Apple Mac OS X Leopard Arrives Tonight, A Users First Thoughts and Unboxing

<!-- Generated by XStandard version 2.0.0.0 on 2007-10-26T14:11:37 -->

Apple Mac OS X Leopard will be available starting tonight at 6:00 p.m. in Apple stores around the world. Many people have been receiving their copies of OS X early though. Following are some unboxing pictures and first thoughts from our Apple forum member Eluzion and unboxing images are provided by member ShaggyRS6.

First, the packaging and unboxing by Lee Shand (ShaggyRS6):

(view large image)	(view large image)
(view large image)	(view large image)

 

OS X Leopard First Thoughts from Eluzion

I’ve been primarily a Windows user with some Mac OS 9 experience back in high school computer courses as well as some time in Linux (mostly Ubuntu). A few months back I was looking into purchasing a notebook for my last year of college and to take with me after school. I will admit, I was a Windows fan boy to a certain extent, giving my friends who had Macs a hard time. After several visits to the Apple store, I decided the MacBook Pro was it, and I’m definitely happy with the decision I made. There’s nothing quite like it when you are comparing it from a hardware and design standpoint, but the OS was really what would make or break my Mac experience. OS X Tiger turned out to be a great experience and everything I’ve been hearing about Leopard had me excited. With that said, this review will be based on the changes made from Tiger to Leopard.

Performance

The first thing that I noticed is that there was definitely a performance increase over Tiger. Load times seemed to be improved across the board and everything feels a lot snappier. I’m not sure what all the changes were made under the hood, but there is no doubt an increase in overall performance which is always a plus.

Appearance

As we all know, everything shares the same unified appearance in Leopard now. I personally hated the brush metal look that some applications had in Tiger and love the solid-color unified look that Leopard now sports. The drop shadow under the active application was increased to make the active window a little easier to identify. The menu bar up top is less opaque, giving it that slightly transparent look. I would assume the idea behind this was to shift the focus more on the active window. The menus are also slightly transparent which some reviews have criticized as making it difficult to read the menus. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it looks great and have absolutely no problem reading the menus. Finally, the most obvious change was with the dock which I will discuss in the next paragraph.

While all of the cosmetic changes were great, it is still not very customizable. I’m sure there is, or will be, 3rd party applications out there to let you tweak the appearance/theme, but some basic control over the appearance would have been nice out-of-the-box. Here are a few things that would be nice to have control over:

• Menu bar opacity control. With certain backgrounds, it can make the menu bar difficult to read. A simply option to adjust the opacity would be great.
  
  
• Customizable window colors. By default, Leopard has the active window a darker shade of gray than inactive windows but it’s not always consistent either (when iTunes is inactive, it is still a darker shade of gray). Personally, I find a lighter shade of gray (or just a lighter color in general) to be the “dominant” color, or stands out more. I would rather have the active window a lighter/brighter shade of gray and the inactive windows a darker/dimmer shade of gray, with the ability to make them slightly opaque as well. This really comes down to personal taste so again, this is just my opinion.
  
  
• New folder icons. The rest of Leopard is beautiful, but I find the default folder icons to be very plain (reminds me of some Linux distros). Again, some people will probably like them but I would have personally liked a little more eye catching icons. One thing I did like about Windows Vista was the icons. You could easily distinguish the music folder from the pictures, movies, and so forth.

Dock

(view large image)

The new dock is outstanding, and not just because it looks cool. While the 3D appearance and reflection are cool, what I like the best is the blue glow indicator for which applications are open and the stacks. It’s a lot more obvious to see what applications are currently open and the stacks make it quick and easy to access certain files, folders, or applications. The grid view is especially useful for seeing all of the applications on your computer. There is only one small option I would have liked:

• An option to delete all or empty folder when you right click on a stack that is a folder. I’m constantly downloading small files (photos, documents, spreadsheets, etc.) and that downloads folder/stack gets filled up quick. Since I generally don’t keep stuff I download to the downloads folder, a quick and simple “empty folder” option would have been nice.

