James Galvin

The Leopard has been spotted and will be available in 8 days, 4 hours, 55 minutes from the time of writing this. Tom Raftery points to this poll on GigaOM trying to pinpoint a reason to upgrade.

• New Apple Mail: Like Tom, I switched to Thunderbird because Apple Mail didn’t impress me enough, despite my best attempts to get to like it. When I first started using my Mac, most programs lived up to the hype and “just worked”, but Mail.app was awkward with spam filtering, and awkward with GPG support, and inferior to Thunderbird in many ways. I was reluctant to leave behind Mail.app because of its inherent compatibility with every other app on my system. But Thunderbird has been chugging along nicely for the past year, and I’m not going to upgrade my system just to have Mail.app fail me again.

• Spaces (for multiple desktops):Multiple desktops have been standard in Gnome for years, I’m surprised it has taken Apple so long to catch up. At the moment I use Virtue Desktops Application which gives me this functionality in Tiger. However, it sounds like Leopard’s “Spaces” is more than just multiple desktops - you can split a desktop into rows and columns, and bind an application to any particular space?

  “Add rows and columns until you have all the real estate you need. Arrange your spaces as you see fit, then choose the function keys you want to control them. You can assign an application to always open in a specific space, if that’s more convenient — so you’ll always know where, say, Safari or Keynote is”

  That is really good. One of the biggest problems that “switchers” face is shrugging off the “alt-tab” paradigm, maximising all your windows, using one program at a time. Apple try to force their way of doing things by making it difficult to maximise windows. Spaces will reduce the distracting visual clutter which goes along with this.

• Time Machine (for backup and restore):

  Time Machine takes care of everything else. Automatically. In the background.

  Any time I hear “automatically” and “in the background”, I think of a degradation in performance. Even programs that allegedly only run when the system is idle have driven me mad over the years by slowing the system to a halt for no reason (e.g., “beagled”, “SETI@Home”, “* Antivirus”, and probably the worst culprit in recent years: “Google Desktop”). Just about the only task scheduler that has never let me down is cron, and thats why I have my own backup scripts managed by cron. But I have to admit, this Time Machine looks great, and if it works well then it is the ideal solution for your mother’s computers.

• 3D Dock with Stacks: Great - I can’t work with cluttered desktop, and Apple’s insistence on defaulting every download and subsequent extraction to my desktop has always really annoyed me. I’ve had to set up every application to download to a new directory, (each web browser, FTP, IRC, Peel, Bittorrent), but even this is inefficient. Have to say, it looks like Apple have solved that nicely here with the stacked dock.

  A stack is a Dock item that gives you fast access to a folder of files. When you click a stack, the files within spring from the Dock in a fan or a grid, depending on the number of items (or the preference you set). Leopard starts you off with two premade stacks: one for downloads and the other for documents. The Downloads stack automatically captures files downloaded from Safari, Mail, and iChat, and the Documents stack is a great place to keep things like presentations, spreadsheets, and word processing files.

• Updated finder with cover flow: aka “Finder meets iTunes”. Perhaps I’m too stuck in the Linux organised file system mentality, but this fancy new Finder doesn’t appeal to me. I think of a folder by its absolute path, and I get mildly ill when files are in the wrong folders. I was very upset when Windows 95 or 98 starting messing about with “My Documents”… it took me ages to find that “C:WindowsProfiles” folder. In Finder, all the folders I regularly use already have shortcuts on the left navigation. What does the enhanced Finder offer me? Well, this “cover flow” gimmick will probably give my PC half second stutter everytime I go to browse a folder. I already know what’s in the folder, I’m not going to be using the searching, and I never really liked the iTunes navigation to begin with.

• Everything: I’m not going to spend €120 or whatever it costs, and an hour of my time to upgrade without any solid reason, but this amounts to another good step forward for Apple, by the sounds of it.

Anything else?

• Improved Safari:

  The fastest web browser today, Safari loads and draws pages up to 3 times faster than Firefox 2 and up to 5.5 times faster than Opera 9. And it executes JavaScript up to 2.7 times faster than Firefox 2 and up to 2.6 times faster than Opera 9.1

  I love how Safari is so fast. It is a cool web browser and it’s really nice to use. So why am I forced to use Firefox and Camino? Because Safari doesn’t work properly, unfortunately. It renders images badly, it fails to cope with some CSS that works perfectly in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer, and it is not compatible with Google Apps (at the moment). For me, this means that Safari is quite simply not an option. Does the new version fix all these issues? If not, then doesn’t matter how fast it is, it is fundamentally flawed beyond use.

• Bootcamp:

  Leopard is the world’s most advanced operating system. So advanced, it even lets you run Windows if there’s a PC application you need to use. Just get a copy of Windows and start up Boot Camp, now included with Leopard.

  Today, thousands of people are going to be downloading Ubuntu Gutsy upon its release. How many MacBook users are going to miserably struggle with their keyboard backlight for hours, or fail to get their iSight working? Windows guys get a full suite of drivers, what would it take for Apple to dedicate a couple of guys to work on behalf of all us who want to run Linux? I suppose it’s probably not as easy as that, but when I first got my MacBook Pro, I got it with the intention of installing Ubuntu Edgy on it. At the time, due to some very slight incompatibility issues, I was not able to run Linux comfortably without sacrificing some hardware functionality.

• The new iChat screen sharing functionality:

  Thanks to iChat screen sharing, you and your buddy can observe and control a single desktop with iChat, making it a cinch to collaborate with a colleague

  Combined with all the other features of iChat… killer app? Yes, it sounds like it. Worth upgrading for? Maybe in 6 months when all my colleagues have fancy new Macs running Leopard.

With all the lovely apps you can get on a Mac, I still find it hard to believe that nobody has made a feedreader that is really nice to use. NetNewsWire Lite has failed me for the last time. I hope that Vienna does not let me down. What do the rest of ye Mac people use?

I’m learning new stuff every day on my MacBook Pro. Today, OS X Hacker points out how you can zoom in on any part of the screen, simply by holding control and dragging two fingers along the trackpad. I can’t see this being useful, but that is beside the point. Little features like this are what makes OS X really cool… I will find it difficult to go back to Linux on my desktop.

Infoworld are crowing that a “myth” has been crushed, as a hacker managed to break in to OS X to win a security contest in Vancouver. No myth has been crushed - at worst, perhaps a misconception has been dented. OS X is not hack-proof - there is no operating system on earth that is 100% secure when attached to a network, and the way some people have responded to a run-of-the-mill Safari vulnerability, you would think that there has been an apocalypse.

What the Infoworld article fails to mention is that CanSecWest organizers relaxed the rules Friday after nobody at the event had breached either of the Macs on the previous day. It doesn’t specify exactly how the rules were relaxed, but a comment mentions that “The successful attack on the second and final day of the contest required participants to surf to a malicious Web site using Safari”. If this is the case, then as far as I’m concerned, the contest only served to show how well secured OS X really is.

The article quotes Dragos Ruiu, organiser of the event:

“You see a lot of people running OS X saying it’s so secure, and frankly, Microsoft is putting more work into security than Apple has”

Dragos: the reason Microsoft is putting so much more work into security than Apple is because it needs it so much more. How many times have I had to fix friends’ Windows computers for no other reason than they left it online for a few hours without a firewall? No myth has been crushed, common sense has prevailed. Your Mac is not untouchable - it is advisable that you tighten security controls on your web browser, and be careful of surfing to dodgy sites on the internet. As long as you don’t make a habit of antagonising MaddoxX, then you can be reasonably confident that your computer won’t be trying to nuke eBay if you leave it online untended for the weekend.