(no subject)
Now that I've had more than 24 hours to play with the final version of Leopard, I've noticed a few interesting things.
First, screenshots. It looks like each window's drop shadow is a part of that window's OpenGL surface now. The Command-Shift-4, Space key sequence used to take a screenshot of a window with no drop shadow. Now it's embedded into the PNGs. Hooray for 8-bit, 4-channel color!
The new Finder is slick. It makes the upgrade and all of the waiting worth it for me. Specifically, they've finally improved sharing, and it now includes some kind of screen sharing. From what I can tell, the new screen sharing is based on VNC, but improved in a few ways. I can actually stream video watchably through it on a local wireless network.
QuickLook is absurdly useful. As far as I can tell, it's the biggest new idea in Leopard. One single interface to open and view practically any document. Until you've seen it for yourself, you can't really understand just how cool it is to be able to just pop open a document to verify it's the one you want before loading the mothership app. It's also extremely fast. You select a file, press the spacebar, and it's open. Half a second, maybe. This will probably be showing up in other OSs very soon.
Remote parental controls work almost exactly how I expected them to. Quite a cool idea that I haven't seen before in other systems. You activate remote setup on machine A and other machines on the network spot it. If you feed machine B the username and password of machine A, it can connect, get a user list, and administer those users' parental controls just as if you were at machine A's local console.
The new Dock doesn't bug me as much as I thought it would. Frankly, I prefer the little blue lights in Leopard to the black triangles earlier versions had to indicate running apps. The showhidden trick still works, and that's the only thing I really care about. It's just as functional for me. Stacks are also nice to have.
The new translucent menu bar sucks. It looks terrible to have my display filled with apps and yet there's still a little bar of my desktop showing through. It's especially ugly when you're on a clean desktop opening up a menu. The menus themselves are translucent, but not to the same degree.
Interestingly, the menus and sheets also blur things behind them now. It's a pretty subtle effect, since the menus are mostly opaque, but I don't like it much. It reminds me of Vista's window borders, and those always looked ... muddy to me. It's livable, just kind of weird.
The new Mail.app is blazingly fast. Tiger's Mail used to bog down when I opened one of my mailboxes with 58k E-mails in it. The new Mail's RAM footprint goes up, but it opens the mailbox and lets me scroll wherever I want in under a second. It feels about as responsive as iPhoto's scrolling does.
One unfortunate thing is that Time Machine gobbles processor power every hour to do its backups. The more you've changed, the longer it pegs one of your cores. Hopefully they'll make it either more efficient or nice it way up (in BSD, a process with a high "nice" value runs at a low priority and can be postponed if other processes need the chip). Other than that, it works pretty well though. I'm really liking how it does full backups at delta backup speed with hard links. For anyone curious about how this works, AppleInsider had a fantastic article on Time Machine in their Road To Leopard series earlier this month. It's worth the read.
Preview is dramatically faster. Presumably, they made it a frontend to QuickLook kind of like how TextEdit (the included word processor that lies somewhere between WordPad and Microsoft Word in functionality) is just an interface to the included NSTextView element that any program on Mac OS can use "for free".
Other than that, I have a few minor gripes about things like changes to the command line utilities and so forth. All of my problems with it are vastly outweighed by the benefits of the new Finder and QuickLook alone.
I'll probably be writing something much more extensive later.
First, screenshots. It looks like each window's drop shadow is a part of that window's OpenGL surface now. The Command-Shift-4, Space key sequence used to take a screenshot of a window with no drop shadow. Now it's embedded into the PNGs. Hooray for 8-bit, 4-channel color!
The new Finder is slick. It makes the upgrade and all of the waiting worth it for me. Specifically, they've finally improved sharing, and it now includes some kind of screen sharing. From what I can tell, the new screen sharing is based on VNC, but improved in a few ways. I can actually stream video watchably through it on a local wireless network.
QuickLook is absurdly useful. As far as I can tell, it's the biggest new idea in Leopard. One single interface to open and view practically any document. Until you've seen it for yourself, you can't really understand just how cool it is to be able to just pop open a document to verify it's the one you want before loading the mothership app. It's also extremely fast. You select a file, press the spacebar, and it's open. Half a second, maybe. This will probably be showing up in other OSs very soon.
Remote parental controls work almost exactly how I expected them to. Quite a cool idea that I haven't seen before in other systems. You activate remote setup on machine A and other machines on the network spot it. If you feed machine B the username and password of machine A, it can connect, get a user list, and administer those users' parental controls just as if you were at machine A's local console.
The new Dock doesn't bug me as much as I thought it would. Frankly, I prefer the little blue lights in Leopard to the black triangles earlier versions had to indicate running apps. The showhidden trick still works, and that's the only thing I really care about. It's just as functional for me. Stacks are also nice to have.
The new translucent menu bar sucks. It looks terrible to have my display filled with apps and yet there's still a little bar of my desktop showing through. It's especially ugly when you're on a clean desktop opening up a menu. The menus themselves are translucent, but not to the same degree.
Interestingly, the menus and sheets also blur things behind them now. It's a pretty subtle effect, since the menus are mostly opaque, but I don't like it much. It reminds me of Vista's window borders, and those always looked ... muddy to me. It's livable, just kind of weird.
The new Mail.app is blazingly fast. Tiger's Mail used to bog down when I opened one of my mailboxes with 58k E-mails in it. The new Mail's RAM footprint goes up, but it opens the mailbox and lets me scroll wherever I want in under a second. It feels about as responsive as iPhoto's scrolling does.
One unfortunate thing is that Time Machine gobbles processor power every hour to do its backups. The more you've changed, the longer it pegs one of your cores. Hopefully they'll make it either more efficient or nice it way up (in BSD, a process with a high "nice" value runs at a low priority and can be postponed if other processes need the chip). Other than that, it works pretty well though. I'm really liking how it does full backups at delta backup speed with hard links. For anyone curious about how this works, AppleInsider had a fantastic article on Time Machine in their Road To Leopard series earlier this month. It's worth the read.
Preview is dramatically faster. Presumably, they made it a frontend to QuickLook kind of like how TextEdit (the included word processor that lies somewhere between WordPad and Microsoft Word in functionality) is just an interface to the included NSTextView element that any program on Mac OS can use "for free".
Other than that, I have a few minor gripes about things like changes to the command line utilities and so forth. All of my problems with it are vastly outweighed by the benefits of the new Finder and QuickLook alone.
I'll probably be writing something much more extensive later.