Finder/Quick look

(view large image)

(view large image)

The finder has a few changes I really enjoy. The first is the left side has been organized more like iTunes, which I find to be a lot more organized. Secondly, the Finder now has a path bar at the bottom to let you know where you are in relation to the root directory and allows you to easily jump back to previous directories. Nothing new in terms of OS’s but it was a needed feature with the Finder. Cover flow is simply eye-candy to me and I don’t find any real benefit in using it. It might be useful for viewing pictures, but just give me a large thumbnail view and I can browse through pictures much quicker. The columns view is still, by far, my favorite way of navigating through the Finder. Quick look, on the other hand, is more than just eye candy. This is probably one of my favorite additions to Leopard as it makes it very convenient and easy to quickly (and I mean quickly) look over a document, video, etc. Again, a very neat and extremely useful feature that almost alone makes Leopard worth the upgrade. One feature I always thought would be useful:

• Split view mode. The only time I really use the Finder is to copy a file from one location to another. Instead of opening two Finder windows, a split view in one Finder window. This way I could navigate to two separate directories and quickly drag-and-drop.

Spaces

This was nothing new to me since it’s been around in the Linux world for a while, but it’s nice to see it in OS X. There isn’t really much to say about it but I find this to be a very useful feature to have. Instead of having to Command-H to hide an application because it’s in the way then Command-Tab to open it back up, you can simply put different applications in different spaces. You can also setup hot corners to work with Spaces. For example, I have mine setup to where if I move the mouse to the bottom right corner of the screen, it displays all my Spaces (although I primarily use Ctrl-Arrow Keys to navigate through the various Spaces). There is one small option I would have liked to seen:

• An option in the menu when you right click an icon in dock to “Send to Space &gt; #”. Basically it sends the entire application that whichever Space you choose, retaining the current position and size.

Spotlight

It’s fast, like Quicksilver fast. It also supports the dictionary so you can easily look up the definitions to words. I’m always using the dictionary widget but now that it’s built into spotlight, even better! Also, each Help menu has it’s own mini-spotlight which makes finding a menu item or help topic extremely easy and quick. It’s funny because I almost never used the Search feature in Windows (even Vista) because it took too long and never really found what I wanted. Ever since I switched to OS X, I’ve been using Spotlight like crazy because it actually finds what I want and I don’t have to wait -- it just works.

Time Machine

(view large image)

I don’t use Time Machine but I can definitely see how this will be a very powerful tool. I worked at a computer repair job for about a year and I would say over half of the work I did was recovering data on bad hard drives. I might pick up another external hard drive to take advantage of this feature, but for now I just manually back up the files I need.

Miscellaneous Extra Features Worth Mentioning and Conclusion

• One awesome feature is the ability to scroll through an inactive window. No more clicking to activate the application then scrolling. Simply place your cursor over the inactive application and scroll.
  
  
• Preview allows you to resize images. No more having to open up your image editing software to simply resize a picture that you want to resize. It can all be done from within Preview, quick and easy.
  
  
• You can display a clock in addition to the screen saver. A pretty small but very useful feature for me since I don’t have a clock in my room (I just use my iPhone as my alarm and clock).
  
  
• Screen sharing is now possible with iChat. I haven’t used it yet, but I know this will be very useful for helping friends and family out with their Macs (kind of started a Mac movement after I made the switch, hehe).
  
  
• There are a lot of new features but I only went over the ones that were immediately useful and apparent to me. Each person will enjoy Leopard for his or her own reasons, and fortunately there are a lot of different reasons to enjoy it.
  

Overall, I would highly recommend the upgrade to Leopard. There are a few features that almost alone make it worth the upgrade, but combine those features with everything else and it’s definitely a worthy upgrade. If you’re still not convinced, give it some time. I’m sure once developers start taking advantage of the under-the-hood improvements of Leopard, you’ll pick up a copy in no time. Core Animation especially should bring some jaw-dropping eye candy and interfaces.

