Apple's OS X Leopard In Depth

jcatcw writes "Computerworld begins its Week of Leopard with an in-depth review and image gallery covering Apple's newest version of OS X. Is it worth the wait? Well, Yes. It trumps Vista, of course; the Finder, Quick Look and Cover Flow provide better functionality and eye candy; Time Machine is the biggest undelete ever and the restore function is one of the coolest things we've ever seen; it has iChat; and has lots of updates under the hood. The answer might be no if you're lacking in the hardware department - an FAQ on how to get ready for the new version will help."

no surprise there

[User 956 (568564)]

Yes. It trumps Vista, of course

Is that really a big accomplishment? I mean, really? XP trumps Vista.

Re:no surprise there

[Scudsucker (17617)]

Sure, Vista is great - if you hated the actually useful features that were promised for Longhorn that were stipped out, having your OS use fifteen frikkin gigabytes of space, a big performance downgrade, and DRM hooks all over the operating system as Microsoft puts the MPAA over you.

Re:no surprise there

[daybot (911557)]

For programming and the command line, give me bash. For anything graphical at all, I'll take vista any day.

Clearly you haven't tried OSX. You get a consistent, fluid and high performance GUI. When you want a shell, you get a Unix one on a certified Unix OS; in a fancy translucent window if you so choose. Beats having to run Cygwin on a Windows box.

Linux just doesn't have a mature desktop environment available, and that's the point of a graphical interface!

Er, who's talking about Linux? This story is about Mac OSX Leopard...

Re:no surprise there

[Rufty (37223)]

But Vista still beats WinME!
(kinda...)

Multiple Desktops

[Chris_Stankowitz (612232)]

Does anyone know what holds MS back from adding the Multiple Desktop feature? I know it can be had with 3rd party software, however last time I used one it really slowed down my machine and caused some crashes.

The lack of such a feature that has been around for eons in the Unix/Linux world drives me crazy!

Re:Multiple Desktops

[chuck (477)]

It's available with 1st party software. It's kind of lame, but it does the job.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx [microsoft.com]

Re:Multiple Desktops

[Liberaltarian (1030752)]

It is quite a hack indeed. Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager relies on bundling groups of windows that are minimized and expanded simultaneously (along with a different desktop background for each bundle). Not only do most programmers not anticipate this (and due to the hacky nature of the implementation it can cause major headaches for end users), apparently MS programmers don't either, as even IE acts ridiculously with it. You also can't move a window in one "desktop" to another.

I'm happy XP finally brought real multiple-display support (something the Mac has had since System 7 at the latest), but who knows when robust multiple-virtual-display support will come along.

Re:Multiple Desktops

[david.given (6740)]

I'm happy XP finally brought real multiple-display support (something the Mac has had since System 7 at the latest), but who knows when robust multiple-virtual-display support will come along.

I don't think it will. I've been hunting for a decent virtual desktop manager for Windows for ages now, and they all have horrible issues. The best one I've seen so far is Dexpot [dexpot.de], but even it is annoying to use.

As far as I can make out, the problem is this: Windows doesn't have a window manager in the traditional X sense. Applications handle their own resize, show and hide events. This means that for the desktop manager to switch desktops, it has to send the appropriate show and hide events to the applications... and the applications can take their own sweet time dealing with them. If the application's busy, the window won't change state. One desktop manager I tried to use (briefly) would actually wait for all the applications to process the events, which meant that if you tried to change desktops with an unresponsive application visible, the desktop manager would hang. Not great on a developer machine.

It gets worse: Desktop managers don't appear to get the opportunity to mediate when an application tries to show or hide itself. Certainly, it was all too common in Dexpot for an application to make itself visible when it was already visible on another desktop, with the result that Dexpot would get confused and think that the window was visible on two desktops simultaneously. I tend to run Thunderbird in #1 and Firefox in #2. Clicking on a link in Thunderbird would cause Firefox to become visible in #1 and #2, which isn't really what I wanted.

