Living with the Kitty or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Apple's Leopard

So, of course, I waited in line to buy Leopard, the next version of Apple's OSX operating system; just one of many hopeful geeks.

Over the years, I've come to have high expectations of Apple. The iPhone continues to exceeded most of my expectations. Their computers are simply a joy to use. The ever-changing line of iPods is ever-getting-cooler. So Leopard was bound to make the experience of the 4 Macs I own even that much sweeter.

I was disappointed. And then I wasn't. But still I am, but not really.

Before I launch into this, here's a link to many of the new features I'm reviewing: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features

The installation was easy, as you'd expect, but I ran into problems nearly immediately. I have several external hard drives that serve various purposes. One is my active client data, one is a large backup drive that supports several computers, one is my music and movies, etc. When I plugged my client data and backup drives into my newly Leopardized laptop, I received an exciting message that Leopard wasn't able to repair the drives and that I was being given access to them on a very limited basis. It recommended I back them up immediately.

Not good.

So, I pulled the drives, stuck them on one of my OSX 10.4 computers that hadn't been updated yet, and ran my repair utilities on them to see if there were any problems. None showed. The drives purred along and all the data was accessible. Hmm.

Put them back on my laptop: now the Active Data drive could be read but not written to and the backup drive wouldn't even mount. So, I tried connecting them to another computer with Leopard: same deal--it wouldn't mount and I couldn't repair it.

I actually almost decided to take the drives and my laptop in to Apple for help. You know things were bad if I was considering such a drastic step. I went another route, though...

I formatted the large backup drive in Leopard, since it contained just duplicates of information already on other drives. Then, I copied all of the Active Data to the freshly formatted backup drive. It took a while! My plan was to then reformat the Active Data drive by Leopard, and copy everything BACK to it. However, suddenly, the Active Data drive has no problems. I can verify it, repair it, mount it, write to it, read from it, etc. Nothing changed. It just started working. It's humming along just fine now, so I never reformatted...

Not good.

One of the things I've been looking forward to in Leopard is the Time Machine application. I've been having a frustrating time trying to back up all my computers lately. I'd bought the new Airport that allows you to serve multiple hard drives over your wireless network. Perfect! I thought I could hook up some big drives and have Apple's Backup program back all the computers up on a nightly routine. It was swell in theory, but the Airport kept dropping connections to the backup drives. It's new technology that hasn't been fully bugged out yet. That's what I get for early adoption. So, I've been manually moving drives around, getting backups of machines, etc. I was very hopeful that Time Machine would allow me to back all the computers up more efficiently. Then I discovered that Time Machine doesn't support disks served over the wireless network on Airport.

Not good.

After some experimentation, however, I discovered I could attach a few drives to my old Powerbook G4 12", which has been working as my print server in the "back office," and connect to them over the wireless network, and with some tweaking in the sharing settings--get all the machines to see those drives through Time Machine and the auto backups seem to be working great! It's a little slow over the wireless (the first backup of my work laptop and the active data drive is over 450gigs. It took about 15 hours!), but once the big backups are done, the incremental hourly ones shouldn't even be noticeable. This was a BIG improvement for me, and a big relief that all my systems are backing up hourly.

Good.
Very good.

The entire operating system seems to be running MUCH faster. Safari launches immediately. Websites snap into existence. The new Finder is sharp and snappy, even the new Coverflow view is fast. Quick Look is super-cool, allowing you to look inside documents without having to open them up--you get addicted to this quickly.

Good.

The parental controls are much improved. You get complete reports of every application the kids launched, of every site visited (and every site they TRIED to visit), every email, every IM. It's sweet! You can also take over other computers on your network VERY simply, which makes for management of multiple computers pretty fun and simple.

Good.

Most of my applications (including the important ones like CS3 and Lightroom) seem to be working just fine. I've had to update a few (like Journeler) that didn't work right off the bat. I'm still having a problem with RapidWeaver being able to publish to my blog, but I'm sure these minor things will be worked out.

Good.

As a GTDer, I was very excited about the new To Do and Notes system that is incorporated into nearly every application. The implementation is, sadly, horrible. The only cool thing is that you can select text from just about anywhere and right-click on it to select the new "New To Do" option.

The To Do list in email doesn't even allow you to filter so that completed items don't show up. It's crude and rudimentary at best. The way it "syncs" with the iPhone is, it turns your To Dos into emails that are all stuffed in an IMAP folder on the mail server. You can't DO anything to the To Do, you can just read it (sort of) on the phone. You can't sort them, you can't complete them, nothing. For those of us with lots of To Dos that we're used to formating and sorting in useful ways--this is an unacceptable. It's unusable. It's un-American. This feels like such an add-on, last-minute thing that I'm embarrassed for Apple.

