Gene Hackman or Michael Caine . Youknowthat it ’s go to be worthwhile … but the coin ’s in the melodic phrase as to whether it ’s worth find out right away .
That ’s because Leopard , unique from all previous major release of Mac OS X , lacks that one sledgehammer feature that absolutelyinsiststhat you park your cigaret in front of the Apple Store and subsist on a diet of Orange Julius and Cinnabons all day to ensure that today is the first day of the rest of your Leopard living . No , Leopard might very well be the first edition in which many diehard Mac folks resolve to forego the $ 129 upgrade entirely . Not because it is n’t worth the money — it sure as shooting is — but because they know they ’ll be getting a destitute copy on the Mac they intend to buy next year , and they do n’t see a need to rush it .
I ’ve been run for Leopard for the past yr or so while it ’s slouched rather messily towards Bethlehem to be born . By now , I ’ve fielded the “ Should I or should n’t I ? ” doubt often enough that I ’ve get it pretty well rehearsed . Leopard , I ’m convinced , is a game of inches . It ’s not one or two major features that ’ll convince you to kick upstairs , but a half 12 or more … and for each person , it ’ll be a different aggregation .
I hear to visualise Leopard as a catalog of shareware and commercial-grade features . If an main developer had register me an alpha of Time Machine and told me that he intended to package and sell it as a standalone substitute app for $ 79 , would I think he was charge too much , too piffling , or that he should unfreeze it as freeware and be thankful for an periodic pillowcase of beer that might make it from an appreciative user ?
Should you upgrade ? Just do the math . I ca n’t cover every feature article , but I can at least do the Antiques Roadshow appraisal on the highlights .
Time Machine
There are three form of backup apps :
1 ) Intense and punitively - complex connection utilities well left to the form of admins who have had their ear surgically - resculpted into elf or Vulcan point .
2 ) Utilities design to help the distinctive user back up their data point in a bare , practical , conciliatory , and effective way .
3 ) The “ freak ” apps .
Time Machine is a “ freak ” app .
It ’s not a flexible tool . It ’s a specific service that apply a exclusive ( but attractive ) backup scheme : “ innumerable undo ” for your whole campaign . You desperately need a spreadsheet that you deleted months ago ? No exertion : start the booklet it was in , actuate Time Machine , “ rewind ” the folder until the missing spreadsheet re - appear , and then drag it from the Folder of Yesteryear into the Folder of Today .
Cool .
by all odds .
But I ca n’t think of the last metre I in reality need to do that .
It ’ll be fab if the next propagation of Leopard apps could overwork this sort of mechanism to the extreme , of course of study . I ’ve just edit three paragraphs from this section ; if by and by on I determine that I have room for ‘ em , a Time Machine - enable translation of this password processor would let me imitate a paragraph from the past and paste it into the nowadays . That ’d make Time Machine into a killer feature article . Alas , Apple tell me that even with third - party development , this is n’t possible under the current system . you may “ rewind ” your iPhoto library , your Address Book , and your Mail store , but that ’s it .
So what does Time Machine do for me as a backup utility ? Well , it create and keep a exclusive straightforward backup of my entire hard campaign and that ’s it . The backup is freshen hourly , which is nice . But Time Machine ca n’t backup just a dowry of my parkway ; it ’s all or nothing , so I take to buy a second drive of adequate capacity to make full and practical habit of the system . And producing multiple backups is cumbersome , which is potentially a fatal weakness in a backup service program .
For my own needs Time Machine is really inferior to a mainstream , non - freak backup app . I useShirt Pocket Software ’s SuperDuper . Once a workweek , it does a complete backup of my MacBook as insurance against a drive crash . Every evening , it backs up my most important stuff ( iTunes purchases , email , and my Documents and Pictures folder ) to my iPod , as insurance policy against everything else . This way , I havetwobackups , not just one , and because I carry my iPod everywhere , if there ’s a fire at my office or a break - in at my hotel elbow room , I have it off that my most crucial data point is safe .