 

Availability and Pricing

Leopard will come pre-installed on any Mac that you buy after today and for anyone that bought a Mac within the past month you can get the upgrade disks from Apple for free so long as you pay a nominal shipping fee charge. For those that need to purchase OS X Leopard it'll cost around $129 in retail and is available starting today.

 

Nice first look! Mine is installing as we speak...58 minutes remaining

 

Very nice...can't wait for more detailed reviews to start pouring in...

 

thats quite cheap compared to Vista Premium or Ultimate OEMs which are 100-200 and the retails about twice as much.

Apple's always had a better OS IMO, I just never liked not being able to upgrade as easily but if I had the money I wouldnt mind gettin a mac just to try this out!

though i heard some ppl got their mac OS on HP laptops....

 

Just get it Sam...I've been using it for an hour already and no bugs whatsoever. I even did the upgrade option - all my stuff was imported perfectly. My system hasn't changed one bit except for the new OS. The water is good on this side!

 

As much as Apple pushing the "think different" mantra and iconoclast image, I really, really wish they would allow users more freedom to customize their UI experience.

- The menu bar should have configurable transparency
- The look and feel of the dock should be theme-able
- The windows and widgets should be easily, and freely theme-able
- The desktop should be "layered" just like in photoshop with controls to move windows between different layers there-by shrinking them, growing them, and/or changing their opacity.

 

The Quick Look feature is by far the most impressive feature of this OS. Everything else is just paint.

MS better start working on a version of Quick Look themselves.

 

the most impressive thing i've read about this OS is that it's FASTER than it's predecessor. vista... yikes. i'm hearing all good things about Leopard. and as someone who knows how to back up but doesn't regularly, Time Machine seems really useful.

 

Looks great. Just wish i didn't have to buy a mac laptop to run it.

 

Completely agreed. Apple is extremely controlling in my opinion.

 

There has to be some massive petition somewhere saying "TWO MOUSE BUTTONS ON YOUR LAPTOPS PLEASE!" Honestly, those other ways of double clicking with the touchpad don't really do it for me, so until then. I'm stuck with Windows.

I know. It's pretty sad that that's pretty much the only thing holding me back from getting a Mac. xD

 

Leopard looks like a good evolutionary step for the Mac OS. But let's face it, Apple's playing catch-up at this point. I dare you to point out one feature in Leopard that wasn't already in Vista 6 months ago and every modern Linux distro 2 years ago.

Time Machine? Volume Shadow Copy/System Restore with a better UI, which means "waste of hard drive space." That knowing Apple, there's no way to disable.

Stacks? Been in Gnome and KDE for years. No one uses them there, either.

The dock, IMO, is still a strictly inferior system to the Windows/Gnome/KDE taskbars in every imaginable way. It's layout makes no sense, there are next to no meaningful options for customizing it, there's no easy way to access programs that aren't on the "quick-launch" part, and minimizing apps into the icons you used to launch them is just stupid. Speaking of which...

The three buttons, that are "Quit; Restore/Maximize; Minimize" on every other GUI, are crazy on OSX. They are, in the same order, "Minimize; Move window to random position; Minimize in a slightly different way." "Quit" isn't an option at all without going to the menus, and maximize - in the sense of doing something useful like making Safari or Word take up the whole screen - doesn't seem to exist at all.

And of course, the whole "One-button interface" idea is stupid. It's been stupid ever since we discovered you could put multiple buttons on a mouse back in the 80s, and it just gets more clumsy every day.

Call OSX and the Mac notebooks "elegant" and "minimalistic" if you wish. I'll stick with "clumsy and non-functional." Until Apple learns to stop designing with "Form over funnction" as their mantra, they're never going to be able to compete. And Leopard's lack of meaningful advances to me seems like one more example of why pretty soon, even Linux is going to be kicking their butts.

 

I'm pretty sure that the point of Time Machine is that it only backs up to an external hard drive so that the files are still there if the internal hard drive crashes. So Time Machine is not enabled by default, and when you connect an external HD it'll actually ask you whether you want to use it with Time Machine, so it's hardly mandatory. (Oh and people quit with Cmd+Q kind of like Alt+F4).

