Ode to Apple

On the 26th of October, 2007 as soon as Apple releases Leopard, I went to an Apple retailer here in Mumbai, India only to be told that “The release is postponed. We got official emails!” “What?”, I asked and thought to myself “Apple and not on time, postponed and I wasn’t aware. Did I miss the news feeds while I drove just 15 minutes from home to their store.”

Anyway, it was just one of the stupid sales-girl unaware of enough facts about Apple despite being stationed at an Apple Products Retailer/Store. It was later confirmed that Leopard is nowhere releasing anytime soon in India.

While Apple sold 2 million copies of Leopard during the first weekend, I decided to order mine from Amazon. However, they won’t ship to India!

So, here are the steps I did to get my copy of Apple Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard;

1. Order the best bargain available at Amazon at that time – Apple Leopard DVD for $99.99 from J&R Music and Computer World.
2. Ship to a Friend’s address in US of A.
3. Let him ship it (along with few other of my orders, of course) as an educational DVD for review purposes to my place in Mumbai, India.

If you do not wish to read in details but glance through a review table-of-sort, then Gizmodo has a handy review matrix from the full reviews of NYT’s David Pogue, USA Today’s Ed Baig and WSJ’s Walt Mossberg. Gizmodo also has a Ten Things You Should Know Before You Upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard, which highlights many “reasons to upgrade to Leopard”.

Here are the few features, according to me, which are super-cool from the whole 300 New Features that Apple added to Mac OS X 10.5 (code-named Leopard).

• Finder: View > Show Path Bar.
• Front Row: Movie Previews, DVD Playback, Streaming Content.
• iChat: Good enough reasons to give this app a try alongside Adium.
• Screensavers: A good way to impress your girlfriend or wife by doing the Mosaic Display ScreenSaver of her Pictures.
• Spaces: One good way to worked in an organized manner.
• Trash: While browsing your Trash folder, you can empty it right there – “Empty” (look at the top-right corner).
• Leopard brings you a new more human voice – Alex. I just heard him when Little Snitch disturbed my Front Row.
• Boot Camp: I’ve read good reviews about Boot Camp and some Mac user even claim that Windows is way faster on a Macbook Pro than on any other PC. Well, I’ve not yet coaxed myself into using Windows on my Mac and is very unlikely to happen anytime soon.

MAIL

I can live without the stationary but this should be a good addition for many people. I love the “Duplicate Smart Mailbox”. I’m going to do away with few more third party apps as Mail has its own “NOTE” and “TO DO”. Mail comes with an RSS Reader this time, however, it will be unwise to move all your RSS feeds if you’re like me who have more 1000+ feeds. I’m going to use it to watch over important ones and let Google Reader handle the remaining. Last but not the least, it comes with its own backup mechanism – “Archive Mailbox”.

PREVIEW

I like the new subtile features added to Preview – Crop, rotate, resize. Its new ability to cut-paste to other Applications is a good addition along with the “Send Photo to” iPhoto or Aperture. Preview’s capability to do Batch Operation is another cool feature which I would seriously like to thank Apple for. I can do away another third party tool here.

TIME MACHINE

This is one awesome piece of Application and NO Mac user should NOT be NOT using it. It backs up everything on your Mac hourly. Let it do its job and don’t even bother looking at it. Time Machine is more stackable archives of your works and you can archive your disk as it gets bigger and never lose anything from now on. For instance, you might keep a disk for each year and keep them as Time Machine enabled disk. You can come back later and browse the Time Machine discs on your Mac. Time Machine backed-up disc are recognizable on any Leopard or newer Mac. I’ve to say good buy to Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper. I suggest getting a Time Machine Disc at least thrice the size of your Mac Disc, perhaps something five times the size would be an ideal one to have all – hourly, daily, weekly and monthly backups. You can manually do a back-up anytime you wish by Holding down Control Key and initiating the Time Machine.

Misc

• Here is a blow-up of the PC Windows depicted by the notorious Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) as seen in Leopard. Here is how to Remove the Windows BSOD icon in Leopard if you want to show some love and respect to your friends, relatives and colleagues who uses a PC.
• Engadget’s Leopard vs Vista – feature chart showdown

References

• MacWorld’s review of Apple Leopard
• Engadget’s run-down of their experience with Leopard.
• AppleInsider’s Review of Leopard
• Apple Gazette Review of Leopard
• Top Ten Leopard Tips from Guy Kawasaki

Trivia

• Leopard’s login wallpaper is not that cool, but I’m OK with it for now. If you don’t like it, here is How To Change Leopard’s Login Wallpaper.
• Of course, many people don’t get along well with the new Dock, so here are the replacements – High Contrast, Browse More Docks.
• While the developer of Letterbox plugin for Mail is still working on Leopard compatibility, here is an alternate way to get widescreen format to Mail – WideMail.

For Adobe Software Users, it would be worth looking through the Adobe Leopard FAQ (pdf).

UPDATE

It looks like Apple Leopard have reached India.