Apple's Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system upgrade is full of good stuff, but there's room for improvement. Lots and lots of it. We asked Harry McCracken - editor of PC Advisor's US sister title PC World, and an avowed Mac fan - to list his gripes, requests and puzzlements.
Leopard's good, here's how to make it great
First, a disclaimer: I like Leopard, aka Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, the Apple operating-system upgrade. True, Apple's list of 300+ new features includes several dozen I'll never touch. (A Danish dictionary! Analysis templates, whatever those are!)
But even when I filter out everything that doesn't matter to me, I'm left with a long list of stuff that'll make my computing life meaningfully better. Compared to Windows Vista, Leopard is a meatier, more polished, more immediately useful, less annoying OS upgrade.
But while I've been working my way through everything that's new in Leopard, and being impressed by much of it, I've also come across a fairly long list of quirks and gotchas - the kind of stuff I hope Apple will iron out in Leopard updates. Without any further ado, here's my list... which will probably get longer the more I dig into the upgrade.
See also: Mac, PC or Linux? Your next operating system
1. Time Machine is picky about hard drives - or, more specifically, hard disk formats. The cool continuous backup utility wants to work with drives formatted with Apple's own HFS+ format, not FAT32, the Microsoft format which the rest of OS X can speak. That's understandable.
But I don't understand why, when I plugged in a new Seagate Free Agent USB drive formatted as FAT32, Time Machine didn't seem to be aware of its existence at all. A "Hey, you need to reformat this as HFS+" message would have made things easier. (My storage-loving colleague Melissa Perenson has run across similar issues.)
2. Speaking of external drives, I wish that Time Machine, like the vaguely similar (but far less slick) backup features in Windows Vista, could back up to a portion of your primary drive as well as to a secondary disk.
Yes, it's a lot safer to put your backups on a different drive. But if you've got a MacBook or MacBook Pro, chances are that you're not going to keep it connected to an external drive most of the time, as Time Machine requires for optimum effectiveness.
3. I like Time Machine's quirky, slightly silly flying-through-space user interface - really I do. But I wouldn't object if there was a simpler, more streamlined alternate UI, too; when I'm freaking out over a lost file, I'm not always in the mood to be entertained.
4. Leopard introduces more transparency effects - most strikingly with the menu bar along the top of the screen, which lets whatever wallpaper you've got behind it seep through. To me, this "feature" is at best ugly. And at worst - as with my wallpaper of a night scene in Hong Kong - it renders some of the items in the menu bar close to unreadable. That wouldn't be a problem if there were a "Turn off transparency effects" option.
5. When you click on a Help menu item in Leopard, you get a special menu with a built-in search field and list of results. Which sounds handy, except that longer titles in the list of results sometimes get cut off, rendering them unintelligible even though there'd be plenty of room to display the entire title. Gratuitous text-chopping is a crudity I associate with Windows, not OS X.
