Leopard is out. Mac fans all around the world are rejoicing as they install what is arguably the best OS X upgrade since, well, OS X. Using Leopard for five days now, I have already started adapting to the new operating system. Past habits are being modified, old applications are being trashed, and new features are being taken advantage of. So, instead of boring you with how great Leopard is (we know that already), I thought I would write about how Leopard has changed my workflow.
Backup
Without a doubt, Time Machine has already altered the way I backup. Last week I picked up a nice Seagate 320GB hard drive for my enclosure. This marks the first time in history I have purchased a dedicated backup drive. While I have backed up in the past using my NAS and Synk, I never devoted an entire drive to backups or even backed up my entire hard drive. Had Time Machine not made this easier, I would still be doing crappy backups.
I am already seeing the benefits of this change. In the process of updating Spanning Sync to the latest Leopard compatible version, Spanning Sync managed to erase months of appointments. Had this happened one week ago I would have been up the creek. Instead, I fired up Time Machine, browsed to my home directory’s Application Support folder, and restored my iCal calendars from a few hours earlier.
Application Launching
Back in Tiger, I used a program called Overflow to speed up my application launching. I loved Overflow because it launched quickly, looked beautiful, and most importantly was functional. Looking over Leopard’s features, I honestly thought Stacks would replace Overflow as my application launcher. Well, that did not happen in Leopard thanks to an unexpected change – Spotlight.
Right after installing Leopard I found the new hotness in Leopard’s Spotlight. Gone are the days of slow searches and irrelevant results. The new Spotlight is faster and functions as an application launcher. Spotlight always lists applications before anything else, so a few letters, enter, and an application launches. While Spotlight has less eye candy than a Stack or Overflow, I am finding it to be more functional.
The Dock
Leading up to the launch of Leopard the Dock was a hot topic. The new 3D interface caused people to debate the Dock‘s location, perspective, and even usefulness. The debates resulted in an optional 2D interface, but I couldn’t care less about that. My true debate ended up over magnification.
I have always been a bottom, no auto hide, magnification user. After Leopard I find myself a bottom, no auto hide, no magnification user. Why the change? For some reason the magnification effect lost its glamor with the 3D dock. Sure, this change has absolutely no effect on my workflow, but I just thought I’d point out my change while others fight over more serious Dock issues.
Minor and Undecided Changes
There are many other aspects of my workflow which have changed with Leopard. Since the remaining changes are fairly insignificant or I’m not sure if I can call them a change yet, I will enter rapid fire mode for my remaining changes.
Mail instead of Gmail? Leopard’s Mail is looking pretty sweet and Gmail’s new IMAP support sure make the change easier. However, I’m not sure if I can break away from Gmail’s unique threading yet.
iCal instead of Google Calendar? As I mentioned earlier, Spanning Sync has not been working the greatest. With the my Jailbroken iPod Touch, I’m finding less of a need to use Google Calendar anyway.
iChat instead of Adium? If it would not be for iChat’s separate Contact Lists, I’d make the switch in a heartbeat. This change is going to take some adjusting to and Adium could easily win me back in a second.
MX Revolution button reconfiguration. I reassigned the buttons thanks to Spaces. New configuration: Side Wheel – Scroll through Spaces, Click Side Wheel – Spaces Overview, First Left Button – Dashboard, Second Left Button – Exposé, Search Button – Exposé Hide.
Finder icon view. Thanks to Leopard’s icon previews and Path Bar, I have made the switch from column view back to icon view.
What Did Leopard Change For You?
I’d love to hear your feedback. Has Leopard had an effect on your workflow? Are you finding the new Leopard applications suitable replacements or are you still looking for more?
31 Comments
Leopard really hasn’t altered the way I do anything. I find spaces sits unused, stacks annoying, spotlight is still too slow to use for me, the new finder doesn’t do anything for me, I have no need for iChat or it’s new features, I find I still use Mail the same way I used to (haven’t touched the new features) and I haven’t been able to configure Time Machine yet, so at the moment I’m really just enjoying the new look. That and faster application launches; the speed boost was impressive.
Within the next week I should get Time Machine up and I’m still considering upping my RAM to 2GB (my max) so Spotlight may become usable, but still.
I do agree with you, much of my workflow is changing a lot with Leopard.
Time Machine is a winner, although I only have a 100GB external laptop hard drive, which makes it confuse itself sometimes. I can’t help when it comes to mobility, I never intend to use a 3″ 1/2 external hard drive again. TM makes the first backup and uses 63 GB for that, which is great. However, on the next day, it asks for another drive, because the remaining 34 GB isn’t sufficient to do another backup, which is completely weird, because I supposed it would run incremental backups.
Anyway, just turn it off and then again once in a week. I think there’ll be an update for this.
