Apple’s latest cool cat
It seems so long ago that an operating-system upgrade would deliver big improvements, such as stopping your computer from crashing so much or making it run faster.
Nowadays, each new OS release tries to add enough three-dimensional rendering and translucency to make itself sexy, while loudly hinting that your current OS - the one you bought a year or three before - is so unsafe that you might as well figuratively tape money to yourself and walk down the street at night.
Apple’s latest revision to Mac OS X, this time numbered 10.5 and named Leopard, certainly has a bit of swagger and security.
Leopard started shipping as an upgrade for current computers and with new Macs on Friday; a single-user version costs $129 and a five-user Family Pack costs $199.
We found a number of new and changed elements that for the right people could make their time at a computer better spent, as well as improve their control over their system.
Apple posted a list of more than 300 new features in Leopard if you’d like to read every last one (apple.com/macosx), many of which apply only to programmers or those who use scripts to automate activities.
We’re going to highlight the items you’ll encounter on a regular basis and which we think make the biggest difference between the previous Tiger (10.4) release and Leopard.
Leopard runs on any Mac with an Intel processor; or a PowerPC-based Macintosh with an 867 MHz G4 processor or any G5 processor; a minimum 512 MB of RAM; and a DVD reader or burner. At least 9 GB of unused hard-disk storage is required to install Leopard, too.
Step back in time. Perhaps the single most important addition to Mac OS X is Time Machine, a feature that automatically backs up your files after they’ve been modified.
Time Machine checks every hour for modified files and copies them to a separate hard drive, or a volume shared over the local network from another Mac. You can’t make Time Machine backups to your startup disk.
The interface should make it easier to find a file you deleted or a file’s earlier draft. Set against an animated starfield to indicate you’ve changed modes, Time Machine presents a succession of Finder windows that represent your hard drive at receding points in time.
Although the effects seem a bit overdone (and exemplify Apple’s desire to sex up Leopard as a whole), the three-dimensionality makes it easy to tell where and at which point in your hard disk’s history that you’re browsing.
If you’ve ever struggled with the aged rigidity of the backup software Retrospect, Time Machine will be a revelation.
More important, Time Machine removes a barrier to backing up your data.
We’re now at the point of recommending that anyone buying a Mac also buy at least one external hard disk for backing up important data. With Leopard, getting a reliable backup becomes as easy as plugging in the drive and pointing Time Machine at it.
Your files (and especially digital photos) deserve it.
Sharing experiences and files. Leopard has added two remote-access features we’ve been looking forward to.
Back to My Mac lets you view and remotely control your computer from any Mac running Leopard on the Internet and access its files like any server. The feature ties in to .Mac, Apple’s $99-per-year subscription service, using it as a conduit that lets you find your computer, even when it’s hidden behind layers of networks.
Windows users have had services like GoToMyPC and LogMeIn for years. This is the first time these features are widely available to Mac users.
Leopard also offers Screen Sharing, which lets you provide someone else remote access to your computer, or lets you access someone else’s computer, via iChat.
Unlike many similar systems, such as the long-running-and-showing-it Timbuktu Pro, Screen Sharing doesn’t paint pixel-by-pixel reproductions of a remote screen. Rather, it uses progressive rendering, so that a slow connection doesn’t make the sharing unusable.
The screen paints in more crisply over time, unless there’s a lot of motion.
We call this the “mother-in-law” feature after our respective (and much beloved) mothers-in-law: It’s how those of us who do tech support for relatives or colleagues can see what they’re up to, click a menu or open a program for them, or help them find a missing file.
The controls for network file sharing have been centralized and made simpler for average human beings in this release, too. Together with that, Apple added a feature lost since Mac OS 9. You can now take a folder and share it without sharing the rest of the hard drive.
Spaces to spread out. Leopard incorporates a virtual desktop feature long available in the Unix world and through add-on programs for Mac and Windows. Spaces lets you switch among more than one desktop, each with its own document windows open (for example, work-related files in one space and home-related files in another).
Spaces could help you organize tasks and provide benefits of having multiple monitors without taking up as much physical space.
However, while you can assign a given application to a certain virtual desktop, you can’t easily switch among open windows that are in different desktops and belong to the same program. (This one-program, many-windows approach has existed in Mac OS since System 7.)
So, switching to an Excel file in one space could toss you into whatever space you’ve assigned the application Excel.
Casting a search glow. Spotlight, the fast search feature that debuted in Tiger, can now search across multiple computers on the same network - useful for those of us with a laptop and desktop, or for homes and businesses in which files are stored all over the place. (Why organize when you can search?)
Spotlight now also allows Boolean searches, which let you specify words such as “and” or “or” to narrow or broaden a search. And the contents of recently visited Web pages (in Safari) are indexed, too.
Apple oddly felt the need to throw the kitchen sink in, too, by adding the ability to perform 40 kinds of calculations in the Spotlight field and to look up dictionary definitions. Spotlight is the essence of simplicity, so it’s disturbing to see its waters muddied.
Glossy eye candy. Apple is touting the improved Finder as a major feature, but several of the company’s design choices make us wonder if the developers are too enamored of the operating system’s graphical possibilities. There’s a heavy-handedness, silliness and lack of refinement to several parts of the interface that seem uncharacteristic.
For example, the Dock now appears as a three-dimensional glass shelf on which your applications reside. The shelf is reflective, so if you position a document window near it you see a mirror image.
Also, the indicator an application runs - a black triangle in Tiger - is a small spotlight glow below the program icon.
Taken individually, these interface tweaks aren’t terrible. But when added together, they are a mash of glows and fades and reflections that turn into pixel soup. (When positioned at the left or right side of the screen, however, the Dock is a sensible gray palette that doesn’t attempt a 3-D appearance.)
And consider the new stacks feature: When a folder appears in the Dock (Mac OS X has long offered the capability to add files and folders to the Dock for easy access), it now appears as a stacked jumble of the folder’s contents. Click it and the contents expand outside the dock. Sounds handy, right?
Well, if you have more than a few items, you end up clicking a Show in Finder icon to view the rest. Because a stack appears as that jumble of icons, it’s impossible to tell at a glance what folder you’re looking at.
The same functionality works better in Tiger by simply Control-clicking a folder to view its contents.
Beefed-up security. Microsoft received a lot of due credit for some significant changes in Vista’s underlying structure that prevent entire categories of viruses and worms.
The Mac has proved more resistant to attacks, partly through a lack of attention by crackers until recently, but the threat is still a possibility. Apple has taken a page from Microsoft’s book and added new security features that should improve the odds of deflecting future attacks.
Leopard will now record information about any program you download over the Internet and provide those details to you the first time you run it. This should prevent attacks that rely on ignorance or a program launch that carries out malicious intent before you know what hit you.
Apple also added digital signatures as an option, where encryption is used to verify a program is unchanged since it was produced by its developer.
As one would expect from a major operating-system release, there are many more features and nooks in Leopard that we don’t have the space to cover here.
But you can expect we’ll take closer looks in upcoming Practical Mac columns.
Glenn Fleishman and Jeff Carlson write the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com or jeff@necoffee.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists