Leopard review part 2: Look and feel
After finally upgrading both the Tiger iMacs in our house to Leopard last week, I can now see what I’m getting for my AUD $250. I’ll start with initial impressions of the new Mac OS X, then move onto specific apps and features in later parts.
The look
Steve must have been watching a lot of Star Trek over the last couple of years. Leopard has a distinctly space-age feel, with its starry desktop background, glowing lights in the Dock, and Doctor Who-style Time Machine. Personally I’m not ecstatic about the look, but it’s inoffensive enough (though Time Machine’s animated swirly stuff is overkill and distracting).
Menu bar and Dock
I actually really like the much-maligned translucent menu bar and shiny 3-D Dock. The translucent menu isn’t as distracting as I’d imagined, and I like the “solidity” of the Dock’s shelf. I particularly like the way application windows are reflected in the shelf. Utterly pointless, but beautiful. I’m not convinced by the glowing dots used to show active apps; sure, they fit in with the space-age theme, but they’re hard to notice. I keep thinking they’re part of the starry desktop background (which I know I could change, of course). I preferred the way Tiger used a black triangle to indicate an active program.
New-look windows and icons
Application windows have been unified into a consistent, reassuring dark grey shaded look. It’s a definite improvement on the mish-mash of window styles in Tiger (even amongst Apple’s own software). Leopard’s Close/Minimize/Zoom window buttons are slightly more saturated and “boiled sweet” looking than Tiger’s, and the pull-down menus in the menu bar now have rounded bottom corners – small details, but I like them.
I’m not a big fan of the Finder’s new staid blue folder icons, though they are elegant in their own way I suppose. I find the “special” folders (Desktop, Documents, Music, etc) a little hard to distinguish when they’re in the Dock.
The feel
Leopard’s user interface is definitely quicker and more responsive than Tiger’s. Menus appear with less lag; window dragging seems smoother; windows open and close instantly. Finder, in particular, seems noticeably faster compared with the one in Tiger. User switching is instant – with Tiger there was an annoying delay after you typed your password – and login/logout seems faster too.
I think the more responsive interface definitely contributes to making Leopard feel “faster” overall; whether it actually is faster under the hood is hard to tell!
The Stacks feature in the Dock is a very quick way to access a few files or applications in a folder. It’s much snappier than the equivalent in Tiger, where you had to click a folder in the Dock to open it in a new Finder window, or right-click it to display its contents as a list (both of which caused a good 1-second delay on large folders such as Applications). I don’t like the way a stack’s icon shows the first couple of items in the folder by default – it’s messy and hard to see – but you can change this easily by right-clicking the icon and choosing Folder instead of Stack.
Summary
Overall, in terms of looks and day-to-day use, I’d say Leopard’s a definite improvement over Tiger. The new interface looks more polished and unified – Star Trek overtones aside – and is more responsive. Add in faster ways to do things such as Stacks, and I find that I can get stuff done more quickly with Leopard than with its stripy predecessor.
April 27th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Ah, you’ve finally done it! The little blue dots thing, well, you’ll get used to it. It’s not as clear as Tiger – but at the moment you’re still looking for the Tiger triangles I expect.
I have yet to have a problem with Leopard, it’s great.
April 29th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Yes, I finally took the plunge with Leopard! I must say, on the whole, I’m happy I did. There are quite a few niggles and annoyances – more of which later! – but nothing broke in any major way on either of our iMacs, which is a relief. 🙂 And yes, I am getting used to the dots.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
I freely admit to being a Trekkie, but I hate the default space theme in Leopard. It’s like some horrific retro computer stuck in the last century 🙂