I eventually gave up and now when I have to use Windows I don't use a desktop manager. The irritation of having to deal with all my windows on one desktop is actually less than the irritation of having to deal with a broken desktop manager.

Re:Multiple Desktops

[Mahjub Sa'aden (1100387)]

Finally, a multiple desktop application made by Microsoft itself. Now I don't have to put up with half-assed, buggy, slow 3rd-party solutions! I can use a half-assed, buggy, slow 1st party solution!

Re:Multiple Desktops

[vought (160908)]

Even Windows 98 could do what you describe out of the box

Windows '98 = 1998

System (Mac OS) 7 = 1991 - but in fact, the multiple monitor support was in the Mac OS as early as 1986.

QuickDraw was based around a grid coordinate system, so you could place your two (or six, as I did once as a proof of concept with a Macintosh IIfx) monitors in any number of arrangements, instantly. Because the coordinate system was respected by anything that wrote to the screen using QuickDraw, only a very tiny fraction of apps had wonky behavior, such as always writing the top left corner of the window to 0,0 (some bad game ports did this).

Again, because of QuickDraw's flexibility and rather more enlightened design, you never had the very stupid behavior exhibited by Windows 98 and 2000 of dialog boxes that defaulted to the center of the screen, splitting the dialog among two displays. And you could place monitors in any configuration - even corner to corner if needed. The displays did not need to have identical resolution and bit-depth, as with 98 and 2000, nor did Mac users ever have to use a special video dual-head card simply to ensure that both video cards would work together, as I encountered many times on 2000.

I think the parent poster's point is proven - the Mac did multiple displays first and better. And while Windows has caught up in some respects, the Mac still does a better job of remembering window positions, etc. when moving from a laptop+large monitor to laptop display configuration.

Re:Multiple Desktops

[vought (160908)]

Yeah right like you had six graphics cards in 1991.


Yes, I did. Because I was working at Apple at the time. My IIfx had 64MB of RAM - that was quite a bit, as the 60ns RAM was both hard to come by and built in 8 bit sticks. With eight slots, you needed eight MB SIMMs. I figure that on the street, the cost of the machine as configured (see below) was well over $25,000.

In addition to the 80MB SCSI drive, my IIfx had the following graphics cards:

5x8*24 Graphics cards.
1x8*24GC (Accelerated with an AMD RISC processor)

Along with my, uh, regular work, I used this setup to play Hellcats over the Pacific, which was the first flight simulator to support multiple displays for a panoramic cockpit view. Of course, that feature only required three monitors. The rest were for fun.

Incidentally, the IIfx was not just a 40MHz 68030+68882 FPU - it also had two 6502 processors. One for each serial port.

If you'll remember, the 6502 was the Apple II's CPU.

Why the translucent menu bar?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Of all of the new features of Leopard, I really cannot appreciate the addition of translucency to the menu bar. As a long time Mac user this really seems like one of those "because we can" features rather than it making any sense.

Re:Why the translucent menu bar?

[drcagn (715012)]

It won't reduce mouse travel time, because it will increase inaccuracy. One of the great things about the menubar is that it's hard to miss what you're trying to click because you cannot go beyond the top of the screen with your cursor. One quick flick of the wrist with cursor acceleration properly configured will get you where you need to be, whereas in non-menubar GUI models it's easy to 'overshoot' and miss the button you intend to click.

Re:Why the translucent menu bar?

[anagama (611277)]

Another major issue with the shared menu bar is that half the time, the app I want to do something with isn't on "top" -- something which is non-obvious when the windows are spread out and not overlapping, but I've already gone up to the menu bar, and then have to go back down and foreground the app (or alt-tab), and then return to the menu bar. This notion of the "on top" application defeats the purpose of multiple and/or large monitors. With enough screen space, everything seems to be "on top".

