Leopard Colony
by Marty Barrett
LOS ANGELES -- I was being detained by TSA operatives at Sea-Tac Airport recently and one of them asked me, probably as a security question, "Are you going to buy Leopard when it comes out?"
"No," I said. My friend Wayne is the person who actually buys software. I just borrow it from him.
Wayne was the one who went to the Apple Store the day the new operating system came out and waited in line. He got a free t-shirt with his $129 DVD. He will never wear the t-shirt.
"What justified this purchase?" I asked Wayne, as if any of his impulse purchases are solid enough to hang justifications on.
"Well, you know how Macintosh Mail doesn't look like it's integrated with the overall pattern of Tiger?" he asked.
"I don't care, but Yes," I said.
"Well now it looks like the rest of the OS," he said.
"Big deal," I said.
"And iChat allows tabbed browsing," he added.
"OK I'll need to install it," I said.
Tabbed browsing was lacking in previous incarnations of iChat. It lets the user handle multiple instant message conversations in the same window, rather than requiring a second screen for numerous chats. To let me talk with multiple people at once I turned to Defaultware's Proteus, which had tabbed browsing but did not have a video component and had a very clunky history viewer. But the tabbed browsing was more important to me.
So last night I installed Leopard. Now my computer (a 1.5 Ghz 2004 PowerBook with 1.5 Gb of memory) runs slower. Also, Photoshop no longer works. I got Leopard for free, so I didn't do my homework.
Leopard does have a more integrated look and some of its base applications, like the backup program Time Machine, are very helpful. It is also nice to use iChat again, though I'd really need an excuse to use video with it. Looking up old conversations is much easier with iChat than with other programs.
The OS-level image viewer Preview is also much improved. For example, until Isteal appropriate a Leopard-friendly version of Photoshop, I can now resize photos to specific dimensions in Preview where I couldn't in earlier versions.
But one of my mail programs, Microsoft's Entourage, now crashes on startup and I have to rebuild the database (hence two blog posts in one day because I'm unable to get any of my real work done while I fix my computer).
I will probably find other things to like about Leopard, but the overall effect of Apple's new Operating System, for someone like me who uses his computer all day, is just that it looks different. Its various perks are not worth the slowdown on an older computer, nor are they worth the considerable workaround required to make other applications work.
My only consolation now that I've wasted several hours of my day is that I didn't purchase it.
UPDATE 2 a.m.
Several kernel panics later, I had to format the drive and blast the computer back to the stone age (OSX.3). I am eagerly awaiting my beta tester check from Apple. Luckily I backed everything up.
LOS ANGELES -- I was being detained by TSA operatives at Sea-Tac Airport recently and one of them asked me, probably as a security question, "Are you going to buy Leopard when it comes out?""No," I said. My friend Wayne is the person who actually buys software. I just borrow it from him.
Wayne was the one who went to the Apple Store the day the new operating system came out and waited in line. He got a free t-shirt with his $129 DVD. He will never wear the t-shirt.
"What justified this purchase?" I asked Wayne, as if any of his impulse purchases are solid enough to hang justifications on.
"Well, you know how Macintosh Mail doesn't look like it's integrated with the overall pattern of Tiger?" he asked.
"I don't care, but Yes," I said.
"Well now it looks like the rest of the OS," he said.
"Big deal," I said.
"And iChat allows tabbed browsing," he added.
"OK I'll need to install it," I said.
Tabbed browsing was lacking in previous incarnations of iChat. It lets the user handle multiple instant message conversations in the same window, rather than requiring a second screen for numerous chats. To let me talk with multiple people at once I turned to Defaultware's Proteus, which had tabbed browsing but did not have a video component and had a very clunky history viewer. But the tabbed browsing was more important to me.
So last night I installed Leopard. Now my computer (a 1.5 Ghz 2004 PowerBook with 1.5 Gb of memory) runs slower. Also, Photoshop no longer works. I got Leopard for free, so I didn't do my homework.
Leopard does have a more integrated look and some of its base applications, like the backup program Time Machine, are very helpful. It is also nice to use iChat again, though I'd really need an excuse to use video with it. Looking up old conversations is much easier with iChat than with other programs.
The OS-level image viewer Preview is also much improved. For example, until I
But one of my mail programs, Microsoft's Entourage, now crashes on startup and I have to rebuild the database (hence two blog posts in one day because I'm unable to get any of my real work done while I fix my computer).
I will probably find other things to like about Leopard, but the overall effect of Apple's new Operating System, for someone like me who uses his computer all day, is just that it looks different. Its various perks are not worth the slowdown on an older computer, nor are they worth the considerable workaround required to make other applications work.
My only consolation now that I've wasted several hours of my day is that I didn't purchase it.
UPDATE 2 a.m.
Several kernel panics later, I had to format the drive and blast the computer back to the stone age (OSX.3). I am eagerly awaiting my beta tester check from Apple. Luckily I backed everything up.
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