OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) is a big upgrade that delivers flashy new features like Time Machine and Spaces. It also introduces interface changes that any veteran Mac user will notice. But as a law student, the most significant aspects of Leopard are the functionality refinements that allow me to accomplish more tasks in less time. For that reason, I’ll focus this review on how Leopard affects productivity.
Obligatory Exam Software Warning
If you don’t know whether your school will support Leopard for exams, check with the IT department before you make the leap to Leopard.
Installation
On my 15″ PowerBook (1.67GHz, 1Gb RAM), the installation process was effortless. I used the default installation procedure and it took about two hours (including the installation disc check). I backed up my entire hard drive to a LaCie external drive the night before, using SuperDuper.
Finding and Sorting Your Stuff
Spaces has grabbed a lot of attention, but I’m not sure how often I’ll actually use it. The concept behind Spaces is that you can create multiple virtual screens and toggle between them as needed. Imagine you’re researching some statutes and case law using Lexis-Nexis in one browser and Westlaw in another, taking notes from your findings in OmniOutliner Pro, and adding snippets to the rough draft of your research paper in Pages. You then decide to set up a study session with a classmate. You open a new Space, and fire up Mail and iCal. Although your browsers, OmniOutliner Pro, and Pages are still open, you don’t see them in this Space. They’re effectively on another screen. You can toggle between the “researching” screen and the “planning” screen with the flick of a button in Spaces.
If you’re a multitasker, Spaces could become like crack. It’s great to be able to keep lots of apps and windows open, flipping between them as need be, but it’s also a great excuse to scatter your attention too broadly.
Improvements to the Finder, on the other hand, have already proven themselves indispensable. Apple has taken a layered approach to helping users find files. First, document icons now are small previews of the documents themselves. This makes it easier to conduct gross sorting of documents when you’re scanning through a folder.
When that’s not enough, you can use the Cover Flow view in Finder to flip through documents the way you’d flip through songs in iTunes. It may sound gimmicky, but I’ve found it quite helpful, particularly with documents that have similar names.
Finally, if you come across a document and still aren’t sure if you’ve found what you were looking for, Quick View will show you the first page at full size. This is extremely helpful, particularly when you just need to grab one piece of information from a small document. What was the reading for today? Select the document icon, hit the space bar, and you’re good to go. No need to open Word or Pages.
Quick View gets my vote for best new Leopard feature.
Getting Online
After installation, I did have some initial problems connecting to my home WiFi network. My Mac had trouble connecting, then dropped in and out. After switching from my old “flying saucer” AirPort base station to an AirPort Extreme I had sitting around, I updated the base station firmware and everything worked fine. Getting online at a nearby coffee shop presented no problems. I did have to recreate the settings to join my school’s WiFi network, though. The network and wireless configuration is slightly different in Leopard. It actually makes more sense now, but it takes a few minutes to adjust to the new approach.
Apple’s Mail application is no longer just a straightforward email client. It now incorporates notes and reminders. Let’s say you receive an email about your school’s foray into Second Life. You jot a quick note to yourself to check it out.
A To Do can be given a due date, a priority, and can then be assigned to an appropriate calendar in iCal. So although Notes and To Do lists are saved in Mail just below your standard mailboxes, they tie in seamlessly with iCal. You can also send notes and to do lists as email messages.
If you don’t already have a GTD system or similar means of organizing tasks, Mail could become the hub of your personal planning system. I doubt it will unseat iGTD or similar tools designed to manage projects and tasks, but its simplicity and seamless integration might be just the ticket for many law school users.
Mail’s data detection capabilities will almost certainlly make your life easier. Let’s say a friend sends me an email invitation to a beach bonfire. Click on the event details, and Mail is smart enough to create a new iCal entry for that event.
This seems like a minor capability, but I’ve already used it a few times and it really does make event scheduling faster and easier.
If you are an RSS junkie, you may be excited to find out that RSS feeds are now directly accessible from Mail. Once again, if you already have an alternate means of gathering RSS feeds, you may never use Mail’s RSS capabilites.
One of the nice things about the upgraded Mail is that all of these new additions are completely optional. The app still feels relatively lean and mean.
iCal
The little calendar that could has several minor modifications that make it better than before. Again, Apple has succeeded in adding functionality without creating bloat.
Apple must have been reading my mind when they moved the Day/Week/Month selector from the bottom of the iCal calendar window to the top. They’ve also added a handy little horizontal line that indicates the current time. To save space, event details are now shown through a pop-up box, rather than a sidebar. This not only feels cleaner, it also puts the information about a date closer to the actual location of that date on the calendar, so your eye doesn’t have to go back and forth.
To Do items from Mail are accessible from iCal, and are sortable by due date, priority, title, or manual selection. In keeping with the bi-directional sharing between Mail and iCal, To Do items added in iCal automatically show up in Mail. Nice.
Calendars can now be grouped, which makes calendar management easier if you have several different calendars. For example, I have placed four of my calendars into a “Work Time” group, and two into a “My Time” group. Grouping makes it easier to drill down to specific calendars in a hurry.
Safari
The shipping version of Safari 3 is smooth, stable, and fast. Two features caught my eye: web clippings and page mailing. It’s too early to tell how useful web clippings will really be, but it’s a clever concept. Select a portion of the page, and Safari will hand it off to Dashboard, where it will function as a Widget. As content is updated, the Widget will update the content it displays. In most cases it seems such content could be found in RSS form, but where there is no RSS feed, Widgetizing the info might be useful. This could be particularly helpful for things like calendars and other information found on court sites, law firm sites, and your school’s career services site.
Safari also now supports bookmark sets, so you can save multiple tabbed pages under one bookmark. Safari also provides a host of PDF controls now, so you can navigate PDFs from within Safari.
Preview
You can now place multiple pages from an article or handout onto one page printed from Preview. The crop, resize and rotate functions allow you to more easily salvage poorly-scanned documents that have been saved as PDFs. The annotation and markup tools are handy for those situations when you’re editing a PDF or making notes on a class reading that has been distributed as a PDF. Also, searching in PDFs is easier now.
When Preview finds the word you’re looking for, it gives you an unmistakable signal showing you the location of the word.
Third-Party Applications
So far I haven’t encountered any noticable glitches with my most-used apps. Quicksilver seems to be working fine. OmniOutliner Pro, Camino, WriteRoom, and Yojimbo haven’t given me any trouble. Even my ancient Word X hasn’t shown any signs of conflict with Leopard.
The Bottom Line
Like many other reviewers, I don’t care much for the alterations Apple has made to the Dock. In general I think the interface could still use a few alterations. But these are minor nits. Leopard incorporates a host of under-the-hood improvements, small but effective interface tweaks, and handy new application features. Its predecessor is an extremely capable OS, so it’s not as if Tiger users need to rush out and buy Leopard. That said, Leopard provides new capabilities that should be welcome to most law students.
Other Reviews
Leopard is a major revision to OS X, and I have touched on only a few aspects of the new OS. For a more detailed review of the user interface changes and under-the-hood details of Leopard, check out John Siracusa’s thorough examination at Ars Technica. Siracusa has reviewed each major revision since OS X 10.0, so he’s no newcomer to OS X. MacWorld editor Jason Snell, another veteran reviewer, wrote a less lengthy review that covers all of the major features.
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