My question though is whether you can have a full screen game in one workspace with Spaces and then be able to quickly switch to another workspace with a keyboard shortcut. Expose is more useful than Alt-Tab or Windows-Tab since it's parallel rather than linear, but one thing Alt-Tab is good for is quickly switching out of a game. (Yes, usually to hide the fact that I'm playing said game.) Not all Mac games have a convenient way to hide itself so it would be useful if Spaces could do it.

 

You couldn't scroll Inactive windows? Weird, XP has that functionality. I Also chafe at the lack of customsing in OSX.

ARGH, I won't be getting leopard until at least one week: my brother's buying a family pack, and I'm getting one of the licenses.

 

So now I know what to expect from Windows 7. Thanks

 

Well, Tiger had a lot of Vista's features even before Vista...and Tiger was out in 2005. Widgets on OS X vs. Gadgets on Vista (of course, Konfabulator started it all), Spotlight on OS X vs. Start menu Search on Vista, Expose on OS X vs. Flip 3D on Vista...its hard to say Apple's playing catch-up when even OS X Tiger already had a lot of Vista's features.

And also worth pointing out that Leopard will run fine on 512 MB RAM, and even the last generation of PowerPC Macs (from nearly 3 years ago). Vista? You'll need 1 GB of RAM, 2 GB of RAM to run it nicely. Leopard is fine on 512 MB.

 

About spotlight though... It was developed (google search too) AFTER MS announced that they were gonna add it to Vista. MS were Just very slow with it.

 

Yes, that is true. Although Apple deserves credit for putting it out first.

 

I think google was first. But apple did a much better implementation. I turn off indexing in vista. I don't need to on OS X.

I found that Spotlight really lifts Appplication launching in OS X. Panther was a Pain.

 

And actually, Spotlight is topped as well ...I personally use Quicksilver, a free third party launch app that is even faster than Spotlight.

 

And this First thought said that Leopard Spotlight is as fast as quicksilver!

 

Just noticed that part of the article...interesting!

 

... lol that stack thing looks stupid.

I wonder how it works with a magifier... like being only able to see 10% of the screen (like what I see in windows) that stack thing would be a pain in the *** to scroll with apple's Zoomtext equivalent... lol.

doesn't look that impressive to honest, improved, but not impressive


PS: My Vista install is WAY faster than XP.

 

I'm not particularly enthused about Stacks either or the new menu bar. They just seem to be flashy changes for the sake of being flashy. I'm more interested in the under the hood changes, like improved network drive access and the revamped OpenGL implementation.

 

Have it installed at the moment and it's running perfectly. It was an upgrade rather than a clean install which, given how horribly vista killed my pc when I tried this, is great and a real time saver.

The improved spotlight and finder work wonderfully, time machine looks interesting (yet to try it) as does spaces. Graphically mostly improvements those as has been pointed out some of the new icons are a bit... meh.

My only real complaint so far is i-chat still doesn't support contact with Windows messenger. Given almost all of my friends use that (and I do as well at work) i-chat is a nice looking but pretty pointless program.

Basically ace - compared to Vista its a stunningly error free and logical upgrade.

((oh - and minor point - but the one button mouse thing. Like everyone I thought this was stupid and pointless - until I tried getting my elderly mother to learn to use a PC mouse. She kept accidently wrong clicking it. As I understand it Mac's mouse options are set up to be as easy as possible for a new user to work with. If, later on, anyone wants to buy a 2, 3, or 567 button mouse they can and it will work. It's all part of their 'simple to new users' philosophy))

 

You obviously don't have to use it. You could just remove the icon from the dock and never launch it at all.

As for having a better UI, it sure does. For what it's designed to be, it works while Shadow Copy doesn't. Different goals.

I do, as well as a lot of people.

The dock makes sense. You might not like it, but it works logically. You can have easy access to all applications, just drag the Applications folder to the dock and it works just as the programs menu, but faster.

Some people find taskbars inferior, specially when you have Exposé as well as the dock. I can't stand taskbars, and disable them when running GNOME. Not to mention the god-awful system tray, which is not necessary on OS X thanks to the dock.

