So is all the hype about Leopard warranted? Yes and no. A look at some of Mac OS X 10.5's newest features, both the highly publicized and the well-hidden. (Sometimes the low-key enhancements outshine the flashy ones.)

My previous post on my Leopard upgrade experiences described some of the glitches I encountered with the installation process and its aftermath. Here, I give my impressions about the post-install Leopard experience, including both new user interface features and underlying system enhancements. Some of the things that grabbed my attention were not necessarily the most prominently mentioned in the hype surrounding Leopard's arrival. But then again, I'm a geek, and find the more esoteric geeky things more fascinating anyway...

Cover Flow - A big deal was made about the new look of the OS X Finder. There was to be a new view option, reminiscent of iTunes' cover flow mode. In iTunes, you get to flip through all your album cover art, and scroll horizontally to the album you want to listen to. In the new Finder, you get to flip through iconified preview images of all the files in a folder, and pick the file or folder you want to open. (This is actually a really neat addition, the ability to see desktop and folder icons as a preview image of the file contents, but this is an example of OS X actually catching up to Windows, isn't it?) In iTunes, this process works, it's like you're actually flipping through a milk carton filled with LPs (for those who remember such things). In the Leopard Finder, it just doesn't feel right. Two-finger scrolling is wildly unpredictable, making it difficult to land on the right file. It's also not at all intuitive how subfolder navigation is supposed to work. The list below the cover flow preview images is reminiscent of the tree view, but with limitations.

Quick Look - Now, coupled with Cover Flow is another new feature in the Finder, called Quick Look. You can right click on a file's preview icon and select the Quick Look option. A popup window opens up displaying the content of the file. If it's an image, you see the image. If it's a multi-page document, you see Page 1 and get the opportunity to scroll through. All well and good in the legacy Finder view modes... but why doesn't this work in Cover Flow? When I right-click on the Cover Flow image, I get... nothing. Disappointing.

Stacks - They're convenient and nice to look at, but ultimately not as useful as they ought to be. Basically, when you drop a folder icon into the Dock, you can pop-up a quick view of (most of) the contents of a folder by clicking on the item representing that folder in the dock. Great—but can you then click on one of the displayed files and open it? Oooh, sorry, no such luck.

The new Dock - And speaking of the Dock... some people love it, some people hate it. Most of the ones that hate it seem never to have liked any incarnation of the Dock since OS X was first release. The "shelf" look when the Dock is anchored to the bottom of the screen really doesn't disturb me as much as it seems to disturb others. Apple took notice of people's complaints that the "shelf" motif doesn't really work with the Dock attached to the side of the screen, so they eliminated the shelf look in that configuration. To me, it's not that big a deal. What is a big deal is the new way active applications are noted in the Dock: with a tiny white dot that's hard to see. Grrrr...

The new Finder sidebar - The Finder sidebar now looks like the iTunes sidebar. Whoopee. For the most part it's just a new look that doesn't really change the functionality of the interface that much and just takes some getting used to. The settings for the sidebar are still controlled through the Finder's Preferences option (not through System Preferences).

Integrated VNC Client - What is neat is the Screen Sharing functionality you get when you click on the icon for a "shared" computer. When you do this, the accompanying Finder window displays all the shares on the remote system. (Even the ones you don't have access to—not sure I find that appealing; plus an inaccessible but still disturbing "postfix" share appears that even Apple seems unable to explain or identify.) In the upper right, however, is the real prize: the "Share Screen" button that opens a secure VNC connection to the remote system. This built-in integrated VNC client seems at least as good as existing third-party clients and is much easier to use. (One user expressed remorse that he had to retire the Chicken of the VNC application.)

Multiple virtual desktops - The Leopard implementation of this functionality, called Spaces, is intuitive and quite usable. You can configure the number and kind of "spaces" you want, tell the system to open particular applications in specific spaces, and move from space to space quite easily. It automatically jumps you to the right space when switch applications using Command-Tab (or by clicking on icons in the Dock). I noticed that some applications are not really Spaces-friendly. I set all my Microsoft Office applications to open in a separate space, and they did, but for some I had to leave the space and come back for the document I had opened to appear. (The toolbars were all there at open time, just no document. Mind you, this is the now old and decrepit Microsoft Office 2004 suite, which is still all Rosetta-based.)

Enhancements to Preview - Far more impressive than all the visual tweaks to the Finder and the Dock are the enhancements to various applications, Preview foremost among them. If you've only used Preview as the default means of reading PDFs and viewing images, you'll be in for a shock. Preview can now annotate the PDFs you open, perform serious image editing functions (not just cropping) including colorizing and resizing, and even display slideshows. I'm only grazing the surface of the enhancements to Preview here. The fact is, most of what Preview used to do is now available through the aforementioned Quick Look functionality, so I guess it needs to be amped up a bit if it was going to continue to live on as a useful utility app.

Enhancements to Terminal - Three words: tabbed terminal windows. So very nice. Need I say more?

StartupItems vs. launchd - The /System/Library/StartupItems folder is empty. (If you don't know what this means or don't care, you can skip this part.) At first I was convinced something had gone wrong with my Leopard installation, but it turns out this is precisely as it should be. As promised, Apple has moved away from the "StartupItems" style of system startup controls and switched over to using launchd. Suffice to say that where there used to be folders in /System/Library/StartupItems for services like the web server, instead you find .plist files in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. This is just a warning so that the truly geeky among us won't panic when they see an empty /System/Library/StartupItems folder (the way I did).

The Web server - Also as promised, Apple upgraded the Apache Web server bundled with Leopard to version 2.2. I have yet to experiment with it yet, but it seems the upgrade to Apache 2.2 was pretty clean. While still running Tiger, I had done my own upgrade to Apache 2.2 based on instructions I found on the web (and comments I got from a friend who had gone through the process himself). The Leopard upgrade left my original upgrade (which I installed in /usr/local/apache2) untouched, and installed Apache into /etc/apache2. My next task there is to merge my configuration with the default configuration that the Leopard upgrade installed. But some questions still linger: where is Ruby on Rails, which is also supposed to have been bundled with Leopard?

Compatibility of other software - My Tomcat server is still running after the upgrade, and starts up by itself without incident. My MySQL database is also still running, despite numerous citations online that MySQL did not work with Leopard. (I think that may have been isolated to problems with MySQL's working with PHP, which I don't bother with on my system.) I recommend Googling for whatever application or server software you are dependent on before upgrading to Leopard, and upgrading those programs (or disabling/deleting them) as appropriate.

All in all, Leopard offers some nice usability enhancements, but many of those are really just bells and whistles that make things look fresh and new but don't add a lot to the user experience. Where Leopard shines is in what goes on under the hood: Screen Sharing, upgraded Apache server, enhancements to Preview and Terminal, and other deep features like Time Machine that I haven't even begun to use or test yet. I'm being cautious about my upgrades to my other systems, but will report on those as I manage to get to them.