The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

As of today, it has now been a full five weeks since I installed Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook. It is no secret that I gave much more focus to Leopard than I gave to the iPhone during its late-June release, and that is because I am a Mac user and the first new OS X release in two and a half years is much more important to me. That’s why, during the week of the Leopard launch, I counted down to the Leopard release in my own way with my Tiger-to-Leopard series, which attempted to put the time difference between Tiger and Leopard into perspective. Then, for the 30 days of November, I wrote my Leopard Feature Presentation series, which selected one new feature per day from Mac OS X Leopard and reviewed it based on my experiences with that feature. Not only has it given me the chance to express my opinions about what I think of Leopard, doing the Leopard Feature Presentation has forced me to discover some of the other new features in Leopard that I might otherwise have overlooked.

So now that I have dedicated a full 45 (now 46) posts on my blog to covering Mac OS X Leopard, and have been using Leopard earnestly for the past 35 days, I will now make my final review of Mac OS X Leopard and do a final recap of the Leopard Feature Presentations during the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

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Probably the most apparent aspect of Leopard to someone who is upgrading to it from Tiger or previous versions of Mac OS X is that it has been given a thorough cleanup job by Apple. The vast majority of the new features and user interface tweaks in Leopard have been made to bring all of Mac OS X up to par with its other features and also Apple’s over apps. The new unified interface eliminates the differing window environments and gives every window the same look, and allows the looks to stand out in the process. The new sidebar style that premiered in iTunes 7 (and was later reinforced by iLife ’08) now exists consistently across the Leopard applications. Via the Open & Save panels, every application now has access to an iLife media browser, and Leopard now includes the few “straggler” applications like Photo Booth, Front Row, and Boot Camp, which until now were solely available bundled with new Macs.

The Leopard release has also been a lot about cleaning stuff up from prior releases. For example, Spotlight, the premiere feature of Tiger, has been much improved both functionally and in terms of features. iChat has finally been updated to be more “on par” with modern day IM applications by providing a number of new text chatting features that other clients like Adium have had for quite awhile. And Safari 3 has made a number of changes to WebKit to be much more compatible with many of the recent developments on the virtual place that we call the world wide web.

And finally, I have appreciated that Leopard is a lot more user-friendly. Leopard’s new Help Viewer finally makes it easier to find help, with the easier to use help windows and the search box right in the Help menu. The new Finder makes it tremendously easier to connect to Shared computers on a Network, or via the internet (if you have .Mac’s Back to My Mac set up). The AirPort Utility and Network preference pane have been completely redesigned to be much simpler to the average user. iCal has been redesigned to be much cleaner, much more professional, and much more easier to use (plus the Dock icon finally updates itself!). And, Leopard is much more family friendly by finally bringing along a 21st century-era set of Parental Controls and through the excellent Guest Account feature.

But of course, what would be a Mac OS release with a few innovations? Not much of one. The premiere new feature of Leopard is Time Machine, which truly can be considered the first computer backup solution that is drop-dead simple (once you buy an external hard drive for it!). iChat brings you weird effects (for the people with too much time on their hands), but also useful collaboration features such as iChat Theater and Screen Sharing. Spaces finally brings the geeky idea of virtual desktops to the practical era by making them really easy to use. And Quick Look finally makes it much easier to quickly preview documents and media without having to wait for applications to use.

Leopard does have a share of downsides, and does suffer a bit from an “Apple knows best” syndrome in the fact that a number of features don’t come with preferences to allow the user to choose what he/she wants in his/her user experience, and probably the best example of this concerns Apple’s new desktop, translucent menu bar, and 3D Dock. However, one of the Mac’s biggest pros is that there is an active community of developers who have come up with solutions or alternative options to some of Leopard’s oversights (something that is currently not possible on the iPhone, I might add). Indeed, I have reviewed a number of those solutions on this blog, and will be reviewing more of them soon.

Nevertheless, there is at least one new feature in Leopard that will be the deal-clincher for everyone, and as you can see from my reviews of the past 30 days, there have been a few deal-clincher features for me, and the other features will also prove useful to users. Therefore, I can fairly say that overall, Mac OS X Leopard is a successful and worthwhile update, and definitely worth the $129, which is much more than can be said for Windows Vista.

Final Rating:

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Leopard Feature Presentation Recap:
Here is a recap of every Leopard Feature Presentation that I posted during the 30 days of November, and my final “Feature Satisfaction Rating”, out of a maximum of five W’s. Click on the feature name to read my review.

11/1: New User Interface & Dock

11/2: Help

11/3: Quick Look

11/4: Photo Booth

11/5: Open & Save Panels

11/6: Screen Savers

11/7: Spaces

11/8: Dictionary

11/9: Software Update

11/10: AirPort Utility

11/11: Network

11/12: Finder

11/13: Terminal

11/14: Mail

11/15: Printing

11/16: Spotlight

11/17: Front Row

11/18: DVD Player

11/19: iCal

11/20: Safari

11/21: Screen Sharing

11/22: Dashboard

11/23: Dashcode

11/24: Guest Account

11/25: Parental Controls

11/26: iChat

11/27: Back to My Mac

11/28: Preview

11/29: Automator

11/30: Time Machine uhh…

Finally, thanks to everyone of you who read my blog (and hopefully have read these thirty reviews). I do all this work not only because I want to express my opinions, but because I hope that I can share some insight and information with you, and I hope that these articles have been helpful in this way.

The November 2007 Webmacster87.info Best Of (which will cover everything else from the month) will be posted tomorrow. Stay tuned…