Product Reviews

Mac OS X Leopard finally shipped at 6pm BST on Friday 26 October and MacUser had its hands on a copy ten minutes later. We had two questions as we waited for it to install on our test Core Duo Mac mini: was it worth the wait, and is it worth the £85 asking price?

The answer to both is an almost unreserved yes. Almost, because there is room for improvement and one or two wrinkles that need ironing out. One wrinkle was smoothed within 24 hours of release when Apple issued an update that fixed, among other things, problems with Keychain Access in the initial release.

Leopard's highlights have been well-documented in MacUser, and they live up to their billing. The most immediately noticeable change is to the user interface, Dock and Finder. Gone is the mishmash of Aqua and brushed metal, and in its place a slick, shiny gunmetal theme. It looks great and replaces Aqua in applications that used it. Our one reservation is the translucent Menu Bar. It looks fine if you have a dark grey desktop, but if you prefer, say, orange or green, it looks odd.

The Finder has had a number of tweaks. Quick Look enables you to preview the content of some documents, such as PDFs, images and Word documents. Cover Flow lets you browse files as you can albums in iTunes. Moving the mouse pointer over the central item lets you play a movie or flip through the pages of a document. It's very slick and works well, but we wonder how useful it will be. Spotlight feels snappier than in Tiger and now presents its results in the same way whether you search from the Menu Bar or a Finder window. Commonly used searches can be added to a new section, Search For, in the Finder sidebar.

The Finder sidebar is now split into four sections. As well as a list of common searches, it presents Devices, which lists connected storage volumes, Shared, which lists shared computers available on the network, and Places which lists folders to which you want quick access.

Spaces is slick and genuinely useful, allowing you to have a number of virtual desktops on one monitor and switch between them quickly and easily.

Stacks

ADVERTISEMENT

lets you view the contents of a Docked folder as a fan or grid. On installation, Leopard creates Stacks for your Documents folder and a new Downloads folder, which by default stores Safari, Mail, and iChat downloads.

Speaking of the Dock, it's been updated and is now three-dimensional when at the bottom of the screen. It doesn't look terrible, but we're not convinced it's an improvement.

Time Machine will revolutionise the way many of us back up our work. It's switched off by default, but switching it on is no more trouble than clicking its pane in System Preferences and clicking On. To configure it, just select the hard drive or partition you want to use to back up your data and tell Time Machine which files and folders to back up. So, for example, to save time and disk space you could choose not to back up your Applications folder. It will then back up your chosen data incrementally every hour and save daily back-ups for the past month.

Pre-installed applications have been improved, too. Mail's stationery is fun but not overly useful, and many of iChat's additions fall into the same category, as does the addition of PhotoBooth. There are a couple of useful improvements in iChat, such as the ability to share the screen of someone you are chatting with to show them how to do something, and the option to tab chats.

Front Row has been redesigned to look like the Apple TV interface and looks terrific. Useful improvements to Mail include an RSS reader, the ability to create notes and to-do lists, and the long-overdue ability to turn dates in messages into iCal events.

Subscribers to .Mac will be pleased with the Back to My Mac feature, which allows you to access any of the computers authorised with your .Mac account from anywhere, over the Internet.

Other notable features include the new Parental Controls, which give you control over how others use your Mac, including who they can use Mail and iChat with.

Leopard also sees Safari 3 and Boot Camp come out of beta.

In our tests on a Core Duo Mac mini, Leopard ran beautifully. It feels much more responsive than Tiger was on the same Mac, and the new features will change the way we work significantly. Other than the initial glitch with Keychain Access, which has been fixed, we experienced no other bugs.

To the £85 price of Leopard you may have to add the cost of upgrading Ram - we'd suggest a minimum of 1GB - and an external hard drive to make full use of Time Machine. Even then it's worth the money. It is, quite simply, the best version of Mac OS X yet and if it doesn't add significantly to the number of people who switch to the Mac, we'll eat several copies of this very issue.