Leopard
Saturday, November 3rd, 2007
At first, I wasn’t sure whether or not to upgrade my old PowerBook G4 (12-inch / 867 MHz / 640 MB) to Leopard since I barely met the requirements. But given my experience with previous upgrades, I decided to give it a shot. Worst case scenario, Leopard would be too slow and I would end up with a clean install of Tiger, which I wouldn’t have minded anyway.
I had planned to do an archive and install, but after reading John Gruber’s installation advice, I decided it made the most sense for me to do the default upgrade. I had some trouble, and I’m not referring to the now-infamous APE + blue screen problem. During the reboot after the installation (and every boot thereafter), my PowerBook would power off while on the Apple/spinning gear screen. I booted in verbose mode looking for the conflict, but didn’t have much time to read before it powered off. So I decided to start the process over, this time choosing to archive and install. The installation went well, and the computer successfully booted afterward. No data was lost, but I had to sit through the installation process twice. The suspense was unbearable.
After discarding the angry letters I had prepared for John Gruber, I dug right in. The first thing I noticed was the reflective glass Dock, to which I’m still impartial. I don’t mind it, but I can understand the hatred of the new Dock. It’s unnecessary, the only logical reasoning for it is “because we can.” And strangely enough on my G4, the fancy new Dock effects worked fine, but the transparent menu bar was disabled. I would assume the Dock’s reflections and shadows would consume more resources than a transparent menu bar. Apparently, the transparency requires Quartz Extreme, which my aging G4 does not support. Dock magnification seemed to be choppier for the few seconds I had it on, but I can see the Dock just fine, and the moving targets only slow me down.
The Downloads stack in the Dock is handy for direct access to recent downloads. Trashing the disk image after installing software, for example, is as easy as dragging it from the fanned out stack right to the Trash. The Documents stack isn’t nearly as useful, as I have too many documents to display on my 12-inch screen at one time. And many of my documents are buried in folders inside the Documents folder that, when clicked, only open the folder in the Finder anyway. In this situation, I would have preferred Tiger’s docked-folder behavior, allowing complete navigation of the nested folders inside via a contextual menu.
Quick Look saves a great amount of time, allowing full document previews without launching an application. The hardest part is trying to break the habit of double-clicking a document to see what it is, and instead hitting the space bar to open Quick Look. Similarly, Cover Flow in the Finder proves to be useful by allowing you to flip through your files and identify them by content instead of filename or icon.
As was the case with previous Mac OS X upgrades, Leopard seems to run faster than its predecessor on the same hardware. In Tiger, Spotlight was slow. So slow, in fact, that it was often quicker for me to locate what I was looking for manually in the Finder. No more. I now rarely open the Applications folder; instead typing Command-Space, a few letters of the application’s name, then Return. It takes a minimal amount of time for Spotlight to process, then my application launches. Even Dashboard widgets load noticeably faster. If your Mac meets the requirements, there is no reason not to upgrade. Leopard improves upon Tiger in every single way. (I know that’s hard to imagine for switchers coming from Windows — where, with each new upgrade, your machine gets progressively slower.)
Now for the moment of truth. I mounted a network drive belonging to another Mac in my house, and then put the shared Mac to sleep while browsing it’s files from my G4. This used to be the “oh crap” moment, where I rushed to wake the machine back up before my PowerBook realized it was gone, leaving my Mac unresponsive. Much to my surprise, the Finder did not freeze. Incredible.
Steve wasn’t kidding when he said Leopard would be a “complete package.” There’s no Home, Premium, Ultimate, Fat-free, Diet, Decaffeinated varients… no. There is only one flavor of Leopard, and it’s delicious.