Secondly, I don't have this problem of missing the menu bar at all. All of the forwarded X apps I use have the menu bar in the window and my experience is that they are easier to use because of that fact, not harder. As for why they're easier for me, I tend to look first, then travel. When I'm looking at something way off to the right -- easily two feet away from my physical focus -- I have to turn my head to look at the upper left corner after which I'll go there with the mouse. This is harder than simply continuing to look at the application already under my eyes' focus.

If you'll notice, I said Apple should offer window-bound menu bars as a choice. That way, people who don't work like I do can have things the old way, and I can have things organized conveniently for me. Offering a choice is certainly better than the one-size-fits-all, there-is-only-one-true-way system we have now.

Finally, after years of complaining, Apple has finally (re)introduced multiple desktops for those who want them. Apparently, choice is good. On that note, only middle-click-paste and window bound menus to go. Perhaps by 10.7.

Choice is not good

[LKM (227954)]

I've just written about this: Don't make preferences until you absolutely have to. [slashdot.org] Furthermore, it wouldn't work: Many Mac applications have no windows. Why would, say, an unzip application need a Window? Unless you unzip an actual file, there's no need to show a window; so where would you put the menu bar? What about applications that have small windows, but wide menus?

It just makes no sense.

Re:Choice is not good

[LKM (227954)]

They all have dock icons, and dock icons have menus.

If that is your solution, I can rest my case.

It's not your job to shove a worse solution for me down my throat, just because you think it's the best one.

Actually, this is exactly my job; I think it's even what my card says, minus the personal insults :-)

You only find this surprising because you're not used to it because not a lot of people who are responsible for UI on Windows and Linux actually take care of their responsibility. It's always easier to go with preferences, or with what the majority likes best. This is a cop-out, and UI designers should be ashamed of themselves if they don't have the cojones to stand up for their applications and implement the best solution.

Also, "the best solution" has got nothing to do with what I think. This is science; the best UI solution for any given issue can be found using proper application of theory (see Fitt's law), usability tests and UI iterations.

mmm... page view whoring

[by Anonymous Coward]

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9043838 [computerworld.com] all on one page print link

How is this possible?

[ShooterNeo (555040)]

How is this possible? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to google for exactly how MANY developers Microsoft has versus how many apple has....but Microsoft had at least 5000 developers that worked on Windows Vista. While they must have lowered their standards in the last few years, originally microsoft was only hiring top graduates from top schools like MIT and CMU.

They have a gigantic number of some of the best people they can buy.

So why does their stuff suck so much by comparison to a small corporation? Apple cannot afford nearly the resources Microsoft has...I wouldn't be surprised if their OS X team had 1/5 the people.

I know that skill matters...but surely the top of the class people at Microsoft are no worse than the hippies at apple?

Re:How is this possible?

[Kent Recal (714863)]

It's all about the vision. And the people in charge.
Just compare Steve Jobs to Steve Ballmer (or Billy, fwiw).

Which of these personalities do you think is more
likely to design an OS that you would like?

Ofcourse it doesn't boil down to individuals but looking
at the heads of a company gives you a good idea of the
companies mindset.

Apple is "cool and hip" because the people working
there *know* what "cool and hip" is.

Microsoft is not cool and hip because, well, it is
driven by people like Steve Ballmer.

The sheer headcount, on the other hand, means
nothing in the world of software developement.
Small and well focussed (on the right goals)
teams will outperform large teams everytime.

You can read up on that in "the mythical man month"
and just about any other ressource about project
management in the software industry.

In fact, developing "good" software (by any metrics)
becomes much harder the larger your team gets.
Programming is not like selling cars. It's more
comparable to an orchestra. More instrumentalists
don't necessarily improve the result but definately
increase the effort to manage them.

