Leopard has been out for a few days now and I have to admit, I am quite disappointed. Of the 300 new features the only new thing I really see is eye candy. Let’s take a look at some of the major “new” features: automated backup, security, finder updates, GUI changes and miscellaneous new features.
Backups
One of the big new features in Leopard is called Time Machine. In essence this is a piece of software that will automatically backup your computer for you. Whenever a file is updated it will save a new copy of that document. This sounds great; however there are some major flaws.
The biggest issue I see is that you have to use an external drive directly connected to the computer. You cannot save a copy on your local drive. This means that Apple’s biggest consumer, laptop buyers, are out of luck without docking the computer in one place. You also can not backup to a network drive which makes the product nearly useless in the corporate environment. This pretty much limits you to using USB or Firewire for backup. You could also use a fiber connected drive, but who outside of a corporation can afford that?
In my testing of time machine I found it to be quite slow. It took nearly five hours to backup vanilla install of Leopard to a firewire800 drive. This was less than 20 gigabytes of data. I can only imagine how long it would take if my laptop drive was 80% full like it was prior to the reformat.
I’ve now disabled time machine and use my geeky command line tool, rsync. There are plenty of other tools to help you backup such as Déjà vu. The only thing time machine does different than most of these other programs is having a “pretty” GUI. In my opinion it is pretty useless.
Security
Something I did not hear much about prior to the launch of the OS was the new security features of Leopard. The best feature here is the firewall that actually works. In previous versions of OS X the firewall was pretty useless. If you turned it on it did not do much of anything without knowing exactly what you were doing.
The firewall is still disabled by default in Leopard, but it actually kind of resembles a good software firewall. It has the option to offer prompts when a new program tries to access the network. This is not the default though, you have to enable the firewall and then turn on this feature. I would much rather just run Little Snitch. It does the same thing but much better in my opinion.
The most annoying security feature in Leopard is very Vista-esque; warnings whenever you try to open anything you downloaded off the internet. Every single time I try to open a program I downloaded it warns me if I want to allow it. Didn’t apple have a commercial doing just this?
Finder Updates
A feature I was looking forward to seeing was the updated Finder. The default finder in Tiger left me wanting more. It was not nearly powerful enough for my everyday computer needs. The updated program is starting to come around, I was actually able to use it for a few days before pulling my hair out.
For me the new finder cannot compare to Pathfiner. It is just lacking in nearly every way. I am unable to use a Mac for any amount of time without installing Pathfinder.
GUI
The first thing you notice when running Leopard is the new dock. It is all shiny. Some may think this looks great, but to me it is just something that is unnecessary. I find the dock now to be kind of annoying when trying to do much work. It has reflections of the programs you are running and well, it just gets in the way. I find myself misclicking items on the bottom of a program due to the dock. I’ve actually started hiding the dock so it does not get in the way. I have never done this in the past on any OS, but this dock is just plain annoying.
Another added GUI feature to this OS is translucency to the menubar. The top bar on the screen now picks up the general colors from your wallpaper and changes the color of the bar to a similar hue. This means that if you have a wallpaper with a ton of different colors at the top the menubar will also be multicolored. I’ve started cropping my wallpapers to make sure I have black behind the menubar. Otherwise the menu just looks bad.
There is also added translucency to the drop downs in the menus; this is done right. You can see through the menus enough to tell what program is running in the background. This really looks good. I’ve always been a fan of this use of transparency.
Miscellaneous Features
Of the rest of the 300 features none of them should be listed on the feature list. Most of them have nothing to do with the operating system itself, they are applications and should be treated that way. I do not use most of the built-in software in OS X, so I really don’t know what has changed as I have nothing to compare to.
A feature that I do find to be helpful is the updated wireless manager. You can now easily see which access points are encrypted from the menu without installing a third party app. I am unable to praise this feature too much as I have been using it on Windows and Linux for nearly 5 years now. This is something that should have been added a long time ago.
Conclusion
If you are on the fence on whether or not to get Leopard, save your money. Thus far Leopard does not have any real standout features that I see to be a reason for spending $129 on this operating system. If you are looking to get a specific feature in leopard look to see if you can already get it in a third party application. Nearly all of the features in Leopard can already be had by running a piece of software by someone other than Apple.
