The Leopard Upgrade
October 27, 2007
Apple, Inc unleashed their newest operating system, dubbed, Mac OS X (pronounced “Oh Es Ten”) Leopard, or just “Leopard”. You haven’t heard? I’m sorry. Well this update to the popular operating system, “Tiger”, has been on the hearts and minds of Apple geeks for almost two years. If you’re curious about what this operating system entails, view Apple’s walk through of the major new features.
The Back Story
Personally, I was looking forward to Mac OS X Leopard more than I was the recently released iPhone. I use Mac OS for a lot of my everyday tasks and I even mix in some of my professional tasks that involve audio and/or video. I’ve had a beef with Mac OS’s Finder for a long long time now. So much so, that I purchased Path Finder from Cocoatech to replace it. The additions of Time Machine and a much beefier iChat really got me excited.
So I used my iPhone $100 rebate to pre-order a copy and it arrived early Friday afternoon. Here’s my story.
The Problem With Expectations
Being a good geek that I am, I backed up my existing Mac OS X Tiger installation using SuperDuper. For some strange reason, the backup failed almost at the end for no reason. For some stranger reason, I threw caution into the wind and decided that enough was backed up to proceed. I booted the Leopard DVD and the fun began:
Leopard could not see my main hard drive!
Hunh!?!? What happened to the seamless, worry free, problem free installations that I’ve experienced with past versions of Mac OS X. My expectations were too high. I hate when I do that. I booted to Tiger and ran Disk Utility on the drive (Verify Drive). Sure enough, I had errors. Partition table errors which reported inaccurate free space. Why now?!?! I then booted with the Tiger DVD and ran “Repair Disk” on my main drive. Get this: Repair Disk reported zero errors needed to be fixed. What is going on here?!?! Oh well, everything’s good, let’s go ahead and do this upgrade. Without hesitation, I picked the upgrade option and happily skipped away while my Mac upgraded.
After I rebooted, I got the dreaded Leopard Blue Screen of Death!!
Oh no. Oh no. This can’t be happening. My expectations were too high. I hate when I do that.! I searched the Web: nothing. I searched Apple support forums: nothing. Welcome to early adopter land and it’s time to bite the bullet and figure it out myself.
So after a couple more failed re-installs of the upgrade option, I bit the bullet and performed a clean install. After many, many successful Mac OS upgrades, I felt betrayed. I set the bar too high for Apple’s upgrade and never thought it would fail me like past Windows upgrades. I really hate when I do that.
End result: Successful installation of Leopard. 
The Fruits
When Leopard started successfully, I was greeted with the standard Apple video. These are always amazing so I was not surprised. The video showed various versions of “Hello” in different languages. It made me warm inside. I then began to dive into the features:
Finder
Since it was my most anticipated new feature, I tried Finder. I opened it by clicking the Finder icon in the new Dock (which I must say, looks great to me). I immediately switched to the new “Cover Flow” view which shows files like iTunes album art. I scrolled to a PDF file and hit the space bar. Oh my. Quick look absolutely rocks. Quick look enables one to preview files and folders without actually opening them. In this case, I was flipping through a PDF file without opening the PDF viewer. Snazzy. I also opened an Excel spreadsheet and was able to view the contents without having Excel nor Numbers installed!! Say what?!!? OOKAAAAYYY!!. File search worked great too. I must say, my first impressions of Finder were outstanding:
iChat
Since Chris Pirillo got his copy of Leopard installed, I convinced him to help me test out iChat theatre. We were both highly impressed with the Photo Booth effects, File sharing and more importantly, screen sharing. Although the video quality was not stellar, we both kind of expected this due to the nature of our connections. Did I mention I had to do zero configuration with my firewall? It all just workedTM. Chris and I had a blast testing all the cool effects. I selected the “Roller coaster” effect. It asked me to step out of the frame for a couple seconds and then told me the background image was captured. I stepped back into the frame and began acting the straight fool in front of a virtual roller coaster. Laughter ensued. Good times.
iChat has instantly become a juggernaut. What we have here is a bundled remote desktop / remote sharing / collaboration application which works with little or no configuration. This will turn heads, I guarantee it.
Spaces
As a user of virtual desktops for a number of years (on Linux and other Unix platforms such as Solaris), I didn’t expect to be too impressed with spaces. I was almost right. The difficulty in configuring Spaces was extremely simple and switching desktops with the mouse and keyboard worked as expected. What impressed me was Expose’ within Spaces. Whoa whoa whoa. You zoom out in Expose mode of your Spaces which shows all your spaces on the screen, then you show all your desktop windows within those spaces using Expose’. Here, look:
Time Machine
I don’t need to say much about Time Machine’s features except it’s a built in backup system. Lose a file? Use Time machine to “go back in time” and get it. Time Machine had quite a few hiccups during the first backup. Since I was playing with so much in Leopard while it was backing up, it may have given it a stress test it wasn’t ready for. For example, I interrupted a backup to reboot and upon attempting to backup from where I left off, I got errors. I kept getting errors, until I changed to a different external USB drive. Very weird. At any rate, Time Machine works as advertised once backups get going:
I think this is going to be a life saver for a lot of folks. Unfortunately, for you mobile users, it means carrying around a backup drive everywhere you go. Not convenient at all, nor practical.
The Billions of Little Things
There are a great deal of “little improvements” that make the Leopard user experience seamless and enjoyable. The integration between applications such as Mail, iChat, iCal, and Address Book are even tighter. This is greatly improved over Tiger which seemed like some things were just throw together. It’s kind of hard to explain this, but I believe Leopard feels cleaner. The UI seems more consistent than Tiger, the dialogs make sense, and things work as expected. I ‘m not a big fan of the semi-transparent menu bar, but it’s not enough to make me go in my room and cry.
Conclusion
I didn’t cover all the new features of Leopard since there are so many, and they have been covered in great detail in other places of the intrawebs. I gave you perspective on the installation procedure, Finder, iChat, Spaces and Time Machine. After a bumpy beginning, I can say that I’m satisfied with Leopard and I’ll continue to recommend it to users. I think for the next iteration of Mac OS X, I’ll know how to manage my expectations better and learn how to prepare.
Thanks for reading.
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! This problem has been confirmed and it has been stated to simply wait 20 minutes for your drive to appear.
!! This problem has been confirmed and it has been stated to remove custom hacks such as Application Enhancer. Funny, I didn’t have this installed, but I did have Uno installed. Hmmm.
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