The buttons are "close this window", "minimize" and "zoom". The latest is meant to resize the window so it's as big as it has to be. I like it, and also I find it totally counter-productive to have a maximized window.

An interesting feature is that the "close" button also tells you whether the current document has been modified.

It's not stupid, it's something experts in this field have been debating for years.

If Apple doesn't work for you it's not a big deal. Their recent results contradict your predictions, though.

It seems to me you're just frustrated because it doesn't work the same way Windows does, and you're not willing to accept that.

 

Doesn't Command+H always work?

 

I think somebody is going to be selling a lot of external hard drives because of Time machine on Leopard!

 

I think this statement is well said. Obviously, OS X works differently from Windows. Some love the way OS X works, some prefer Windows. If OS X wasn't different, or Windows wasn't different from OS X, then they'd be identical and that'd be pointless.

Which is the same advice I give to new switchers to the Mac. They always say, "this is so awkward! This wasn't the way I did this in Windows!", and I always tell them that obviously OS X is different, and when switching you should keep an open mind and accept change.

After all, if you want everything in OS X to work exactly like it does in Windows, you didn't really switch, now did you?

 

Bah. I'm addicted to the "two finger on the pad" right click. I wish all my laptops had that feature.

 

I agree, I prefer this method over having a dedicated right click button.

Although with that said, I don't see what harm it could do for Apple to finally implement the right click button. At least it'll quiet down the haters a bit .

 

That's like giving in to Bill Gates Or maybe it could be an excellent marketing tool for the future. Like the Mac ad (I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC) about office and windows. "Now we have a right click button too, then the windows' guy shoots himself in the head"

 

Haha, yes, I remember that ad .

 

Well, it doesn't seem to work in UT2004. I came across a developer board a while back talking about game porting and hiding. It seems Windows games don't really have a hide command since the Windows key or Alt+Tab does it at the OS level. So when Windows games are ported over, a hiding feature would have to be written in by the porter, which they may just not bother to do it or they may feel that it's not in the interest of the game to have that feature, due to lack of pause ability or accidentally hitting it, etc. Still I think there should always be a way to hide programs including full screen games.

 

Of the two OS's from my experience, Mac OSX is hands-down better. My reason behind this is that while OSX and Windows may have similar features, things in OSX tend to be far better implemented.

An example is the dock. Someone brought up they think that the dock is inferior to the Windows taskbar. I think quite the opposite- the dock is a massive improvement, but only once you understand why it works the way it does.

The taskbar in Windows is now a mess in my opinion. It has become far too cluttered given the amount of applications and tasks run in the background. With 10 windows open of different applications, finding the one you want via the taskbar is tedious, whereas the dock in OSX will show a live preview. That's a little thing that makes a huge difference. Little things that require tiny icons (bluetooth, WiFi, clock) are kept separate in the upper right hand corner (no "hide inactive icons" necessary.)

The dock also is used to launch applications. For example, in the Mac OS, it is possible to drag an image from a document or webpage directly to Photoshop's icon and have it open instantly for editing.

I could go on and on. Someone can look at the features of Mac OSX and say "oh whoop, big deal" , but excruciating detail (in most cases, anyway) is paid to every feature and I think it's what has pushed OSX well ahead.

 

so if apple putting a right click on there laptops is giving into gillgates... what is bootcamp?

as for the taskbar, I NEVER use it, try Alt+Tab or Windows+Tab

 

yeah i prefer 2finger pad right click. it is more quick that way.

 

But makes playing FPS practically impossible.

That being said, I may grab a MacBook in a few weeks, depending on how good the next hardware refresh is. If they are going Santa Rosa, I might consider.

 

Do you really game with the trackpad? I don't know about you, but I prefer using a mouse .

 

meh, i prefer the taskbar to the dock.

 

Only useful feature I see is the stacks, which is simple yet efficient.

Nothing amazing about time machine and quickview is ok but nothing stellar.

 

In some cases, I'm known to play CSS better with a touchpad.