Videos which shows the difference

[aliquis (678370)]

Let these videos show you what the parent mean, they kind of explains the difference of Steve Jobs vs Ballmer quite good:
Jobs and mac: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSiQA6KKyJo [youtube.com]
Ballmer and Win 1.0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk [youtube.com]

Pick your flavour :D

Regarding small vs large teams, a good example of this may be the development of DragonFlyBSDs Hammer filesystem vs Suns ZFS, we'll see how fast Hammer gets done thought :)

Re:How is this possible?

[wodgy7 (850851)]

I won't comment on the quality of the programmers -- both companies draw from similar pools -- but the way they manage those programmers is significantly different. Probably the biggest beef I have with Microsoft's management is their devotion to Jack Welch's (of General Electric management fame) idea of doing a company reorganization ("reorg") roughly every 16 months. Not everyone moves around, since certain people don't make sense to move, but there is disruption. This kind of management "theory" makes sense when everyone is viewed as unskilled, interchangeable production units, but it doesn't make sense in software where the value is in slowly acquired knowledge of the source code base, and knowledge of how to interact with everyone on the team to minimize team issues. Reorgs flush some of that away, every time. I realize they teach from Jack Welch's playbook in most MBA programs, but Microsoft needs to abandon this practice. There are other major differences between the two companies attitudes and group dynamics as well. You really have to have worked inside one (or preferably both) to get a good comparison.

Another, more minor beef, is Microsoft's philosophy that others will put up with things that they wouldn't personally put up with. For instance, internal to Office, Clippy is known as TFC_* in function names... based on a comment from Bill Gates that "I don't want to have to deal with That F*cking Clip every time I want to print." Bill hates it, but he nevertheless still shipped it. In contrast, Jobs would never ship a feature he hated; he'd view it as a personal affront. This attitude pervades Microsoft. For instance, everyone at MS realizes the overly tiered pricing scheme is customer hostile -- they know many customers realize they're being either nickle and dimed or had -- but they still ship it because it maximizes revenue in the short term, regardless of damage to long-term company goodwill. Jobs won't dish out something he wouldn't personally put up with. Perhaps it's ego, or perhaps he understands that Apple's success depends almost entirely on goodwill. This all sounds handwavy, but it's another major difference in the the two company philosophies.

I could spend all day comparing the two companies; it's fascinating. And no, not everything about Apple's culture is superior.

Re:How is this possible?

[hxnwix (652290)]

Apple's OS has to work with less different types of hardware

Interesting. So it's "hardware differences" that require start to be clicked in order to shut down windows.

Look, windows isn't annoying to use because it has to run on a greater variety of hardware. It's annoying to use because it was designed by assholes.

Double Standard

[MBoffin (259181)]

"If your computer doesn't meet those specs, it's time to upgrade your hardware or stick with Tiger for now. And if you're still running Mac "Classic" OS apps, forget it. Leopard drops support for what was once Mac OS 9."

So when Vista needs beefier hardware and some Windows 98 apps are broken on it, the reason is because Microsoft sucks and it's their fault for requiring a current computer to run their current OS. But when Leopard needs beefier specs, it's the user's fault they haven't upgraded by now and it's all taken in stride.

I get it. Makes total sense.

Classic apps are not what you think they are...

[argent (18001)]

Ther is a bit of a double standard, yes, but dropping support for OS 9 isn't like droping support for Windows 98. The Win32 API in Vista is basically and ancestor of the Win32 API in Vista. OS 9 apps, on the other hand, are a whole different kettle of fish.

OS 9 wasn't a modern operating system. As an OS it was, in many ways, decades behind Windows 98. The OS 9 API was based on a model where memory management and scheduling by the OS simply didn't happen... the application got a chunk of REAL memory and until it voluntarily gave up the CPU noting could touch it. To work around this, they created a really gimpy partition model. Multitasking in classic Mac OS was handled conceptually through the window system... there really wasn't an OS underneath it at all, not even as much as there was in Windows 3.1.

Jobs wanted to get rid of the ghastly classic Mac OS API in 1997, but Adobe and a few other big manufacturers dug their heels in and told him they'd abandon the Mac if he didn't come up with a way forward.

