David Emery Online

Hi there, I’m David. This is my website. I work in music for Apple. You can find out a bit more about me here. On occasion I’ve been known to write a thing or two. Please drop me a line and say hello. Views mine not my employers.

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Outed

26 October 2007

My name is David Emery and I’m a sad geek.

Better to just get it out in the open, although I hazard a guess you might have realised already.

The content of today’s post – as you may have also guessed already – is boring, sad, geeky and also repeated everywhere across the rest of the internet. I am, of course, talking about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

I’ve now had it installed for about a day and all in all it’s really very nice. It’s not a massive revolution by any means, but it’s packed full of features that are really pretty great to use on a day to day basis. Greatness by a thousand cuts or some such. There are lots of tweaks to almost everything – none of them really very large, but all of them useful, and lots of them that are to the underlying structure which should ensure we get some pretty startling 3rd party apps coming out for Leopard.

The biggest improvement for me has to be the myriad of improvements to the Finder. The networking is so much better, which has been a real bug-bear for quite a while, and the integration of VNC (called Screen Sharing) into it is really, really nice. The visual redesign is very nice – the Finder, with Cover Flow on – really looks like iTunes now which is no bad thing. Cover Flow is worth highlighting, actually, as it’s far more handy then I thought it would be; I’ve kept it on which really surprises me (it’s the speedy file previewing that really makes it). The whole Quick Look thing (you press the space bar and get a pop-up preview of a file) is also very well done, and as quick as it appears in the demos on the Apple site.

More thoughts, in handy list form:

  • The transparent menu bar is really quite nice if you’re a fan of auto-changing desktop pictures (like me).
  • The shiny Dock is actually pretty cool, but then I’m a total sucker for eye candy.
  • Stacks in the Dock are really good – perfect for using for your download folder (and, like everything else, very quick)
  • Mail.app isn’t as different as I thought it was,really. I don’t think I’ll use Notes, but I might use to-dos and RSS (it’s going to be useful for work RSS feeds I don’t want in Bloglines). The Data Detectors are pretty cool, though.
  • iCal hasn’t changed much, but seems much nicer. I particularly like the new pop-up info viewer.
  • I’ve already given up trying to use Spaces; I – like a lot of over people I suspect – just don’t really get on with virtual desktops.
  • Time Machine is the most brilliantly over the top piece of eye candy I’ve ever seen.
  • Holding down shift still slows animations down all over the place (Time Machine, Stacks, Spaces…).
  • I don’t use iChat (I use MSN as well as AIM, so it has to be Adium for me) but it looks like a very solid update.
  • The only thing that seems to have broken for me is Mail.app bundles – specifically MailTags and Mail.appetizer. MailTags are bringing out an update next week, but I’m a bit worried about Mail.appetizer as it hasn’t been updated since 2005.
  • For anyone else interested, the new Mail.app stationairy templates are stored in /Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources/ (which is a pretty silly path if you ask me) and seem consist of a bundle (presented as a .mailstationery file) of html, images and a simple .plist description file. They seem to be fairly easy to edit as well.
  • Safari 3 is pretty good, I guess, but I’m totally in OmniWeb land so I haven’t used it much.

All in all, it’s well worth upgrading (unsurprisingly).

From: Articles

26 October 2007