Leopard Review: The Big Ticket Items By Francine Schwieder

I'm not going to comprehensively cover everything, rather I'm going to concentrate on the things that have particularly engaged my attention, both favorably and not so much. To see a comprehensive list of the features in Leopard, visit Apple's own promo page.

The Big Ticket Items:

Quick Look is hands down my favorite addition. Right from the start it is fantastically useful, instantly displaying the contents of all sort of files. The combination of the new Cover Flow window view option, used in conjunction with Quick Look, is a very handy way to scroll thru a folder's contents when you want to find something and need to actually inspect files to do so. The appearance of items in Cover Flow is determined by whether or not the file has a custom thumbnail. Apple is moving to 512x512 thumbs from 128x128. If Finder draws the thumbs, they look great, if it displays custom thumbnails they'll look a bit shabby. Hey, if you want to see something REALLY horrible, take a look at some Photoshop images saved with Photoshop's custom thumbs from the 1990s. I think those were 32x32, and on my old 7100 it was way cool--Windows 95 didn't even HAVE custom thumbs. Here's what the old thumbs look like in icon view at a mere 128 setting (not even the possible giant size available in Cover Flow):

I remember when Macs moved to the 128x128 thumbs, and how gorgeous and detailed they looked, compared to the old ones. And, of course, eventually a Photoshop update moved to that sized custom thumbs as well. Apple is now in the process of moving to 512x512 custom thumbs, but the old custom thumbs are still at 128. The result is that you can leave your old thumbs in place, which will result in the standard icon view window loading really fast, or you can have NO custom thumbs and just let the Finder draw thumbs "on the fly" for you. If you strip the thumbs, using something like CocoThumbX, then a folder in icon view may take a few seconds to generate the thumbs, but they will look gorgeous when you use Cover Flow. No doubt Adobe will also eventually update to the bigger thumbs, but right now they are still at 128x128, and if an item has a custom thumb Finder assumes that's what you want to use and displays them. If you have the size of the Cover Flow section of the Finder window set to take advantage of Apple's 512 thumbs then those thumbnails created by Finder will look lovely, but Adobe's custom thumbs will be blown up by a factor of 4 and look terrible. You can either shrink the Cover Flow section down to the optimum size for the custom thumbs, or you can strip them off and let Finder draw them. You can even use an Automator workflow to replace them with thumbs drawn by the system rather than by Photoshop (which is what I've been doing). Here's a sample of both icon view and Cover Flow, all the thumbs are custom ones, and all were created using the Automator action:

If the item you are looking at is a text file, when you bring up the Quick Look view you can not only read it, but there is a scroll bar to allow you to see the whole thing. Works with many text formats, including PDF, RTF and plain text. It works with most Microsoft Word documents, though I have some where it doesn't. It displays html files as they would look if opened in a browser, although it doesn't display Safari's own webarchive files. As time goes on more things can be added to its abilities, someone just has to write the plugin.

Time Machine

Time Machine is the handiest backup solution ever. The only external drive I had handy was 150GBs, but I wanted to try TM. My startup drive is 250GBs, but I only have 53GBs on it. Time Machine created its backup on the external, no problem. I immediately decided hourly backups were insane (that's the default setting, and there is no way to set a different schedule), so I turned automatic backups off and backup "by hand" once or twice a day. The files I create/change in the course of a day are text files and Photoshop files (in the 1 to 10MB range). I've now had Time Machine going for almost three weeks, and the Time Machine drive has gained 2.5GBs in size over the startup drive. So it looks like at this rate, an increase of about 1GB a week, I may not have to buy a bigger drive for quite some time.

You don't get fine grained control: I chose to exclude specific volumes (my Leopard clone drive, my Tiger drive, and my Data only partition, which has all my old files, and copies of new ones from the startup drive--I'm big on redundancy!). So Time Machine is only backing up the Leopard startup drive, and it backs up everything it is set to backup. I understand you can exclude certain folders as well, but I don't have any folders that have huge multi-GB files (such as PC drives from VPC days or the giant dotMac iDisk image). If I did, I would have excluded them, as any change to such a file causes to TM to write the whole dang thing to the backup, which would fill the backup in nothing flat. AFAIK there is no way to change what file types TM does or does not include. This led to my only disappointment with Time Machine--the only thing I really wanted to recover so far was a cache database file and I discovered that it was not backed up. Ah well.

The Revamped Dock with Stacks, Spaces and the Sidebar

The new Sidebar is, like the Dock, inferior to the Tiger version. They decided to use the the iTunes window as their model. That means it is large, not really resizable, has screaming section headers, and if you turn it off you also lose the toolbar. Unfortunately it won't be going away, and there isn't much you can do about it.

Spaces confused me when I used it in various Linux distros. It still confuses me in Mac OS X. Perhaps you'll love it.

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