Tiger to Leopard

I already owned a Mac before Leopard jumped over IT world. I had Tiger running on two Minis. I wasn't inclined to updrage this machines to Leopard, as many people did with their old hardware the day when Leopard arrived. But after I've got MacBook with Leopard preinstalled, I can say that new cat is definitely more advanced than its predecessor.

I like new sidebars in Finder and Mail. I love the new Preview with Cover Flow. I kinda like how the new Dock looks like. Transparent menu bar is reminding me Vista's Aero, but it is still less annoying. I don't use a Time Machine, because with standard hard drive it is meaningless (and I suppose that synchronizing VmWare's virtual machines is not what I really want). But some new features are really, really slick.

As much as I was addicted to Exposé and Dashboard in Tiger, I was instantly hooked by Spaces and Stacks. These two concepts are not at all new, they were done many times before Leopard, but in Leopard, they are as polished as only Mac app can be. No bloat, maximum comfort, aesthetic pleasure. Now if they only could implement something Quicksilver-like ;)

And out-of-the-box support for Ruby and RoR in Xcode is really surprising. It makes the fact that RoR developers are mostly Mac users pretty unsurprising :)

QuickTime? Thanks, I have already got VLC!

We all know that Macs are sold with literally Gigabytes of software goodness. Buit-in viewers, editors, mail, browser, even IDE for those programmers who drops .NET and Java frameworks in favor of Cocoa. But is everything so good as we would expect? Well, the answer is very difficult and requires classification of you as a user.

If you are a power user who likes to do boring things in style, and if you are happy with those features that cover needs of 95% of all users - then you can live with all titles from Apple. But if you are a fresh switcher, or if you belong to 5% of people who always needs more than they got - then you definitely need replacement to some Apple software.

I am something in between those who belong to 95% and those 5%. I can live with most things I have, but I open to alternatives if they can offer better value. In case of software that comes pre-installed with a new computer, you should be quite motivated to look for something else that can beat something provided for free. This is why Microsoft gets accused in abusing the monopoly. But exactly as in case of Microsoft, there are some free alternatives which in most regards are better than programs provided together with operating system.

While it is questionable whether Firefox is really better than Safari, Apple's own browser, it is a safe bet to assume than anyone who ran Firefox on other platform, will do it on Apple, too. Anyone who is in love with Firefox's plug in system, will miss all the functionality that comes with extensions. But for most tasks, Safari is just as great. So, if sites you are usually viewing, are not hostile to "small browsers", then you are fine with Apple's own offering.

iTunes, iDVD, GarageBand, iCal, Mail - all these are fine things you will hardly need to replace. But QuickTime, in my humble opinion, is not that friendly as Mac program could be. You can add codecs to enable playback of different files, but this is ot what average user will do. I was wondering if Apple really forces people to switch to QuickTime Pro, for-money version of its media player, until I found a beautiful program called VLC. This is freaking awesome media player. It plays everything right out of the box. It is surprisingly lightweight for an application that is ported to several platforms. It even plays DVD of any region, if you just specify where VIDEO_TS folder is. Just great.

MacBook Battery

The one thing that is done amazingly well in Mac OS is the power management. Everything related to it makes me cheer and I shudder when I compare this to my Estonian-built Ordi PC-laptop.

At first, battery life is well over 4 hours in normal mode. You can see how many time you still have - straight from system menu bar. If you plug AC adapter, the numbers show you how long laptop will be charging the battery.

Hardware wise, battery compartment is absolutely flat at the bottom of the laptop. There are simply no things that can get broken. In my Ordi laptop's chassis, the latch that holds accumulator was broken in less than one months, and because of that computer is not really portable any more.

I always thought that energy saving tricks (like switching off monitor after some period and auto-hibernating) are annoying, but now I changed my point of view. If monitor instantly goes to working mode, and if system instantly goes awake, it does not any more matter how and when it goes to sleeping mode.

And watching movies and working with wireless somehow do not drain battery as much as they do on most PC laptops - I guess it's because of system being so much optimized for the hardware on which it is supposed to run.

Speech service

The next thing to make people wow is a built-in speech service. If you are not familiar with services in Mac OS X's poit of view - it's some functionality provided by some application for other applications. Service menu is available from main menu for any Mac OS application and for Windows switcher it's a first place to look for things that usually appear when doing a right-click. The main difference is that such a design alows much more functionality to be built in, while still being a context menu.

