Siracusa on Leopard
Another great Mac OS X review from John Siracusa, though it’s not as long as the Tiger one. Here are some highlights:
In action, it’s indistinguishable from magic. You write these little text files with script-like bang-pound lines using this weird C-like language and you have essentially free reign to grope all over the kernel.
In the end, Apple made the hard choice instead of the easy one. I think it will pay off, though the short-term consequences could be pretty grim. After all, just look at how long it’s taking to get an Intel-native version of Microsoft Office for the Mac. Should we expect a 64-bit Cocoa version in, say, 2012? And I have no idea what Adobe’s going to do about 64-bit versions of its products. That’s many millions of lines of Carbon code between those two companies alone. We may be in for a rough patch, so buckle up.
Drawing the user interface at different scale factors:
Hey, what do we have here lurking under
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworksin Leopard? Why, it appears to be a new framework:CoreUI.framework. Whatever could that be for? Surprise! Every piece of the user interface in Leopard is being drawn in an entirely new way that incorporates the best of the bitmapped and vector styles.
The new “Show warning before changing an extension” and “Grid spacing” options in the Finder:
It’s hard for me not to use profanity at this point, so thoroughly do these two additions infuriate me. On the one hand, I’ve been wishing, hoping, and sometimes begging for these features for years, and I’m glad to finally see them in Leopard. But on the other hand, actually using these features and experiencing how much more pleasant they make my daily life on the Mac—as I knew they would—only reminds me of how stubbornly Apple refused to add them for the past six years!
Oh, the agony inflicted for want of such simple features! In the case of the icon grid spacing adjustment, this is something that existed in a lesser form (only two settings: tight and wide) in classic Mac OS and was dropped during the transition to Mac OS X, like so many other features, without explanation or justification. Worse, the spacing between icons was expanded to a comical size in Mac OS X 10.0 and never recovered. It always seemed to me to be some sort of punishment for daring to use icon view. Just look at this screenshot from Tiger showing the Applications folder with 48x48 pixel icons, scaled to 50 percent of its original size.
The new “Always open in” checkbox:
This avalanche of mandatory explicit action effectively represents a denial of service attack on the spatial style of file management. It overloads the user with a never-ending stream of mundane tasks, making the formerly transparent process of view style retention so inefficient that it will likely be abandoned entirely.
The Dock:
In the Leopard Dock, my home folder appears as a bunch of stacked folder icons because that’s mostly what it contains: other folders. There’s actually one document peeking out in the middle of the stack as a sliver of white. The icon on the top is the Desktop folder icon. So, out of the box, your home folder, when docked, appears to be the Desktop folder.
Though Apple was kind enough to make it a public framework, Time Machine is arguably the entire reason FSEvents was created. Time Machine can wake up whenever it wants—it doesn’t need to be running constantly—and efficiently find out what’s changed since it last checked (that is, since the last file system event id that it saw). Since FSEvents reports changes at a directory level, Time Machine still has to determine which files in that directory have changed. No problem! It’s got the previous backup of that directory to use as reference. FSEvents and Time Machine are a perfect match for each other.
Well, the actual GM is just as good, probably even better—though I’ve yet to produce a single crash of anything even in the September seed. Of course, I only have a limited set of hardware and software to test on, so I can’t say definitively that 10.5.0 is going to be great for everyone. And yes, the Miracle of September does give me some pause. But I’m cautiously optimistic that 10.5.0 won’t be a repeat of the 10.4.0 experience. That said, a 10.5.1 release is almost certainly not too far away. I just think you won’t be in desperate need of it when it arrives.
Apple has finally submitted to adding what must be quite a hack to get the iCal application icon to show the correct date on its Dock icon, even when the application is not running.
And hey, anyone remember that Apple Type Services bug that prevented my preferred Terminal font (Monaco 9pt forever!) from displaying correctly? You know, the one that lingered for five years after I first reported it?…Fixed.
