I’m sure that I won’t be the first to use that turn of phrase, but it’s October and we all know what that means. No it’s not that Major League Baseball is heading into the playoffs, nor is it that the National Hockey League has started its’ season with several excellent games, The Big Cat is on it’s way at the end of the month. Woot, the cat has finally arrived. OS 10.5 offers what seem to be a number of startling and excellent improvements in the way that we Mac users interact with our machines. From where I sit Leopard has some very big shoes to fill. Tiger (OS 10.4) is perhaps the most stable and one of the more intuitive operating systems that I have had the opportunity to use. The mere fact that Tiger has been around for almost two years signifies two things:
1. Apple has not seen the need to push along an update to fix some key issue with the OS (alá 10.1 in September of 2001 just six months after initial OS X release).
2. Something big must be coming along in the next iteration.
So what are we getting with Leopard? That is a great question. Apparently there are some fantastic developer tools shipping with Leopard. Support for 64-bit applications is a big deal (I waited to buy a new Mac until there was again a processor that was 64-bit) ZFS, which I think is about the greatest thing since sliced bread, will make it in to 10.5 at some point. It is quite a feat for people to get excited about ZFS, mostly because it involves getting animated about file system which seems almost oxymoronic in its complexity. More additions to the Core frameworks are also good news for devs, as is garbage collection though I’m not quite sure what the hell it is, but if Siracusa is excited about it so should we all be. All in all the feeling that one gets from the knowledgeable about Leopard is that it will be a huge developer release but will not feature all that much to call home about at the end of the day. I will have to be unreasonable and go against the popular sentiment and say that Leopard is perhaps the most interesting release of the OS since the first one.
Apple is slowly revolutionizing the way that we interact with our computers. Many many years ago computers used to just be considered type-writers, in fact I remember reading a book by Robin Williams and though her point was on how to get good typography from a Mac it still works as a glib truism. Even today there are many people who consider computers as big expensive and complicated pieces of technology that are good only for outputting documents and spreadsheets. If you follow this philosophy, which clearly many in the Mac community do not, you are bound to end up with thousands upon thousands of files and documents. Hell even a few semesters at any good university and you’ll probably end up with a dozen papers all labeled “Paper 1″. This is where I think that the more important end-user features of Leopard will shine through and make this more of a requirement than an upgrade that can be skipped.
From what I have heard through reputable sources and through the little I have experienced there will be five killer features of 10.5. Quick Look, Time Machine, Stacks, Spaces, and screen sharing in both Finder and iChat. These are implementations of concepts that have been floating around for many years and implemented in typical Apple fashion; relatively easy to use and integrated across the board. Take Quick Look for example. As his Steveness pointed out in the WWDC keynote, Quick Look is a great way to page through thousands of documents, PDFs, photos, and even videos with live previews. Not sure what presentation that is? Just tap a key and you get a preview that accurately reflects the item that you’re viewing. How fucking cool is that? Not sure which episode of Dexter you’re looking, just press a key and you can watch five minutes or even the whole thing at full screen size. Possibly the best thing about Quick Look is that it works in other applications as well as in the Finder. This just enhances its’ usability and its’ power as a tool. Use it with another one of the killer features Time Machine to find that one photo of the dog that you accidentally threw away, but keep the rest of that roll in electronic purgatory. Just that simple and just that cool. No caveats that I can see this looks to be an amazing feature that will become like second nature to many Mac users, much like the Quicksilver shortcuts have to me.
Time Machine. What else is there to say that hasn’t already been said? It would be nice if it worked with ZFS snapshots, but that was pretty much pie-in-the-sky thinking by Mac nerds anyway. It provides the Apple solution to one of the most important problems of the digital age. When one uses their Mac to create all that great media, like home movies, photos, and webpages, what do we do when we lose it? There are two ways that data loss happens environmental and accidental and Time Machine covers the both of them. First it creates a backup of your drive and then does incremental backups based upon what other applications have done for years like Dantz Retrospect and SuperDuper. The most interesting part though is the actually putting a user-interfact on the front of the file management in such a way that they mythical computer-illterate family member can retrieve those precious photos of Rover that accidentally ended up in the dustbin. Never before has a the metaphor “searching through the dump” felt germane to to a conversation about data recovery, but I do believe that this is the first time that Aunt Flo can drive up to the dump in her F-150 and look herself. It used to require someone with a bit more technical knowledge and training to pull o the data recovery.
Who will this help? Steve Jobs had the numbers. He talked about them. Anecdotally I’m sure there are many people out there without adequate backup solutions and I’m one of them. I have been considering purchasing a large hard-drive for other reasons and I will definitely keep a backup of the boot drive of my iMac on it in case there is failure of the regular drive. The only downside that I can find in this whole approach for Apple is that a good part of the great features and security coming from Time Machine comes from requiring that external hard drive. Now while most Mac, and indeed computer, people will have little trouble finding a cheap and reliable hard drive, I feel the impact may be missed on John Q. Mousepad. The only thing I wish Apple would do is to sell Apple branded hard drives, call ‘em Time Capsules for all I care, and offer them with new Macs at a discounted price. Something relatively large and it must be reliable; also make it work with the Time Machine software. Bring up Time Machine every time the hard drive is plugged in to make the process even more streamlined.
Stacks: a wonderful idea to replace the screamings for spring-loaded Dock folders with something original and clever. Just mouse over it and boom there is all the stuff that you must have at a finger tip. The only thing I’m not sure about is the usability when the Dock is in the side position. I started using Dock on the left side of my screen when I had an old Beige G3 running 10.2 and quite frankly I never liked the dock at the bottom on the other computers I have used. Aside from the Leopard Dock Problem the other concern for me is Stacks and side Dock. I like the way that Stacks run in a curve because it fits with the way the human hand moves a mouse from the bottom of a computer screen to the top of one, but I don’t quite see how that translates into being useful in side Dock position.
Spaces is VirtueDesktop 11.0. A hundred times more useful than any other virtual desktop manager ever created for the simple reasons that it can be activated and navigated any way that the user wants it to be. Add to that the ability to create many more virtual workspaces and anyone who has had to work on a paper where they need to look at the notes that they took in class, an online article, and to manage working music will be drooling at the thought.
Speaking of managing projects screen sharing is one item that people with parents who have computers should be on their knees begging for with all due humility. Aside from the obvious ability to fix Ma’s computer with a few mouse-clicks, screen sharing could have numerous uses for working on collaborative projects like photo editing. Think of it like a more productive, though much less entertaining, version of Layer Tennis. Oh the possibilities!
The Big Cat will have a big impact on the Mac scene for many reasons; and be you a dev or be you a member of the great unwashed, you should be excited. If Leopard is anything like the last few revisions of OS X, it should be at the very least faster and better performing, as well as introducing the joy of OS X upgrades to thousands of switchers whose only experience with the word “Upgrade” tends to rather negatively associate with the words “re-format”, “De-fragment”, and “Data loss”. Even if for that reason, we can be excited about the new cat in town.