So first of all he came up with a bridge API called "Carbon". Carbon applications got an API that couldn't do all the fugly old classic stuff, but were ready to at least run on Rhapsody (what OS X was originally going to be called) once it was revamped to support it. Carbon was introduced for OS 8 and became a standard part of OS 9. After OS X came out people really pushed developers to switch to Carbon... but there were still a bunch of die-hards that insisted on running some software from 1994 that had no Carbon version.

Several times in the early 2000s Jobs pulled the last G4 Powermac capable of booting OS 9 and running classic apps native, rather than under the "classic" emulation environment. Each time there was an outcry... until 2005, when it vanished and nobody complained. Six months later he announced the Intel macs that would not ever be able to run pre-carbon "classic" apps from the dark ages.

MOST apps released *for* OS 9 are not "classic", they're carbon-based, and run under Rosetta.

Most apps released before OS 9 have been carbonised.

NO intel macs have ever been able to run pre-carbon apps.

Don't think of this like Microsoft abandoning Windows 98 apps. Think of it like Microsoft abandoning apps that needed direct access to hardware registers and video memory. The kind of stuff you have to run under Bochs even on Windows XP. It just sounds worse because Apple left it SO late to get rid of that old "application-centric" environment and actually ship an operating system that was actually an operating system.

The real double standard is the resistance of Apple fanboys to admit just how bloody awful OS 9 was.

Re:Classic apps are not what you think they are...

[argent (18001)]

You are trying to give Apple a pass on an issue they really don't deserve one. They could have used even a nominal virtualization system if they were not going to create a subsystem capable OS structure like MS did with NT to ensure support for non main OS level APIs.

And it's a bloody good thing they didn't. OS 9 was not even up to the level of Windows 3.1. It wasn't up to the level of Win16 or Win32s. The classic Mac OS API was so bloody horrible that it should have been dragged screaming down to hell along with Yrkoon of Melnibone's black soul on Strombringer's burning blade. Steve Jobs did the whole computer industry when he shoved a stake in its curdled and stinking heart. It was so bad that when I read "Inside Mac" in 1985 I was convinced that the Mac was doomed and got an Amiga... it was like reading an orchestral score for the kazoo and 32 sackbutts in 17/23 time. The shenanigans you had to go through to safely use pointers. The complete lack of scheduling. God damn you to Moorcock's hell for making me remember this stuff... writing classic Mac applications was like writing device drivers for a pre-thread operating system... you had to put bloody sequence points in and guarantee that they got hit every N milliseconds or the whole grand multitasking illusion would come tumbling down. It was so bad that an early G3 running classic Mac OS was less responsive than a 68030 running NeXTSTeP... I had the two of them running next to each other and the contrast was appalling.

Apple's real crime was waiting as long as they did before killing it. And now it's dead I'm glad, I tell you, glad!

Re:

[laddy (159448)]

Doesn't look like they got the GM. Their dock is on the side and isn't sporting the revised look. [macrumors.com]

Re:Computerworld Developers

[_Pablo (126574)]

The 2D dock can be enabled using the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

Re:Computerworld Developers

[noidentity (188756)]

The 2D dock can be enabled using the following: defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

This is a feature that should be high on anyone's list: the ability to direct someone else to change system settings without having to give them a long GUI script along the lines of "Open this, click here, click there, this should say X, type Y". I just love being able to package up these types of changes into a command-line like that.

Re:Computerworld Developers

[Riquez (917372)]

the ability to direct someone else to change system settings without having to give them a long GUI script along the lines of "Open this, click here, click there, this should say X, type Y"

Indeed, the conversation would probably go like this..
noidentity: OK, open up the terminal
user: What? Is that in my Dock?
noidentity:..erm ok, then go to HD > Applications > Utilities > Terminal
user:OK
noidentity:Now type defaults write com...
user:Where do i write 'com', on my note pad?
noidentity:no, no I mean type write
user:I don't have a type writer
noidentity:sigh. No, the word write, type the word write
user:I think i typed it right, w r i g h t thats right, right?
--- Time Passes ---
noidentity:OK, now, using the keyboard on your computer, type the following words -boolean YES;
user:Whats a hyphen?
--- sound of gunshot ---
user:Hello?

