One of the much-heralded new features of Mac OS X Leopard is, of course, the Time Machine backup system. Its key selling point - apart from the Dr Who-style restore screen - is the fact that it’s a “no-click” backup solution; you just plug in an external backup drive, and Time Machine gets on with the job of backing up automatically.

This is all nice and reassuring - or is it? Well, not when you get errors like these appearing every couple of weeks:

I’ve seen the Unable to complete backup error on both our iMacs over the last few weeks. It’s a fairly common occurrence. I tried the trick of repartitioning using GUID rather than MBR on my Mac, which certainly reduced the errors, though I still get them.

It looks like there are quite a few other Mac users experiencing this error, too.

And what’s with that second error? The backup needs 13.8 GB, but only 20.3 GB are available? Looks like someone at Apple needs to go back to maths classes. How can I trust a backup system that can’t subtract two numbers?

Frankly I’m tempted to go back to using rsync for my backups until Apple makes Time Machine more stable. At least I know rsync works!

Nothing is guaranteed to bring the smug Mac user brigade out in force like a discussion on viruses and trojans. “Oh, we don’t get those - we use Macs!” they proudly announce. And they have a point; Mac malware is pretty thin on the ground right now. Indeed, the first virus to specifically attack Mac OS X didn’t come out until 2006 - five years after Mac OS X was launched.

Well the time for such smugness may be coming to an end. In the past few weeks we’ve had a published root escalation vulnerability, not to mention a Mac-targeted trojan in the wild that takes advantage of said vulnerability, and is evil enough to wipe the smile off even the smuggest Mac user’s face. Furthermore, Mac hackers have produced a tool to make future production of similar trojans almost trivially simple.

Maybe we’re seeing an increase in Mac malware now because Macs are getting more popular, with 80% of businesses allegedly now using them. More Macs make for a bigger, juicier target.

But Macs are secure - aren’t they?

Yes, Macs are built on UNIX, and yes, UNIX is generally pretty secure and battle-tested. But UNIX and Linux servers are compromised every day. Maybe not as much as Windows machines, but there are plenty of worms and rootkits out there for Linux. If malware authors start targeting the Mac in earnest, it’s unlikely that Mac users will get off that lightly. We can only hope that Apple starts tightening up security in Snow Leopard, as Dino Dai Zovi suggests.

The next version of the OS X operating system - 10.6 “Snow Leopard” - was quietly announced at WWDC08 at the start of this week. Unlike previous versions, 10.6 will not focus on new features (though doubtless there’ll be a few here and there). Instead, Apple have decided to concentrate on making the OS leaner, meaner and all-round nicer. (Maybe this is how they came up with the name: It’s a slicker Leopard, but they’ve frozen the features. Feature freeze? Snow? Never mind…)

They’ll do this by:

• Making it easier for developers to code apps for multi-core processors, using a technology called “Grand Central”
• Introducing Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets applications use the Mac’s GPU (graphics processing unit) almost as an additional CPU
• Increasing the RAM limit to 16 terabytes (16,000 GB) - a limit not likely to be reached anytime soon
• Including QuickTime X, which will run all your latest codecs much more smoothly (so they say)
• Making Safari run JavaScript “up to 53 percent faster” apparently - which will be good for all those AJAX-driven websites
• Reducing the OS’s footprint (i.e. the hard drive space it takes up). This has caused a bit of controversy as many think this means dropping support for PowerPC Macs, but this remains to be seen. Maybe they’ll ship 2 versions: one for Intel, one for PowerPC?

One new feature they are announcing now is full support for Microsoft Exchange using the Exchange Web Services protocol. This will let Mail, Address Book and iCal play nicely with Exchange servers. (more…)

Well this review of Mac OS X Leopard could fill a book, so I’m going to wrap things up now. I’ll briefly talk about other new features of note, and attempt to reach some sort of conclusion about the latest Mac OS.

iChat

Apple have added tons of snazzy new features to iChat AV. Major ones include Photo Booth-style effects, the ability to have a picture or movie backdrop, screen sharing, audio/video chat recording, tabbed chats, and iChat Theater - a feature that lets you show movies, Keynote presentations and other media to your chat buddy while you’re talking to them. I haven’t had a chance to use most of these new features yet, but the backdrop effect is quite fun - though the backdrop tends to leak through quite a bit. One simple but nice improvement is that the Buddy List window now allows buddy groups, making it much easier to organize your list of buddies.