And if my internal thrust go toes ( or some other fleshy protuberance)-up , I can just restart my Mac and kicking from my Super Duper relief . I ’ll be back up and running again in five instant . I was fairly astonished to learn that Time Machine backups are n’t bootable . If I rely solely on Time Machine for championship and there ’s a major crash , I ’m time of day away from a functional Mac . Unless of course I had the forethought to partition my Time Machine volume and add a separate boot mass with a operative written matter of Leopard on it .
( That ’s a crest , kids : write it down . )
So:$15 . It does n’t offer the flexibility or safety of a traditional backup app and it has one unexampled feature that you might like or you might completely ignore for the life of the OS . I ’d be advising the developer to undercut the $ 28 Super Duper ! for this initial release , and then kick downstairs the price to $ 29 when it gains some new features .
Spaces
space is such a simple , one - prank thing : it lets you delineate any issue of “ virtual ” monitors . And like throw two or three “ real ” Monitor attached , you’re able to overwork this real - estate any way you see primed . Put each app in a separate projection screen ? Use one for word - type stuff and nonsense , a second for turn - ish things , and a third for Aperture and Photoshop and other imagey operations ? A “ boss ” screen door that dead will never bear a Firefox windowpane full of “ Babylon 5 / Serenity ” slashfic ?
It ’s up to you . infinite is not here to approximate .
( But Simon Tam getting it on withBester?!?Really ? add up on , now … )
I bang Spaces . It ’s sporty , it ’s simple , and it works fantastically . I see that I tend to create a new Space for every app with a great fullscreen mode , like iMovie or InDesign or Aperture . I also do n’t think we ’ll have long to wait before developer start make “ passkey control panel”-type apps whose sole job is to occupy a slot in your Spaces setup , and fill your total screen with a nice , black status panel of your intact cosmos ( new emails , newsworthiness headlines , To - Dos , appointment ) that you may read from across the room .
So its gloomy monetary value of$19isn’t a reflection of its economic value . Merely an acknowledgement of how voiceless it is to get people to cough up more then twenty bucks for a one - trick pony .
New Dock
The Dock has been given a facelift , but not one that everyone will enjoy , and it has new feature of speech , but none of any literal time value . “ But what about push-down list ? ” you say . “ Drag your written document folder into the Dock , and you’re able to select and establish any file directly from the Dock ! ”
Yeah . Keen . But you ’ve been able to do that for years . It ’s just that the files were presented as a popup menu rather of a fan ( or power system ) of document previews . And because I ’m one of those mythical exponent users who has more than a dozen things in my Documents brochure , I ’d much rather have a Brobdingnagian popup list that scroll quickly than a panel of a dozen icons that moves more slowly . Nice touch , though , inhabit the Stack with just the most recently - extend to item .
I see this as afreeupdate . One that many people wo n’t rile downloading .
Back To My Mac and Screen Sharing
in conclusion . Finally!Apple finally figured out that it ’s the architect of both the Mac OS and a massive on-line service . I do n’t sleep with if there ’s been some sort of gas pedal leak in the .Mac team ’s role all these years , but why did it take so long for them to do something more ambitious than simple electronic mail and lodge hosting help that anybody can get anywhere for free ?
If you have a .Mac account ( and youwillwant to have one , now ) , the service acts as the go - between for your Mac and the rest of the world . Pop open your MacBook in a hotel way and resplendency be … your desktop iMac appears in the Finder ( take over that both Macs are running Leopard ) . you could get at its hard drive as though it were locally attached . get at your partake iTunes subroutine library . And this bring withanyMac die hard Leopard . You ’re at your ally ’s Mac , you ’re at an Apple Store … it does n’t weigh , so long as you’re able to sign in to .Mac .
compound this with Screen Sharing and you suddenly have a very very veryveryintensely useful thing . Your connection to the other Mac is encrypted via IPsec , which means that in a sense , .Mac now comes with a gratuitous VPN tool .