Preferences deemed harmful!

[LKM (227954)]

But that's the point: Normal users aren't really supposed to figure this out. As a software developer and UI designer, it's part of my job to make sure every UI decision doesn't result in a new preference. 90% of the time, preferences are cop-outs: If the design team can't decide on what solution is best, they make it a checkbox. Don't do that. It's your job to figure out the best solution, don't burden the user with it.

What Apple does is the right thing: Make what they think is best default. Don't make preference for it. But if somebody absolutely needs to have his Dock look different, give him a way that does not involve changing the actual application resources.

Re:Computerworld Developers

[BoldAC (735721)]

Tech-Recipes got a copy. Here are their first 20 tutorials about the new features of Leopard. [tech-recipes.com]

If you prefer the old dock style, Mac OS X Hints [macosxhints.com] has that tutorial now as well.

Anybody going for a T-shirt tomorrow?

Re:

[vux984 (928602)]

Like the Lisa, the Newton, OS9, those ipods with the super scratcable screen, the puck mouse?

Apple has pulled its share of boners. Having a string of good products doesn't mean they are automatically super fantastic. They just happen to be super fantastic.

Lisa

[shmlco (594907)]

I don't consider Lisa to be a boner. A strong argument can be made that without the work done on Lisa we wouldn't have the Mac, OR Windows for matter. At least in their present forms and on the same timeline.

Yes, $10,000 per system was probably a bit strong... but consider that a good computer at the time would still set you back $5,000, that hard drives were so expensive they were considered only for workgroup solutions, and that Xerox expected people to pony up one HUNDRED thousand dollars for a Star system.

Re:Spotlight enhancements

[Malekin (1079147)]

It's pretty damn easy to use as an app launcher now - hit apple-space to open it up, type the first few letters of the app's name in, then hit apple-return to open the top hit. Out of interest, how would you suggest it be made better?

Re:Let's state the obvious

[Winckle (870180)]

Haha, fisher price PC, that's a good one.

Btw, my FisherPriceBook Pro has a UNIX core, I ssh into my CS university account from home to do my work, do my programming in what is IMO the best IDE I have had the pleasure to use.

What "more power" do you have that I don't?

Re:Does Time Machine require a dedicated partition

[Winckle (870180)]

It makes a directory for itself on the root of the drive, no partitioning needed. :)

Re:yeah, but it's not bootable :-(

[Winckle (870180)]

Yeah i know where you are coming from with the non bootable thing, but you don't have to install leopard then restore time machine. As part of the installation leopard will ask you if you have a time machine folder with data you want to restore.

Re:I have to know the answer to this...

[teamhasnoi (554944)]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac trolling fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while you attempt to rephrase a old troll from kottke.org. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be trolled more often, I'm rarely trolled once a year. If that.

In addition, during this trolling attempt, I can not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even my assistant is straining to keep awake as you type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while waiting for your various trolls, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Wintel troll that has been posted faster than its Mac counterpart, despite Wintel users generally having less of a life, and more time to hang out on Slashdot. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs circles around you, and a small Perl script could out troll you most times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh troll is a superior troll.

Mac troll addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to troll a Mac user over other faster, cheaper, more stable people.

