Learning To Love Leopard
First, I really like the new interface look, which I definitely prefer to previous versions of OS X. I'm especially fond of the new, simpler, classic-looking folder icons, which remind me a bit of the ones in my aesthetically favorite-ever Mac OS GUI, System 6. I'm even partial to the revised Dock's appearance, which I like better than the old OS X Dock aesthetically.What I don't like about the new Dock is its lack of support for conventional folders. Stacks just don't do it for me, and I've been obliged to revert to aliases on the Desktop for some frequently-referenced folders that have dozens of files in them, and for which I absolutely need support for default List View in alphabetical or chronological order. I have many folders with hundreds of files in them, and folder icons just will not do. Consequently, Stacks have to be considered a retrograde development, arguably part of the "dumbing down" of the Mac OS with this version that some have complained about. Not cool. Hopefully, some of the inevitable third-party hacks to remedy this shortcoming will prove an acceptable fix.
However, probably the most jarring thing about Leopard for me is that Window-shade X doesn't work. I knew about this, but hoped that Unsanity Software would have a patched version of its Application Enhancer (APE) that plays happily with Leopard out by the time I upgraded. No such luck.
The lack of windowshading is frankly driving me nuts, and it's almost enough to make me go back to Tiger until Unsanity gets a Leopard-friendly version of the Window-shade X/APE tag-team out the door. Window-shading has been intricately integrated into my workflow habits since the feature was an add-on third-party hack for System 7 back in the mid-'90s. I usually have up to two-dozen or even more documents from various applications open and window-shaded on my Desktop, and that works for me better than any other mode I've attempted to use. I'll never forgive Apple for leaving windowshading out of OS X, because there is nothing - absolutely nothing - that even comes close as a satisfactory substitute, especially the pathetic collapse-to-the-Dock.
Consequently, I'm getting my baptism in Leopard's Spaces early on, and I really like Spaces, although again it's no replacement for windowshading. Getting comfortable in Spaces will take some getting used to, but I think it's really great. It does help with the Windowshading deficiency, although it's not a panacea. For example, the way I use Eudora is to keep the In and Out and Personalities windows, plus usually a couple of others, open and windowshaded all the time. Even with a Spaces environment dedicated to Eudora, this just doesn't work gracefully without windowshading. You have to be constantly digging to bring the required window to the foreground. I'm grateful for the expansiveness of this 17" display.
Even with Spaces, one more annoying aspect with version 10.5.0 was that when you opened another document in an application with one or more already open, the latest one didn't come to the front by default, so you had to go rooting through the Window menu. Clumsy and slow, and the whole business banefully inelegant and un-Mac-like. Happily, one thing fixed with the version 10.4.1 update is that the most recently opened document now comes to the front.
I also miss Classic Mode support. I was aware of and mentally prepared for its absence in Leopard, and I've settled for now on using Opera with the images disabled as a substitute for the Classic-only WannaBe text browser. Opera has a particularly convenient facility for toggling images on and off, but even with them off it's woefully slower to load pages than WannaBe. I was actually warmed up to this for a week or so after updating Tiger to OS 10.4.11, as that seemed to break Classic Mode's ability to access the Internet.
Then there's email. While dial-up seems well-supported and problem-free for securing basic connections, POP 3 email performance is definitely a lot poorer than with Tiger. The worst problem encountered so far is that in version 10.5.0 neither of my POP 3 standbys - Eudora or Nisus Email, could send messages through my main email address on my ISP's SMTP server. OK, neither of those programs is still being developed, but I can't get Leopard's own brand new built-in Mail email client to work with my ISP's email service at all - incoming or outgoing, although interestingly Opera Mail does work for both. After installing the OS 10.5.1 update, I was able to send messages through the ISP's SMTP server with Eudora, but the send proceeds as slowly as the proverbial molasses running up hill in January. Mail and Nisus Email still won't work at all with those servers. The trouble is that I'm joined at the hip to Eudora, and definitely not of a mind to give it up, and Opera, while it works, just isn't an adequate substitute. I don't like either Mail or Thunderbird, and Mail doesn't work anyway. I haven't tried T-Bird with Leopard. Eudora seems to work reasonably well with Gmail and Lavabit, so I don't know what the deal is with my ISP's SMTP server (and POP server with Mail), but at this point it's obviously not compatible with Leopard. Hopefully this will eventually be addressed by someone.
Overall, POP 3 email performance seems distressingly flaky in Leopard. As noted Gmail works, but response is depressingly sluggish, and I also had an attachment I sent to myself (to my ISP account) fail. Indeed, attachments seem near hopeless, even with Gamil. I tried sending a small (36k) onr this morning and gave up after a 10 minute stall in Eudora. Sent it from the Gmail Webmail interface in Safari with no fuss or bother other than the hassle of getting Gmail loaded via dialup.
This all seems a bit bizarre. Email is about as fundamental as it gets on the Internet. How hard can it be to get it working right? If I wasn't having problems with Leopard Mail I would somewhat grudgingly resign myself to the fact that things evolve, and older, no-longer-developed programs can't be expected to work forever. For example, the Nisus Email quick send floater also seems to be going AWOL sporadically in Leopard, requiring program restarts, although that's more forgivable given that the program hasn't been updated since probably Jaguar days. But there's no excuse for the problems with Apple's own latest version email program.