You ’re out and about and using an open WiFi approach point in time . You do n’t dare do your on-line banking or carry any other kind of sensitive selective information because you ca n’t trust loose WiFi ( yes , it ’s possible to establish a sham proxy that make you “ recall ” your web browser has a secure connective ) .
Okay , so or else of connecting to GreedySelfishBastardBank.com via the copy of Safari on your MacBook , connect to your bank building via the written matter of Safari located on your iMac at family . employ the inviolable Back To My Mac characteristic to prove the connexion , open up your iMac ’s screen , and then launch the browser app from THAT desktop .
Or how about this ? You have an old PowerBook G4 . It does n’t have much by direction of a CPU or memory or a difficult movement , but it ’s way too near to throw away . Fine : use it as a terminal for your home iMac . permit your new iMac have the big muscle and the terabyte of depot and host a hundred apps . No matter where you are in the house or the world , your 1 GHz G4 with its 60 gig campaign can easily manage the unsubdivided tasks of shuttling pixels , keystrokes , and creep events across your WiFi connectedness .
And to anyone who suspects that Apple will turn a dirt - cheap “ slender ” Mac sometime next year … well , now you have a lot of things to think about , do n’t you ?
( Truth be told , I have n’t been able to get this characteristic working as I indite this . I confide that all of the infrastructure will be exchange on shortly . Apple ? I ’m right to trust that all of the .Mac infrastructure will be switched on briefly , right ? You ’re cognisant that you ’ve shipped this matter , right ? )
The bottom line is that this is a utile pair of features for anyone who ca n’t count on being in front of the same Mac in the same billet at all time . And it ’s precisely the sort of feature I fuck : it ’s really a big box of possibilities that you ’re unforced to exploit in any way you care .
So hell , yeah : I ’d pay$99for this feature as a third - political party shrinkwrapped DVD at an Apple Store .
Core Animation
When I imagine of Core Animation out there on the street trying to raise immediate payment on its own , I think ofGrowl . On its own , it does nothing . It ’s just a resource that developers can apply to enhance their apps . Normally , when my FTP node want to tell me that it ’s finished uploading 110 MB of files to a task server , it let me have a go at it by bounce its ikon continuously until I do something to make it stop annoying me . If I ’ve installed Growl , a smoky semitransparent window shimmers into view , displays an acknowledgment , and then evanesce back away .
Core Animation is like that . It provides built - in service for kindling objects and make a motion them around the covert . “ Big deal , ” you shrug , but I boost you to imagine the sort of apps that will start appearing soon . Beauty is a true , valuable feature in user - interface pattern and from now on , developers will be able-bodied to have their apps appear and conduct the way that objects do in the tangible world , all with a minimum amount of heavy lifting involved .
If you doubt me , take another look at the iPhone . It ’s really just a wrapper for an enormous heap of Core Animation routines .
Call it$29 . And most of these written matter would be “ sold ” the first time the user materialise to model next to someone with Core Animation installed . They ’ll spend an entire 3 60 minutes trajectory steal increasingly shameless glances and by the fourth dimension their plane match down in Dallas / Fort Worth , their own desktops will seem as slick and powerful as Jerry Stiller .
Mail, iCal, and Address Book
I wonder if Apple knows something about Microsoft ’s time to come that we do n’t . Or possibly Steve Ballmer keyed Steve Jobs ’ Mercedes once , or something . Because Apple continues to attempt to nudge Microsoft apps forth from the center of the Mac experience . It ’s slow work , like wiggling a electric refrigerator out so you could mop underneath it , but you ca n’t brush aside the progression . Safari pass Internet Explorer . Keynote take out PowerPoint . Pages got off to a dumb start and seems eons away from really challenging Word , but the ’ 08 edition of iLife intelligibly came to play and it brought a great spreadsheet app with it .