Because it's not a point release at all

[eiscir (968749)]

Because Apple's point releases are called 10.x.y, not 10.x. For instance, Tiger, which is 10.4, was released in April 2005, swiftly followed by 10.4.1, 10.4.2, etc, all the way up to 10.4.10 (the current version) and 10.4.11 (probably the last version, due probably tomorrow). These 'point point' releases provide the 'bug fixes and a few little extras thrown in' that you describe, and are free, automatic downloads through Software Update. It's these 'point point' releases that are equivalent to Microsoft's Service Packs. Leopard, 10.5, isn't a 'point release' at all in anything other than name. The only reason it's called 10.5 and not OS XV is because Apple like having the X/Ten play on words. Y'know, it's after OS 9, but it's also UNIX, ho ho ho. A quick run through http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html [apple.com] will show you that Leopard consists of much more than 'bug fixes and a few little extras thrown in', such as a completely new backup system, redesigned and simplified system preferences, a completely rewritten scheduler, full 64-bit architecture, and a whole lot more.
Bear in mind that numbering schemes are simply marketing and entirely arbitrary.

Re:I have to know the answer to this...

[Stormwatch (703920)]

Mac users: Why are you guys so quick to buy minor point releases (ie. bug fixes and a few little extras thrown in) of your OS rather than demand that they be freely available like Windows?

You think this is: Mac OS, version ten dot five. But it works more like: Mac OS Ten, version five.

Re:I have to know the answer to this...

[shmlco (594907)]

What the guy above me said, plus I have to ask just what comparable features did Windows XP SR1 and SR2 provide? Integrated backup solutions?New collaborative messaging environments? Major file manager and desktop redesigns? Redesigned mail, notes, and calendaring systems? New graphics and developer subsystems (Core Animation)? Improved performance on existing hardware?

How about major security upgrades and multicore enhancements? Oh, wait. SR2 did add a firewall, didn't it? In addition to rolling up a couple of hundred security patches.

My bad.

Re:This news story

[Jeremi (14640)]

Not like I wouldn't recommend leopard over vista. Heck I would try it if it wasn't for the fact I would have to buy another computer just to TRY it...

Funny, I can say the same thing about Vista...

Re:Slower G4s

[abhi_beckert (785219)]

I've seen it run on a 1Ghz G4. Some of the new features are a little chuggy (spaces, stationary in mail, etc), but it works fine overall. I'm planning to install it on an 800Mhz G4 iBook, I think it'll run fine.

Both of those machines have maxed out ram. I'd recommend at least 1GB of ram for average usage patterns, more if you're into multi-tasking.

As for features that existed on both Tiger and Leopard? Many of them are much faster on leopard than tiger. Spotlight absolutely screams on leopard. Results start appearing as you lift your finger from the key, even on the 1Ghz G4. I've uninstalled quicksilver, since spotlight is just as fast now.

Re:Anti-piracy "features"?

[Winckle (870180)]

No, none at all, apple only have serial keys on their super expensive pro apps.

Re:Extra features?

[egomaniac (105476)]

Leopard is no more resolution independent than Tiger was. If you enable it via Quartz Debug you'll see that it's horribly buggy and unusable even with Apple's own applications. Or at least it was as of 9a559, I haven't checked with the GA version.

Re:Time Machine - backups?

[c_forq (924234)]

But it does backup your computer. You can examine the disk from other Macs, and the first backup it makes is of your entire system so it can do a complete system restore if need be.

Re:Time Machine - backups?

[NMerriam (15122)]

When I think of "backups", I tend to think "this will help me recover my files if my computer dies, is stolen, or is unexpectedly repossessed by nature".

That's what Time Machine does. If you put the Leopard install DVD into a new Mac, one of your options is to plug in a Time Machine disk and restore your whole old system to the new computer. That's as backed up as any backup system I've ever used (and a hell of a lot easier).

Re:Time Machine

[TheNetAvenger (624455)]

Acronis isn't a good example...

When you see Time Machine think Vista 'Previous Versions' with a prettier UI, and no ability to track or keep file changes on the volume.

Vista does both on volume backup copies of changes and external backups automatically, and presents them in the same 'previuos versions' UI timeline list.