So, when you use an application that shows list of files, you can use Services from Finder for a selected file. You can send selected file or selected text to mail recipient using Services provided by Mail application. If you installed Skype, you can send file or selected text from any application to someone form your contact list. It's like Automator tasks that get available from any scriptable Mac OS application, but you should not really script anything - it's just one action and you can do it right away using Services menu.

But let's return to the topic of the post - the Speech Service. As you can imagine, it allows you to sit back in your chair and listen to computer-generated voice that reads aloud the text you have selected in any other application (well, not every single ones - I guess that only "native" apps are supported, for example Firefox, built with its specific framework, is not capable to trigger this service). I tried it on Safari, listening to synopsis of 22-nd episode of Lost 3 :)

It is by far the best generic audio-generation I ever heard. Not without glitches, but definitely much more human than what I have heard some years ago. It knows about punctuation and intonation, which is just amazing. Unfortunately, text is always spoken using English pronounciation rules so forget about listening your favourite Russian blog, news from Le Monde, or gossips from your Portugues-writing frinds on Orkut...

But it stil something that shows power of Mac OS and the beauty of siplicity, with which complex things are integrated into the system!

Virtualization

When i ordered my Macbook, I asked salesman to add 2 more Gigabytes of memory and even bought boxed version of Parallels. All that to explore the world of virtual machines running XP inside Mac OS X. I had some memories about first version of Parallels, which ran for about a month on my home Mini last year, until trial period was over. It worked without any glitch, and all new feature announcements promised the unforgettable experience.

In practice, Parallels 3 out of the box did not like itself being installed on Leopard. The very first run threw me an error message saying that application has unexpectedly quit. After restart it worked, and I excitedly tried to run XP off BootCamp partition inside the virtual machine. It worked beautifully and I thought all problems are gone. But the next time I started Parallels Desktop, the same error message appeared.

And it kept coming and coming all the time. No update for version 3 is available from Parallels website... In forums, noone seems to have the same problem... I found a pattern of having virtual machine in runnable state the very first double-click on virtual machine's shortcut that appeared on the desktop after creation, but mostly started to boot straight into windows partition. Then the next problem came.

The problem is called Windows activation. When you boot once from Windows partition when starting your Mac, and next time running it in Parallels, Windows gets sick and complains that hardware was changed significantly since last run and therefore Windows should be activated once again. The same thing when you boot next time from Windows partition. Pretty annoying.

And then I decided to give VmWare a chance and downloaded it with serial number for 30 days trial period. The very first run of XP off BootCamp failed miserably - system hanged and I can't remember how I managed to finall kill VmWare processes. I was really upset having two non-working virtualization software titles. But I gave VmWare another chance and installed XP inside the virtual machine. It totally changed the game field.

Not only it installed quickly and without problems, it also automatially installed VmWare tools (software that is installed in guest operating system that enables painless release of control to host system when mouse is rolled out of guest OS window) - Parallels still tried to install its counterpart to VmWare Tools with every run of virtual machine.

I did not notice any significant difference in performace of virtual machines in Parallels Desktop or VmWare Fusion, and Parallels' own Coherence and Fusion's Unity work pretty much the same way - but Full Screen mode in Fusion is way better - it automatically adjusts to screen resolution of host system. To be honest, I liked Unity more as well - it shows the right icon for the application in Dock. In single window mode, I found Fusion's controls to enable/disable virtual devices to be ore convenient, too.

Now I can impress my co-workers with Full Screen Windows running in one of Spaces in my Leopard, and change to Mac OS X spaces with just single Control+Arrow keystroke. Slick transition makes people wow. In such moments you are really happy you have a Mac :)

Leopard Mail

One of nice things in Leopard is updated Mail program. My first thing when exploring it, of course, was setting up my GMail account. And it did not succeed automatically - I went to Gmail help and read their howto. Well, at least it was easy to do.

The next small trouble was organizing folders - but mostly because Apple reworked the structure of a sidebar in order to make it more Leopard-like. But after I figured out how to create rules that work, applying them worked like a charm, and I found my mail sorted into the folders I wanted. Nit-picking in me wants to warn,however, that there's no way to create a folder when you create a rule, it should already exist...

But "all the small things" is where the Mac shines, we all know that. And the little things begin from integration with AddressBook, one-click saving of attached files to Downloads (and it is very convenient to have them all in that brand-new pre-build Stacks in Dock!), ability to send a folder of photos with Dragging that folder onto Mail icon in Dock...

Should I say a word about built-in RSS reader, Notes and ToDo list? Well, maybe next time...