And now we have the de - wussification of Mail . Mail was once a candy - apple ruddy Mazda Miata . Now it ’s a Ford tone arm with a accelerator stand and a rear - window decalcomania of a animated cartoon Calvin micturate all over the Microsoft Entourage icon .
It ’s really a whole new app ; Mailfinallyunderstands how modern family line use their post customer . A single email can represent a Modern contact , an designation , a new item on my To - Do list , and a greenback . And now Mail can articulate all of that subtle mental object without my having to grease one’s palms lots of third - political party software system or produce a whole crowd of AppleScripts or Automator work flow . iCal , too , understands that calendar are n’t just about keeping trail of the nipper ’ soccer practices and that Events are often a soup that many mass contribute to .
I apprehend Mail ’s new bread and butter for RSS subscriptions . I do n’t know if I ’ll utilize it , though ; Bloglines is pretty hardwired into my casual routine . But I like the melodic theme of hold an app that service as a one - stay answer to the question “ What happened in the retiring 15 min that I need to know about ? ”
Leopard Mail has the sort of features that people will pay up good money for ; with a jog , Mail , iCal and Address Book could become a new$59iPackage . I believe Apple could get forth with charging that kind of dough .
iChat
10.5 ’s iChat is in the same category as Mail : it ’s really been moved to the next point . It ’s still a fun , nonchalant app — and I am steeling myself for sempiternal TV chats with friends who are n’t sick and banal of having the lengthened “ Peter Vs . Giant Chicken ” combat from “ Family Guy ” running behind them at all time . But now it ’s entered that category of ability where the matter short becomes , you sleep together … tax - deductible . The power to run intro and do springy screen sharing , as well as the ability to show chat , will encourage people to reach for their wallets.$39 .
Safari and Web Clip
This really palpate more like afreedownload than anything else . The power to create a “ unrecorded ” clipping as a Dashboard thingumabob ( so you may keep an oculus on an eBay auction without having do download and configure a exceptional fresh widget ) is orderly and represent something I might pay$9for as shareware .
As for the improvements to security and searching … well , those I expect to get for devoid . And speak of widgets …
Dashboard
Dashboard probably sits as the biggest letdown of Mac OS X. It sure seemed interesting but unfeignedly , the only time I ever come up myself seem at my Dashboard is when I aim for the Delete key and strike F12 by fortuity . And then I had to wait a moment while all these useless trinkets loaded in and populated themselves with information .
I am promote by the comer of DashCode . Like Core Animation , it ’s a feature for developers and not drug user , but it makes it very very well-to-do to create unexampled , “ real ” widgets . So it ’s completely possible that a new “ killer doojigger ” will come out that turn my capitulum around on Dashboard completely . Like a new football arena , I ’m not opposed to it but I ai n’t paying for it . Free .
Finder
Yup , I ’m one of those the great unwashed who ’s getting increasingly antsy for a true gyration here . Apparently , Apple believe it got the Finder perfect with System 1.02 , because we have n’t picture a true fresh take on this in more than 20 years . But we ’ve seen unshakable evolution , and I speculate that ’s enough . The Sidebar , for object lesson , makes more sentiency now than it ever did , organizing volume and directory resource in a way that you may “ get ” straight off .
And speaking of receive thing immediately , it ’s about prison term that place and using shared volumes was as easy as using shared libraries in iTunes . My mouth goes a small teetotal when the subject of “ a more iTunes - corresponding Finder ” comes up , but here but having used the iTunesy Finder for a few month now , I will have nothing but kind thing to say as I pay my$39 .
You ca n’t get more iTunes - like than inserting a new Finder prospect based on Cover Flow . I scoffed . I sneered . I snickered . And when people get timeworn of hearing me go on about how halting that idea was , I moved to another state and got new booster just so I could start all over again .