Comments
Andy said: You CAN use a partition on the same disk for Time Machine as you mentioned this is handy for laptop users Did you even try and do this before writing this article OSX even warns you that backing up to the same physical drive is not as secure It would be handy if you could configure multiple time machine drives though so that you could have your convenience backup on your laptop and your safety backup on your external drive at home
Dorian said: You are right on with the Window Maximizing issue It is the largest cause of more mouse clicks than anything else on OSX second only to the lack of menu items shortcuts which is the reason many Windows users refuse to move to the MacThe green button should be able to maximize to both full screen with one click and back to the max space needed to show the entire content of a window this a second clickIn addition each column should smart adjust to show its content without cutting off document or folders names Its totally insane having to constantly move the mouse to the bottom of the window to adjust a column so that one can read its content It is so annoyingI hope Steve is listeningThanksDorian MattarITGraphics Management
Dorian said: You are right on with the Window Maximizing issue It is the largest cause of more mouse clicks than anything else on OSX second only to the lack of menu items shortcuts which is the reason many Windows users refuse to move to the MacThe green button should be able to maximize to both full screen with one click and back to the max space needed to show the entire content of a window this a second clickIn addition each column should smart adjust to show its content without cutting off document or folders names Its totally insane having to constantly move the mouse to the bottom of the window to adjust a column so that one can read its content It is so annoyingI hope Steve is listeningThanksDorian MattarITGraphics Management
Mr. Reeee said: Ditto to Harrys not Mac Expert Folders in the Dock have been a feature since the OS X Public Beta in 2000 Im not much of a Dock fan and keep mine hidden I prefer using LaunchBar for finding and launching apps Its MUCH quicker than extra mousing aroundTo me Stacks feel like an eye candy kludge I set mine for grid mode as the swooping default arc is distracting and hard to read My biggest complaint is that the new Finder window Sidebar Too much iTunes already The icons are locked to one size unless I missed something The text is too small and does NOT scale along with icons as it does in Tiger Overall it feels kind of dark and claustrophobic In comparison Finder windows in Tiger feel much more open and less intrusiveI figure that either Apple or more likely an enterprising third party will release some utility that gives us some level of visual adjust for Finder windows and the Dock
George said: Web Clips ought to be called web masks It doesnt clip anything It loads the whole page into dashboard and then masks it so you only see the clipped part To see what I mean flip a clip widget over and edit the clipping Youll see that the whole page is actually open but a clipping mask has been used on it to control what is visibleDont know what your problem is with DVD Player Mine generates the thumbnails just To display them while watching a movie full screen I just move the cursor up to where the menu bar would be and they drop down Similarly if I move to the bottom of the screen the remote pops up This does not work if youre using Front Row to watch the DVD Mouse input seems to be disabled in that case
Harry's no Mac expert said: Um Harry you call yourself a Mac expert yet you didnt know that you could put folders on the right-hand side of the dock Thats been there since 2000 And since you didnt know that information then you dont realize that stacks are actually 10 STEPS BACKWARDS in functionality amp ease-of-use based on how folders USED to work in the dock when you could HIERARCHICALLY drill through them
Gene Warech said: How do you kow you dont want analysis templates without knowing what they are
Geoff said: I use Mega Zoom in tiger - not sure if its out for leopard - and it works fine to maximise a window totally It even removes the menu bar
henk said: Except for the full screen comment I mostly agree with you With your desktop always behind stuff it is and has always been harder to loose your way on Mac than it is on a PC As a Mac user for over twenty years I have to agree with your comments on customisability under OSX In the age old Aplle menu it was possible to drag anything into it and have it readily available in a clear way It is now possible to access files and applications in ever more ways in OSX But indeed it seems at times tha each of these ways have their own limitations
Jim Schimpf said: On using TimeMachine with one drive You can do it just partition the drive note TimeMachine partition must be about 12 to 15 as big as the boot drive It complains when you do this but it works fine
Bruce said: Oh no way on maximizing windows to fill the screen by any default action I hate the windows approach where u have a window blocking the whole screen What other than a badly written web page or a large spreadsheet can fill or justify at window that wide
Jonathan said: Your last comment wishing that macs would allow you maximize applications to fill the whole screen is an age old philosophical debate between mac and windows users Personally I prefer the mac way of doing things which is geared to multi tasking with the zoom button resizing windows to the size they need to be Having your computer taken over by one app just seems so old fashioned to me
Joe said: While most of your comments are legitimate I consider the majority to be trivial or just need to get used to issues 13 however is a major issue Under Tiger you could open any file on your hard drive in a single click and drag That functionality has been lost with Leopard Since I open different files on my hard drive all day long I cant put the files or folders Im going to need into the Dock so it costs me a huge amount of extra time every day Apple needs to restore that functionality
Matt said: my problem with web clips is that there is no scroll bar option I want to size the portion of the page to include in the web clip independently of the actual size of the web clip in dashboard I have wanted to create many clips that are just to big to include in my dashboard or even on my screen
jon bee said: who cares what web clips are called you are way too picky man the only real complaint here is that stacks dont fill the screen and you cant browse in stacks other than that this whole article was just some guy complaining so he would have something to do