I have been with OS X 10.x since x was zero (I am afraid that I didn't ever try the public beta because it seemed to be impossible to actually work with it). It was fun being an early adopter. Things were rough around the edges, but we were getting an idea of a new way of working. I still remember when I first saw the dock with its magnification, and it was striking just how different it was. 10.1 came as a free upgrade (what else could Apple do – 10.0 really wasn't really ready for production use except for the adventurous few). 10.2 saw what I thought was a proper professionalisation of OS X, and 10.3 saw what I thought was more-or-less the completion of the transition (with new features such as Exposé and fast user switching). During these versions we saw the introduction of tools such as ichat, and public beta versions of ical, isync, safari and X11. It was actually quite exciting.
Then we got to 10.4, which seemed to be to be somewhat underwhelming. I fear I have hardly made any use of widgets at all, mostly because they didn't seem to give me anything of value that a bookmarked browser would give. Spotlight seemed like a decent idea, but over time it seemed to me to be not quite as useful as I had been hoping. 10.4 stuck me, in conclusion, as being a set of small upgrades that certainly improved things in many ways (including new tools such as Dictionary), but without any obvious vision.
So we come to 10.5, which seemed to me to be prefaced by quite a lot of hype. Having now had it running on my three systems for a few days, I am no less underwhelmed than I was with 10.4. In fact it is worse, because some of the things I was hoping for seem not to work. In fact, I wonder whether in the rush to get 10.5 released (remember it was slowed down by the iPhone – it is almost as if 10.5 took too low a priority within Apple) there are too many loose ends still remaining to be tied. Take for example the translucent menu bar. Whilst this appears to be reviled by many, there appears to be no way to change how transparent it is. But there are a number of systems for which there is no transparency at all, and a strange note to this effect in Apple's knowledge base. I don't care whether I have a transparent menu bar or not, but the fact that I am supposed to have it and don't suggests to me that we will be seeing some bug fixes in the coming months.
The feature I was really looking forward to was "Back to my mac". I have a .mac account and I do need to access my home computer from other places. But it just doesn't work, and again, there is a page on this in Apple's knowledge base.
Spaces is a nice feature and appears to be better implemented than VirtueDesktop which I had before (I had to give up on that because palettes became separated from main windows in applications such as Pages – Spaces appears to do a better job in this regard). However, it is not near to being perfect. I don't always end up in the right place when going to a different application, and too often I watch it going around various windows before it finds what I want (making one almost sea sick!). It doesn't always go to an open Finder window correctly.
I will never use Bootcamp nor Webclip. Dictionary having access to wikipedia is neat, but hardly essential. When I buy a new disk Time Machine looks worth a look (I don't want to overwrite my current backup disks). I hope that Spotlight proves more useful that its previous incarnation. I am hoping that Stacks will work, but I suspect it will need a bit more work than I was hoping. Finder coverflow seems to me to be too slow to be useful. On a negative, something in the security model (probably with TSL) has killed my use of my department's email system.
In short, 10.5 looks different round the edges, and it seems to have some small useful tweaks (like Dictionary), but I see no big vision. In fact I would say that the number of small tweaks is actually quite impressive, and I can imagine it being fun coming across them one by one. For example, I have just come across the link between Address Book and Google Maps. It is nice. Screen sharing could be interesting, but when I tried it out my daughter was using my desktop and it came down to a tool for spying! 'Creepy' was the reaction. Icon preview could be useful, but there will be times when it might be a nuisance. Quicklook might be better.
What seems to me to be a pity is that some nice tweaks could be given away for free in the incremental updates. For example, adding tabs to terminal, or obtaining address information from emails, are small tweaks that would be nice to suddenly fund in an incremental update. The fact that Apple stores these up for one of the 300 new features in a large paid-for upgrade suggests to me that Apple is running out of a big vision for OS X. Of course, it would be churlish to complain, because effectively we now have a very robust and usably operating system that is apparently very hard to improve upon.