Okay , I was incorrect . You see , I ’m not Felix Unger . ( If you ’re ten years younger than me , “ I ’m not Carlton from ‘ Fresh Prince of Bel - Air . ’ ” If you ’re ten years younger than that , you do n’t keep an eye on idiot box so I ’ll say that I ’m not an uptight anal - retentive who compulsively organizes his poppycock into folders . ) I have a self-aggrandising blob of stuff marked “ Documents ” and another marked “ Pictures ” and once I duplicate - dawn on it … it ’s like a game show or something and there ’s a 50 - 50 prospect that it ’d be faster for me to just recreate whatever I ’m expect for from wampum than to actually attempt to locate it .
Cover Flow and Quick Look underscore how correct I was not to give a damn about organization . I open my Pictures folder in search of a good picture of my iPod with its anti - skid tape on the back . I ( literally ) flip through oodles of pictures and quickly see the picture show I want . Quick Look let me consider the picture at full - screen without have to hale it into Preview or something to confirm that it ’s salutary enough to publish in a Word of God . A huge raiment of document types are supported already , and it ’s boundlessly extensible with developer plugins .
I ’ve say nothing but confirming things about the Finder and there does n’t seem to be another place to put this , so I ’ll use this last paragraph to say that the new semitransparent menubar is a big Costco - sized box of Suck . And search ! There ’s a free prize inside : a travelling - sized electron tube of Fail .
It ’s ugly and makes a critical part of the UI harder to see and employ . That ’s not what we ’ve get along to bear from Apple . When I first saw it , I did n’t simply assume that it was a bug … Iknewit was . Oh , well .
TextEdit and Preview
When I think the the great unwashed who are in care of these apps , I picture a couple of developers who have so much seniority at Apple and are such masters at the secret plan of collective survival that they ca n’t really ever be fired and they know it . high - ups have stuck them in a bad little office out of the manner , assigned the squad a task that ’s so esoteric that ( it ’s figured ) they ca n’t really make any trouble .
TextEdit and Preview are insignificant apps . Or at least they ’re speculate to be . “ We need an app that can display RTF single file , so users can show the ‘ study Before Installing ’ docs that come with most software , ” these people were recount . “ Oh , and a JPEG and a PDF viewer that comes up when people twice - chatter on stuff in the Finder . ”
Left to their own twist , they ’ve determine to make real damned software and make it a free part of the OS . The squad ’s goal seems to be to research just how far they can go before the iWork and iLife product handler confuse a fit .
TextEdit is , frankly , areal damned word processor . If Pages does about 85 pct of what Microsoft Word does , then TextEdit is 60 percent as safe as Pages . And it’sstillenough Holy Writ central processing unit for 100 percent of the needs of 60 percent of all Mac users .
( hang up on … I cogitate I have a pie chart or something here . )
Preview is not yet areal damned persona editorbut it ’s still challenging . It ’s not just a utility for peeping PDFs . It has a full array of markup , written document management , and persona - adaption tools . Just the ability to zap the background signal from a photo leave behind behind a clean outline has made Preview an essential app whenever I ’m train a Keynote presentation .
I hump them both , to the line of$19apiece .
Spotlight
What materialize to Spotlight in Leopard is what ought to happen toeverymajor young feature after its debut . intelligibly , the Spotlight team listened carefully to exploiter and was unforced to throw away their vision of how people ought to use system - wide search and instead give way them what they actually want and require .
bear in mind you , the novel Spotlight is n’t rotatory by any mean value . Its improvements are more a cause of calculating edits . Search answer appear in a new Finder window , not in a special public eye port . Which makes perfect sense ; it ’s natural to want to “ trail ” a search into the Sidebar so you’re able to employ it again and again . lookup language is now more Google - like . Not only can you do compound searches , but you could also do calculations and other shape of search - fu .
And it ’s been made more relevant by adding more data type to the mix . It indexes the pages you ’ve viewed in Safari , so when you do a spot hunt on “ awesome life - size of it ten - wing mannikin rocket ” the number - one termination will take you to a bookmarker file in Safari ’s “ History ” folder , eat up deeply within your “ Library ” leaflet . Because that ’s the URL of the web page where you read all about that three months ago .