Safari

I was already using Safari 3 on Tiger, so there’s not much new here. The only difference appears to be the Open in Dashboard button/menu option that lets you capture part of the current page and save it as a Web Clip Dashboard widget. This is a very handy feature in certain situations - for example, I use it to display the current Sydney weather radar on my Dashboard for quick access, as shown on the right. (Looks like a storm brewin’ in the Pacific!)

However, the widget doesn’t work so well with things like AdSense report pages that require a login. When your login times out, the widget can’t cope with the changed page and freaks out. (more…)

In my ongoing Leopard review I’m currently looking at the Apple applications that are bundled with Mac OS X - at least, the apps that I personally use on a regular basis.

I was going to write about just Mail, iCal and Preview, but then I remembered there’s another app that I use that has had major changes in Leopard: Front Row. We actually use Front Row fairly extensively; we don’t have a TV (shock horror!), so we watch DVDs and a lot of video podcasts on the living room iMac, as well as listen to music on it (streamed from the iTunes on my Mac).

So is the new Front Row a step forward like Preview, or is it one step forward, two steps back, like Mail? Let’s see.

The good

On the plus side, the daft swirly effect when you launch/exit Front Row is replaced by a simple fade, which makes for a smoother transition to Front Row and back. The new Front Row interface on the whole is slicker - much like the Apple TV interface, in fact.

The fonts are a lot smaller than Tiger’s Front Row, so if you plan to watch movies on your MacBook from across the room, you might be squinting a bit. On the other hand, this means that you can see more of song/movie titles while you’re browsing. Even better: When browsing, the titles for both audio and video media now scroll horizontally if they’re too long to display in one go. This feature is wonderful, as I’m no longer having to play “guess the podcast” with long podcast titles, for example.

Viewing theatrical trailers is generally a nicer experience in Leopard’s Front Row. You now get some blurb about each movie as you’re browsing it (replete with the occasional HTML character code - oops!), and you can also see the download progress of a trailer as it loads - a feature sorely missing in Tiger. However, in Tiger you browsed movies by poster artwork - a nice, intuitive way to find movies. Now you just get a list of titles, and you can only view the poster for the currently selected movie.

Another nicety is that Front Row can now play a VIDEO_TS folder from a ripped DVD - handy if you like to have your movies on your hard drive. In Tiger you had to resort to a hack to get this working. (more…)

Many of the core applications in Mac OS X have been significantly upgraded in Leopard. I’ve already taken a look at Mail and iCal in my review. Here I’ll concentrate on Preview, Apple’s PDF and image viewer.

As the built-in apps go, Preview is a bit of an unsung hero. It pops up when you view a PDF, then you close it when you’re done - you don’t tend to think about it much. However, it’s a supremely useful and well-written application, and with the release of Leopard, it’s now even better.

Annotation

Preview in Leopard has vastly improved annotation features. You can highlight text, and add sticky notes, ovals, rectangles, and URL links. (I was disappointed that you can’t constrain ovals to circles and rectangles to squares, but hey, you can’t have everything I suppose.) You can add your name to annotations too (enabled by default in Preferences > General). All annotations are retained when you save the PDF.

Here I highlighted some text in a PDF (which, by the way, is from the excellent book Future Files, by my good friend Richard Watson), and also added a note:

PDF editing

You can move or delete pages within a PDF, and combine PDFs using drag and drop. Although you can’t create PDFs from scratch or edit the actual text of a PDF, these basic editing features are still useful for those times when you want to make a quick change. (more…)

My epic Leopard review continues. At this rate I’ll have to give it its own blog category.

Today I’ll take a look at iCal, the calendar/task manager app that ships with Mac OS X.

I’ve bitched about Tiger iCal’s hideous user interface before - particularly its heinous lack of keyboard shortcuts for basic tasks. So does Leopard’s iCal mark an improvement over Tiger’s?

Well, yes and no. The iCal interface has had a makeover, and definitely looks and feels slicker than Tiger’s iCal. In addition, as with the new Mail, the interface feels more responsive, too.

Unfortunately, the interface, despite its makeover, still sucks like a fleet of Hoovers. In fact - and Apple have had to try really hard here - the new interface is even less usable than Tiger’s. (more…)

Along with all of its 300 spiffy new features, many of the bundled Apple applications have had a makeover with the release of Leopard. In this multi-part review I’ll be concentrating on three of the main ones: Mail, iCal, and Preview. In this part: Mail.