However, these complaints notwithstanding, as a general observation, I have to agree with my daughter, an old Mac OS hand who's been running Leopard on an Intel machine for several weeks now. She said the vibe she gets from Leopard reminds her of the OS 8 release back in 1998. It just feels good and "right" from the get-go, notwithstanding that Leopard is evidently the most buggy OS X release since version 10.1, which was essentially a late beta. It took me a while to warm up to Tiger. I felt comfortable in Leopard from the first boot-up, notwithstanding the gripes outlined above and some more I will get to in a moment.
Much of this is intangible "feel," although the pleasant aesthetics don't hurt, and it's why I'm inclined to affirm that the likelihood of my going beck to Tiger, which I still have installed on another partition of my hard drive, while I'm not entirely running it out due to the email troubles, is not terribly high provided nothing else unexpected crops up.
In that context, I would say that at least on this G4 PowerBook, Leopard so far seems like a happier camper than the early builds of Tiger were on my iBook and Pismo which were my front line production machines back in '05 when OS 10.4 was first rolled out. The Leopard install was completely smooth and undramatic - it "just worked."
Indeed, given that Leopard's Finder feels distinctly and decidedly more responsive on this 1.33 GHz G4 than OS 10.4.11 does, I'm now pondering whether I will try an unsupported install on one of my Pismos. If I ever do that, it will be some time hence, when more of the bugs and angularities have been wrung out of Leopard, and for now I'll concentrate on getting in the Leopard groove on this machine.
I should mention that prior to installing Leopard, I did run AlSoft Disk Warrior and repaired some (very) minor directory issues, and also repaired permissions and ran the cron maintenance scripts, which hadn't been done for about a month. You can't prove a negative, so it's hard to say whether things would or would not have gone as smoothly had I just plunged ahead with no disk and system preparation, but I do suspect that my belt-and-suspenders approach to system upgrades and updates may not be coincidental to the fact that I've never really experienced much in the way of problems with system upgrades. The OS 10.5.1 update installed without drama as well, although there was a very long wait on the reboot while the boot caches were updating, or so the dialog that appeared said. Unlike the last half-dozen or so Tiger version updates, the 10.5.1 install only reboots once after the install.
Getting back to using Leopard, it's definitely not all sweetness and light. While I like the new folder icons, some of the Dock icons are hard to decipher, and for some reason all my Tex Edit Plus document icons (of which I have thousands, maybe tens of thousands) have all (save for a very few) gone generic. Even more peculiar, on the first reboot after installing the OS 10.4.1 update, the TE+ Texas lone star flag icons reappeared momentarily and then immediately reverted to generic text icons. This may be a TE+ issue that will be corrected in time.
It's not a bug, just a change, but I don't much like the way remote volumes mounted over a network no longer appear on the Desktop, but have to be accessed from a window sidebar. I'm heavily Desktop oriented in the way I interact with computers, and I know Apple has been trying to wean us away from Desktop dependance, but I intend on having to be dragged kicking and screaming every inch of the way. I like the Desktop metaphor, I find it more efficient and convenient to the way I work and my mind addresses things, and I'm not prepared to abandon it without a fight.
Another thing I've noticed is that program stability in Leopard is definitely not up to what I've come to take for granted in Tiger, and I've had a more application crashes in two days than I've probably experienced in the past six months with Tiger. Some might dismiss this as less than optimum program optimization for Leopard, but that doesn't explain the Finder locking up, and Pixelmator 1.0.2, another app. that has proven crash-prone in Leopard, was just released last week. And those aren't the only ones that have crashed. I'm becoming a lot more re-acquainted with the Dreaded Spinning Beach Ball of Death than I ever wanted to be.,
Then there's the heat. With Tiger, the PowerBook's cooling fans cycle more than enough for my taste, but if you;re just doing light-duty stuff, they stay fairly subdued. Or at least they did until I recently updated to OS 10.4.11, which seems to heat things up a lot more the previous Tiger builds did. However, Leopard is definitely worse, with fan cycling pretty much relentless once you're past the initial warmup. Makes me wonder what the service life of those noisy little fans is. I should note that after I updated to OS 10.5.1 last evening, the fan cacophony eased off somewhat, so perhaps there is hope.
I also have to say a bit about Spotlight, although I haven't really had a chance yet to explore its changes extensively, but it does seem substantially improved, although why-oh-why did they get rid of the returns count dialog at the top of the results window? More dumbing down? I quickly became addicted to Spotlight in Tiger, but the Tiger version was buggy, cranky, and suffered manifold usability shortcomings. The Find dialog in Leopard also appears to be an improvement, with file name searches possible again without tedious configuration. Unfortunately, Leopard Spotlight is still prone to going into paroxysms of non-response and the DSBBoD.
I do also very much like the speed and quick startup time of Safari 3, which I had begin to get used to in OS 10.4.11.
Cover Flow I haven't checked out yet, and ditto for Time Machine, although I'll get around to hooking up my big, 500 GB external USB drive soon and letting it do its stuff. There's plenty more to learn and explore, and I'm looking forward to the upcoming release of David Pogue's Mac OS 10,5 Leopard: The Missing Manual. In the meantime I have those email bugs to try and work around and trying to adjust to living at least temporarily without windowshading. The Odyssey is joined in earnest again.
CM
Charles W. Moore
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