It ’s also a lot faster than its predecessor . So while the original spot was a small shaky , the new edition is understandably something you ’d pay hard cash money — namely$29 — for .
Speech
It ’s easy for most of us to blank out just how important Speech is . To people with imagination problems , it ’s not a precious picayune toy … it ’s what makes a Mac usable . Even if you do n’t “ need ” good , clean address , it ’s still utile : for years , I ’ve been converting email , webpage and documents into ad - hoc synthetic podcasts so I can have my news read to me while I drive to meetings and such .
There ’s a young address system and a new accession to the chorus of synthetic voices . “ Alex ” surrender speech that ’s so readable and raw that it ’s really a little bit off - putt . You ’ve been capable to purchase voices as salutary as Alex fromCepstral.comfor a good while … but it would have cost you$29 . Now , it ’s built - in .
in person , I value this feature at … let ’s see … roughly 2800 times what normal drug user would pay . That ’s because Leopard ’s speech dictionary has been hardwired to pronounce my name right . It would in all likelihood be me$82,197to launch a massive PR campaign to inform everybody that it ’s “ eh - NOT - ko , ” not “ Ick - a - notto ” and it ’d be cheap at doubled .
I ’m also factoring in a twain thousand for the “ nyaah nyaah nyaah ” factor . It is n’t how my relatives in other parts of the country or the reality pronounce it … it ’s howIpronounce it , having been born and bred in New England . 1,000 years of Russian line are trumped by 10,000,000 computers . Whee ! I ’m not looking fore to this year ’s family Christmas letters .
Adding it up
So if each and every one of these features seems like a big plenty to you — and if you ’re unwilling to contribute to a general store to promote the correct pronunciation of “ Ihnatko ” throughout the seven continents — then by my reckoning you ’re getting a Newlywed Game loot software worth $ 409 .
Wait , I ’ve just receive my official written matter from Apple via FedEx and there ’s a way - nerveless 3D holographical nebula on the covert of the package . So get ’s kite that up to $ 420 ; a hologram like that would cost you an sluttish $ 10 asset tax down at the mall .
But this is an imprecise skill . Figuring out the economic value of Leopard is n’t as promiscuous as crack loose the DVD and count the number of memory modules inside . Only you could enter out which features are important to you , so only you could do the final math . Plus , there are plenty of little feature I have n’t even discourse .
Leopard would have cost me $ 236 ( $ 247 , including holograph ) . Because though I ’ll be grease one’s palms a new MacBook over the winter , I do n’t need to wait to get the Modern Finder ( $ 39 ) , iChat ( $ 39 ) Mail , iCal and Address Book ( $ 59 ) , and Back To My Mac / Screen Sharing ( $ 99 ) .
( Er … simulate that Apple had n’t just now broadcast me a comp transcript , of course . )
No matter how you work the numbers , though , it ’s pretty decipherable that Apple has yet again swot up way more than $ 129 worth of value into its latest OS update . It ’s the wizard number : just low enough that most people will regard it as a reasonable expense without need to resort to a mint of operatic paw - wringing over the decision .
liken and contrast this with Microsoft ’s drum roll - out of Windows Vista . It ’s usable in multiple distributions of varying lineament , and the only truly low-cost edition is the one that provide the exploiter practically nothing that he does n’t have already with Windows XP . issue : the residential area of Vista users is growing only about as fast as raw PCs ( with Vista pre - installed ) are being sold … whereas Leopard will sure as shooting be the predominant installed Mac OS by this this time next year .
Microsoft plunged its substance abuser deep into the Wring Cycle of upgrade decisions … and now it ’s possible that the fat lady ’s finally babble .
I concur that I probably owe each of you a dollar for that horrible pun . get ’s just chalk it up to my excitement of finally bear a shipping copy of Leopard and move on as though nothing had happened , all right ?
[ Andy Ihnatko is a frequent Macworld contributor and technology editorialist for the Chicago Sun - Times . ]