When I watched the keynote introducing Leopard a couple of years back, I remember being distinctly nonplussed by the “improvements” to Mail. Now that I have my hands on the new Mail, I am still distinctly nonplussed. In many ways, Mail is one step forward, two steps back.

First, the good news. Searching is now lightning fast, thanks no doubt to the improvements to Spotlight. I managed to search my entire mail account - some 60,000 messages weighing in at just under 2GB - in around 10 seconds. Previously this would have taken over a minute. (This, along with the improvements to Spotlight itself and the new Quick Look, all help me work faster and get more done with my Mac, which is wonderful.) In addition, the Mail interface, like the Finder’s, generally seems more responsive than it did in Tiger: windows pop open with no delay, messages render quickly, folders instantly snap open.

My issues with Mail are twofold. Firstly, the new features in Mail are, on the whole, fairly useless (for me). Secondly, the new Mail is buggier than the Mail in Tiger.

New features

New Mail features include the ability to create Notes and To-Do items, decorate mail messages with stationery, and read RSS feeds with an integrated RSS reader. Let’s take a look at each of these.

Notes and To-Dos. I’m happy that Apple finally included a decent notes feature in Mac OS X, but what on earth are Notes and To-Dos doing in Mail? To-Dos are already in iCal. Notes would surely be better as either part of iCal, or as a separate app, replacing Stickies. It’s all rather confusing. (more…)

Apple’s latest Mac operating system, Leopard, has, we are told, over 300 new features. Many of these are minor, but in this part of my Leopard review I’ll concentrate on three of the big ones: Quick Look, Time Machine, and Spaces.

Quick Look

One of the nicest new features for me is Quick Look. Select any file in a Finder window, press the spacebar, and you’re instantly previewing the file in Quick Look. “Quick” is the operative word here; whereas it might take you 10-20 seconds to fire up Microsoft Word or NeoOffice to view a .doc file, with Quick Look you’re viewing it within 1 second of hitting the spacebar.

Exactly how the preview looks depends on the type of file:

• Text files - whether that’s Word documents, PDFs, or plain text - open with a viewer that lets you scroll up and down through the whole document.
• When previewing images, you get an Add to iPhoto button to add the displayed image to your iPhoto library.
• An audio or movie file opens with a play/pause button and a scrubber control for jumping around within the content.
• Font files display the entire alphabet rendered in the font

… and so on. In all cases, you can click a button to view the file in full-screen mode and, if you Quick Look multiple files at once, you can view a contact sheet of thumbnails to choose from (this, combined with the full-screen mode, looks great with photos!).

Quick Look uses plug-ins to work its magic; each file type needs an associated plug-in to be rendered in Quick Look. Naturally, Leopard ships with plug-ins for most common file types, and app developers are adding more all the time.

This is a wonderful way to quickly double-check that you’ve found the file you’re after, without having to launch an application. It’s a real time-saver. I just have to train myself to use it - currently I still instinctively want to double-click a file to open it. (more…)

I’ve talked about upgrading Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard, and about Leopard’s look and feel compared to Tiger’s. Here I’ll look at the new Leopard Finder, and talk about the Spotlight search feature in Leopard compared to its Tiger counterpart.

Finder in Tiger, while serviceable, always felt a bit clunky to me. Opening big folders was sluggish; the sidebar had its limitations; network shares were handled poorly. In particular, the way the entire system would hang when a network share dropped was appalling.

The Finder in Mac OS X Leopard

The Finder in Leopard is a definite improvement. Big folders open quickly. Preview icons take less time to render. The sidebar is nicer looking, and actually lists other computers in your network in the sidebar - this is a wonderful feature, as any network share is now only a couple of clicks away. But most importantly: No more system hangs when working with network shares! Not only do shares drop less often (despite Leopard’s Airport going up and down like a yo-yo - not sure why), but when they do, there’s no beachball for 10 minutes. This makes working on my wife’s Mac over the network actually usable now.

Going with the flow

Leopard’s Finder offers a fourth way to view files and folders: as well as the traditional Icons, List and Columns views, we now have Cover Flow view. This works just like Cover Flow in iTunes, but instead of viewing album covers, you see previews of the items in the current folder. In theory this is great, as you can flip through a folder’s contents without having to actually open files to view them. In practice, it’s good for things like photos, just about OK for PDFs (if you make the Finder window big enough), and pointless for applications (all you see is a huge version of the application’s icon). (more…)