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APPLE
seems to be doing a lot of things right these days.
In many
lecture halls and coffee shops, Mac laptops outnumber
those of any other manufacturer. The Mac share of the US
market is nearing 10 percent—a feat that seemed
unimaginable at the start of this decade, when Apple was
mired at 2 percent or 3 percent.
This
transformation might seem like a triumph of marketing,
especially to those versed in Windows. But Apple’s
success doesn’t come from those cute “Hi, I’m a Mac”
ads. It’s a product of a consistent focus on simplicity
and elegance, coupled with a willingness to rewrite
perfectly functional software if Apple thinks it can do
better.
Time travel.
The Time Machine
feature of the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard upgrade
automatically backs up your computer and lets you view
old versions of files.
Those
traits have led Apple to ship its sixth system update
since 2001, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Despite following so
many earlier updates, Leopard (included on new Macs,
$129 otherwise) still brings something new. It might
save you from losing your data, and it makes it easier
and faster to get to programs and files.
Leopard’s foremost feature, Time Machine, aims to cure
one of the oldest conundrums of home computing: Nobody
backs up their data, but everybody should.
Time
Machine all but ensures that you can’t lose your work,
because it automatically and regularly backs up your
computer. It also remembers your changes: If you edit a
file, it preserves the old and new versions in its
archives.
Time
Machine then lets you retrieve a lost file by clicking
through a nifty hall-of-mirrors view of your computer’s
past backups. When you’ve found it, click the “Restore”
button to put it back in its place. You do, however,
need an external hard drive—the one inside your Mac
won’t do, nor will CDs, DVDs, online file storage or
those little USB thumb drives. And if the drive is not
big enough to keep a copy of your entire system, you’ll
have to tell Time Machine what files to exclude.
The same
sense of pleasant simplicity shows up in the way Leopard
streamlines access to programs and files.
The big
deal here is Quick Look, a way to view most
documents—pictures, PDFs and even Microsoft Office
files—in the Finder or Apple’s Mail program. Pick a
file, hit the space bar, and its contents appear
instantly, without any wait for a separate program to
run. Tap the space bar again to hide the preview.
That
might not seem like much, but it adds up to serious time
savings. It shows that somebody at Apple has recognized
that people with functioning Internet connections have
more information than time.
The
Dock, the desktop strip of shortcuts to programs and
folders, offers a similar time-saver: You can open
programs and files by selecting them from the
transparent palettes that appear when you click on your
Applications and Documents folders.
Leopard’s Internet software includes its own helpful
shortcut—you can read Web pages without opening your Web
browser.
To do
this, click the Web Clip scissors icon in the Safari
browser to copy a page to the Dashboard, Leopard’s
gallery of little “widget” applications. You’ll see the
latest version of that page when you open the Dashboard.
That’s a
terrific help for sites that don’t publish updates of
their content in automated updates known as RSS feeds.
So, for example, I can use it to track my Evite
invitations without having to visit that ad-littered
site.
If a
site does offer RSS updates, you can view those in
Leopard’s Mail program. This e-mail application also
shows your to-do list and text notes you’ve jotted down.
Finally,
you can even use Windows programs on a Mac running
Leopard. Its Boot Camp software will put Windows XP or
Vista on your Mac, which you can run instead of OS X at each
startup. The new version upgrades OS X’s already strong
security as well as the look of the software itself.
Some of these adjustments (like its simplified
system-preferences window) work, but others suggest that
Apple is trying too hard.
For
instance, its transparent menu bar and pull-down menus
can be hard to read on top of the background.
And
Leopard’s online help system gets in the way: Its window
can’t be pushed to the background, blocking your view of
the program you needed help using.
Like
earlier Mac operating-system releases, Leopard doesn’t
work with some older Macs—in this case, those with
slower G4 processors. If your Mac is more than three
years old, you’re probably better off declining this
upgrade.
Leopard
also evicts many older programs by removing the
“Classic” software that ran applications written for the
old, pre-OS X Mac system software. Even some new Mac
programs can malfunction in Leopard, though that should
change as developers update their work.
For many
Windows users looking at Macs, however, Leopard’s best
feature may be what it leaves out: Unlike Windows Vista,
it won’t lock you out of your machine if it thinks you
didn’t pay for your copy.
****
Trouble Spots in Leopard
Editor’s
note: The following is from Rob Pegoraro’s “Faster
Forward” blog on washingtonpost.com
AS
people have continued to install Leopard—the new Mac OS
X operating system from Apple that I reviewed last
week—a couple of issues have emerged.
One is a
nasty bug that can cause you to lose files that you’re
moving to a different hard drive or computer if their
destination becomes suddenly unavailable. For example,
if you unplug an external hard drive by mistake or if
your network connection to a server hiccups. Blogger Tom
Karpik documents the issue with numerous screenshots
(http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopard/)
and a plea for Apple to fix the problem: “This is
unacceptable.” The MacInTouch blog provides additional
detail (http://www.macintouch.com/leopard/movebug.html),
including advice on how to avoid getting bitten by this
bug.
The
other is the design of Leopard’s firewall, which on
closer inspection by security experts has revealed some
disturbing aspects. Mac security consultant Rich
Mogull’s writeup in the TidBits newsletter (http://db.tidbits.com/article/9294)
explains how the firewall can leave your Mac less secure
than before, how it can cause some programs to
malfunction and how, even when active, it will still
allow some incoming network traffic. Mogull concludes:
All of
these behaviors are considered “bad” on the whole
firewall good/bad scale.
The way
I’d put it is that Leopard’s firewall setup looks
uncomfortably like Windows at its worst. If you’d like
more technical details about this issue, see Mogull’s
analysis on his own blog (http://securosis.com/2007/11/01/investigating-the-leopard-firewall/).
I still
think Leopard is a good operating system and a worthy
upgrade from Tiger. But if you don’t have a firewall on
your home’s wireless router protecting your computers or
you often move files from one computer to another, you
should think about holding off on installing Leopard
until Apple fixes these problems. (As for myself, I have
my own reasons to delay upgrading to Leopard—the
software I use to sync my smartphone isn’t compatible
with it yet.) |
