Assorted Afflatuses

On Friday, 26 October, insane Apple fanatics once again gathered outside of the Cupertino-based company's retail stores to obtain the first publicly available copies of Mac OS X "Leopard." As I possess some dignity and a certain measure of sanity, I waited until Saturday morning to pick up my copy. No queues of crazy people. No problems.

By and large, I like Leopard. Apple has made a number of subtle, well-conceived changes to key applications, like Mail, iCal and the Finder, that add extra polish to the already stellar Mac OS. QuickLook — the nifty new technology that permits one to open a full preview of common document formats like Word, Excel and Keynote files — makes hunting down documents and photos far less of a chore. iCal no longer keeps event information squirreled away in an awkward drawer on the right or left side of the calendar. Instead, version 3 of Apple's calendaring software implements a rather charming pop-up editor that the software displays inline with the rest of the schedule.

The biggest improvements in Leopard, however, are under the hood. Though clever and thoughtful engineering, Apple has managed to dramatically improve application responsiveness and performance. In large part, they have accomplished this by better leveraging the dual- and quad-core processors that reside in newer Intel-based Macs. Everything — from Safari to Spotlight — responds much more quickly on Leopard than on Tiger with the same hardware.

Developers can also leverage a host of amazing new tools like Core Animation, the visual fireworks behind many of Leopard's visual improvements. Apple has also ushered in the era of Objective-C 2.0 with Leopard's Xcode 3. It finally frees developers from Cocoa's often confusing memory management scheme with garbage collection and, with properties, eliminates much of the monotony of creating accessor and mutator methods.

On the other hand, two integral elements of Mac OS X took a sharp turn for the worse. I speak of the Dock and the menu bar. As many commentators have already noted, the "improved" transparent menu bar is not only a superfluous use of transparency, but also quite detrimental to usability. With some desktop pictures, it is next to impossible to decipher the menu's text composited over the unsightly visual mélange of gradient and photograph.

Apple's decision to make the Dock a pseudo-three-dimensional reflective shelf is, to my retinas, what the Ottoman army was to the people of 15th century Constantinople. Its presence, superimposed on the two-dimensional desktop, is quite incongruous. But, more than the simple visual unpleasantness the new Dock imposes, I really dislike the new Stacks feature of the dock. Where once I could stash folders and files, and click once to open them or click and hold to view a folder's contents, I am now forced to use Apple's ridiculous "Stacks."

Fortunately, I managed to whip up a special, modified version of Apple's once-default Aqua Blue desktop picture (and my neutral desktop picture of choice) with a strategically positioned strip of white at the top, which gives one the illusion of an opaque menu bar. (Interested parties may download a copy from my flickr account).

Nonetheless, I strongly recommend that every Mac user make the leap and upgrade to Apple's latest cat-named operating system. Apple's subtle improvements and the amazing potential of Leopard's new system-level features make Leopard an essential upgrade.