Just like Time Machine, in Vista you can view folders or documents at any previous time whether they are a recent change that is still stored on the volume or a backup from six months ago on an external hard drive.

Vista also does this more transparently, without the need for application integration because of its simplicity in accessing the previous version via a simple open/save dialog box.

Time Machine's UI is much prettier, but since it has less functionality than Vista, and adds overhead by backuping up files every hour, the pretty UI doesn't make up for the lack of features.

Does anyone else find it strange that Vista's backup and previous version system is more advanced than OS X's Time Machine, and yet you hardly ever see it mentioned on a review or when people are talking about Vista. Apple adds a generic version of the same thing, and the press and fans go wild...

And I'm not even saying this to discount OS X's Time Machine, as it is a good feature and a great feature for OS X and Mac users, but strange how something gets accolades when Apple does it, and is dismissed when Microsoft does it and even technically does it better.

Re:Time Machine

[by Anonymous Coward]

This article [appleinsider.com] should clear up your confusion about Time Machine.

From the article (page 3):
The Time Machine settings in System Preferences show the time scheduled for the next backup. When that time arrives, it displays a progress thermometer during the backup, which typically only takes a few seconds, unless you've generated a huge amount of new content in the last hour. Again, that's because Time Machine doesn't scan through your entire drive looking for changes, but rather only consults FSEvents for a listing of what has changed recently.

and more from page 4...
Time Machine has been frequently compared to Microsoft's Shadow Copy (or Volume Snapshot Service), because both systems involve file backup. In reality, they are not really very similar at all. Microsoft uses the background Shadow Copy service to duplicate files on the same disk. Those shadow copies record a "snapshot" of the file at a given moment in time, and can be accessed by the user using Previous Versions (which shows up in the file properties viewer), or tapped into by an external network backup system. Backing up these "shadow copies" simply prevents the external backup system from running into problems trying to back up live files that may be locked by the user working on them.

The data backup features related to Shadow Copy are only useful if a Windows machine is running in an environment with a server backing them up. Shadow Copy is not in itself a backup system, although it can present a listing of duplicated files that were captured by the shadow copy service. Without a dedicated backup system, Previous Versions only shows local shadows of a file. It does not copy files to an external disk for safekeeping, and its shadow copies can't be browsed through by the user in the file system by date or by query. Shadow Copy is certainly not an easy to use consumer backup solution (nor is intended to be), which is what Time Machine expressly is.

In Windows Vista, Microsoft also tied Shadow Copy into System Restore, which allows users to roll back their entire PC software install to a previous point in time. This is not a backup system either; it's a system wide undo. System Restore is oriented around undoing the problems caused by installing a software title, a Windows software update, an unsigned hardware driver, or some other event that causes problems that need to be rolled back. It doesn't go back and find something lost from the past; it reverts the clock to a previous checkpoint and throws away the future from that point forward. System Restore is not even loosely related to Time Machine in what it does, how it does it, or why it exists.

Actually, their whole series on Leopard called The Road to Mac OS X Leopard is rather good. Lots of facts and history.

Re:Time Machine

[harrisg (1179983)]

Apple's Time Machine is pretty but it 'needs' the applications to be time machine aware to take full advantage of the features.

MS technology just happens transparently at the FS level which OS X can't do and it also extends to backups like OS X's Time Machine. If Apple could have gotten ZFS working as the default FS, they could have used the feature that ZFS and NTFS share to make the on volume realtime backups like Vista does.

This is wrong. See my previous anonymous post [slashdot.org].

Time Machine doesn't require any special changes to applications although it offers some cool stuff that way. It's main purpose is to be a complete backup system that actually gets used because it's helpful and doesn't get in the way. Vista's Shadow Copy doesn't backup to a second hard drive. Shadow Copy also doesn't restore files that have been deleted. Those are the two main purposes of Time Machine. From what I can tell Vista's Shadow Copy appears to be no lower to the file system than Time Machine and FSEvents.