Comments
I agree that it is not as impressive as I had hoped and this has led to a feeling of disappointment.
There are some things about Spaces that are better than VirtueDesktop, in my opinion, and some things that were better IN VirtueDesktop. For example, I think using the exposé-like interface for Spaces is better than the VirtueDesktop interface, but VirtueDesktop did not tie an application to a window if you docked it [I found that was a useful way of moving applications from one window to another - shrink application into dock, move to other window, unshrink from dock] whereas with Spaces it seems the only way to move an application from one window to another is to press F8 to present the set of shrunken windows and drag the application from one space to another. Once you have opened an application in a window it is tied to that window even if you have docked it. I find this a particular irritation with iTunes - I want it to be playing but out of the way most of the time - with VirtueDesktop I could just unshrink it from the dock quickly and then put it back again and get on with whatever I was doing, but with Spaces I get switched to another window (whichever one I opened iTunes up in) and then have to switch back to where I was working - this is not something huge, but we're supposed t be saying "it's the little things that Apple gets right that make the whole experience better".
The new dock, with stacks, is also a disappointment - I couldn't care less about the glass shelf because I always have my dock on the side of the screen and never see it. The look for the dock on the side - a translucent dark grey - is fine if you have a light coloured desktop but awful (in my view) if you have a dark desktop (as in the new default desktop image). Hence my first reaction to the new dock was "yugh!". I'm over that, but stacks is still an issue. I don't like the way the icon for a folder changes to the icon for the first item in whatever sort order you have chosen. It is no longer obvious what is a folder and what is a file. When you open a stack with many files the grid display is unusable. It is "cute" to see the thumbnails of the first pages of some documents and the quite pleasant images for some generic file types, but I am well past the stage of limiting my file names to 12 characters, which means that most of the names of my files are truncated and illegible until I call up a proper finder window. Two clicks instead of one. One step forward two steps back.
The biggest plus, I think, is that Leopard seems to me (subjectively) to be a little quicker.
I think iCal is supposed to be much more usable for sharing calendars than before - I will check that out and hope it is true.
Mail has a few tweaks - the auto-detection of names and dates and the integration with iCal will, I think, be quite useful - but this was not an obvious thing - I stumbled on it by accident when my cursor was floating above the word "tomorrow" in a mail message and a little drop-down menu appeared. I can imagine some people using the new Notes and To Do list features, but I don't think I will be one of them - they are not bad features, it's just that I have a way of working already and they don't fit in.
Similarly, I don't think I need iChat to share files. In the middle of a chat I might use it but it doesn't solve a problem I had.
Time Machine is obviously a good idea, but I have not tried it out and probably won't in the near future - I don't need another backup option on the desktop, and my laptop really does spend most of it's waking life on my lap, and not connected to a massive external disk. The initial promise of being able to do this through one of the new Airport base stations was appealing, but was withdrawn just before release of Leopard.
The interface to Spotlight is better than it was before, but still does not give users access to the full power of the underlying engine.
In a sense, I am frustrated by this upgrade because I think it really IS better than Tiger, but as far as the user experience is concerned it is mostly by small increments. And the new features seem promising but do not fulfil the promise yet. I wouldn't willingly downgrade to Tiger, but I find it hard to pinpoint why someone using Tiger should rush to upgrade.
Ian Frame on Tuesday, 13 November 2007, 10:03 UTC # |
Updated to 10.5.1. First impressions are
- Back-to-my-mac (including both file sharing and screen sharing) now appears to work more consistently than before.
- Internet sharing giving out IP addresses via DHCP seemed not to work.
- I note that the firewall now tells more of the truth, but that is cosmetic.
Other point to make is that I am really liking QuickLook, which works well in several different contexts. I would add that since this is linked to CoverFlow, I actually realise that CoverFlow is useful for browsing (particularly when pruning out old useless files) because you can see what you are looking at without having to open it.Martin Dove on Friday, 16 November 2007, 08:16 UTC # |