Not good.
Very not good.

The notes are only slightly better. You're supposed to be able to sync them online as well, but on my computers you can either sync the To Dos or the Notes, not both. Not sure why. But it's lame. You'd think that the Notes in Mail sync with the Notes program on the iPhone. You'd be wrong.

Not good.

Mail has been beefed and cleaned up in satisfactory ways. Much of the preference panes are smarter, simpler, and otherwise improved. One of the things I love is that any date or address or phone number are auto-detected and you get a quick little drop-down that allows you to add these things to a contact, go to it on a map, etc. Very slick. Mail supports sexy templates that I can see being a big improvement as you get used to them and customize them.

iCal no longer has an inspector tab, you have to double-click on an item to see/edit its details. I can live with that, but it's a little extra work that I didn't think helped anything. I do like that you can now schedule default alarms. So, in those departments, small but enjoyable upgrades.

Good.

Some of the eye candy is fun, like Spaces, but I don't find I have much use for it. I'm trying to force myself to get into it and see if I find a good use for it--it's nothing as revolutionary as expose was, though. The new dock is cute, but otherwise just a dock. I really like the new Web Clippings feature in Safari. It's so simple to use, it's fun. I can see a LOT of uses for this functionality. The new PDF controls are very swank, too.

Good.

Spotlight is MUCH MUCH improved. It's lightning-quick, and much smarter. I've actually ditched Quicksilver and gone back to Spotlight because it's so much better than the first version. I wasn't using all the very clever, but slightly complicated, features of Quicksilver, so as a launcher and document finder--Spotlight is once again my favorite.

Good.

iChat has some fun new toys, but more important is the ability to remote control the computer of the person you're chatting with. It means you have a quick and easy way to help support someone's technical question, or a quick way to show them something on your machine. You can also do presentations of slideshows, documents, movies, whatever across iChat, which makes it a very useful business tool. This stuff rocks!

Good.

All in all, I'm having fun with the kitty now. It's not the giant leap forward I was hoping for, but it is an improvement, and I expect the little things that are irritating me will be gone in future updates. I'm sure there's more, but I wanted to get you a quick feel for where things were at! March on!

Kevin

Whoa. Thanks for the update! Very very informative, as I knew you would do. The overall speed of your computer... seen any difference in it? Slower? The same?

Well, like I said, the entire OS is much faster overall..

Hey Kevin, Thanks for the review! I'm curious if you've installed it on a G4 or G5 system yet? I have a 12" PB and a dual G5 2.7 PM. Should I wait until I upgrade the hardware or install now? (not really expecting you to answer that for me, but any insight is much appreciated!)

~Bill

I installed it on my 12" PB G4 and it runs great. No issues.

Thanks

Thanks Kevin! I was just wondering if I should spring for the upgrade - glad I found your post. I think for now I'll just stick with what works. I've finally got a stable problem free workstation, so I'll save the upgrade for a while.

It seems like a sign of the times though that companies make such large upgrades to their product lines while cutting the legs out from under them in so many ways. I thought this was just an MS trait, but I guess not. I hope Mac OS doesn't begin to show the same kinds of bloat with limited feature sets (stuff like the to-do lists - basic functions you'd find on a 15 year old palm pilot are un-usable with the "latest and greatest" - what's the world coming to).

Anyway... informative. Thanks for being the guinnea pig for us.

Kevin,

I hear your the man when it comes to understanding a mac and Leopard.

I hope you can answer a quick question for me. I have recently bought Leopard and I'm about to install it on my Laptop and G5. Currently I'm having a lot of problems with my G5 running slow ( have 6gb of ram but feels like less than 1), safari and firefox crashing, mac mail getting locked up, just everything on it running slower than molasses.

Should I do just an update when I install or erase the harddrive and start over?

I'm beating my head over this computer. I desperately want to work smarter and faster but I'm getting bogged down by a messed up computer.

Any help you can give would be awesome

Ruth

Hi, Ruth...

My recommendation is to always do a fresh install, if you can. It's a bit of a pain in the butt, true... but it could save you trouble down the line. Make sure you have your program discs and that you archive your user folder onto an external drive (if you have one), then do the fresh install. If you're a bit scared of computers, the easier route is just to have it update... I just find, in the long run, you can inherit problems that would otherwise be absent.

I hope this helps!

Kev

Ruth, do you have anything exotic running on your G5? We have a SATA host card for connecting to external drives and Leopard doesn't seem to play well with those.

...If you're just running the regular apps and PS, I'd clone your Tiger drive to an external with a program like Carbon Copy Cloner and then do an Archive & Install.