However the major surprise was Spaces. I’ve seen similarities on Linux distros, didn’t found any of them of my liking. Then I saw Apple’s implementation and a new world opened before my eyes. I found Spaces completely awesome and a productivity enhancer. I working with only two Spaces: one for my work, and other for “junk” and distractions.
This got much better than working with two monitors, where stuff on the secondary monitor can catch your focus with just a blink. With Spaces, it keeps hidden until you decide it’s time to go there and check it (with an AWESOME set of default shortcuts, I might add). And although two monitors can be a joy, your eyes are never focused on both of them at the same time.
Also, you have the benefit of having the same set of icons, toolbars and shortcuts on both desktops. Try to drag something across two 1920×1200 displays and by the end of the day your mouse might have run a marathon.
Ronald-
I’m glad Time Machine was able to restore your events after they were deleted! But for anyone els reading who might have experienced the same problem and were left without a backup, please contact Spanning Sync support–we’ve developed a method of recovering deleted events from the Google Calendar archive.
Thanks,
Charlie
spaces really surprised me i went into the spaces settings and allocated different apps to launch by defaut in different windows and I love the clean screen.. I set things up to switch screens using apple + the arrow key and fly about from space to space as required. It is all automated and makes for a lot less clutter. You can also make an app appear in all windows by default..
I have mine set to window 1 safari , 2 is mail and so on and on . I am trying safari set to all windows at the moment as i am tending to use the web alot but which ever way you choose to set up spaces it sure is cool.
give it a go
I look forward to the improvements in Mail and iCal, and likely will use Time Machine – but a changed workflow will have to wait to to some critical application incompatibilities. I did my research and know what does work, but there are a few apps on my list for which I can’t find any reports; I’ve indicated these with [?]. Have you used any of these under Leopard Ron? Are there other apps that you’ve had to ditch in favour of the workflow improvements you describe?
Bruce, I posted a comment over on your site filling in some gaps in your application list.
SPACES, set up with a hot corner – drag the mouse to a corner, and BANG! Spaces is up. Click on the space with the app you need, and you are there. AWESOME! Used to use Virtue Desktops and Expose, but this is much more intuitive.
Does Time Machine work well with FreeNAS? I’m thinking about setting my network up similar to yours.
Time Machine has no support for network drives, so it does not work with FreeNAS at all. There is apparantly some hackery to get network drives to work, but it requires at least a HFS+ formatted drive, and FreeNAS does not support HFS+. Thankfully, Leopard auto mounts/unmounts Time Machine drives on sleep, so an external drive is no longer such a pain with a laptop.
I still have yet to install Leopard the disc is still sitting on my desk. Actually the reason of the delay is my laptop dvd rive is acting up. But anyways, I did review countless reviews but things I like to comment on regarding spaces and time machine.
I’d admit, I am not an avid backup person. I have used Norton Ghost in the past, even with external hard drives, have it do a scheduled full back up once a week and incremental backups nightly. Yes, Norton’s interface is ugly, but it did its job for me. What I don’t know about Time Machine is, in the event of catastrophic failure, does it support bare-metal restore. Meaning, am I able to use a Rescue Disc, and restore the OS back to where it was WITHOUT reinstalling anything. I find that to be the most useful feature of any backup utility.
I have used Linux and variants of UNIX for quite a long time. They have always had the concept of multiple desktops. I personally never used them much as Apple thinks people will use Spaces. Have you really used Spaces that much it truly affected the way you work? My problem with this concept is lack of short-term memory. Only thing useful with virtual desktops in GNOME or even KDE, was a mini preview of the four desktops and window locations of what is there kind of jogs my memory.
The Dock is useful but it gets crowded easily so I can see how Stacks can be helpful, but those new icons are just fugly without colour to differentiate what they are. I also hate the Start menu from Windows and KDE, I do like the old Apple menu from the classic days. Are there 3rd party Apps that allow me to do that? Heck, I would love the classic rainbow Apple too
.
I guess that is all I can comment on until I get my DVD drive repaired or I buy a new 24″ iMac.
Time Machine provides that option. From the Leopard DVD you can do a full restore of your Time Machine backup, or opt to reinstall the operating system and then migrate your data and applications over.
I haven’t used it enough to say it’s changed my habits, but I have found it handy when doing web development work.
Not that I know of.
Regarding my Apple menu comment, mainly I find it annoying that I have to click Hard Drive, Applications, to get to my lesser used programs that I did not put on my Dock. I know you mentioned Spotlight as your new launcher, so you rather just type in Terminal and go from there? I really have to give that a go, but I know that Windows Vista does that and I still find i click Windows+R to run my apps (even XP).
By the way, if I use an external DVD ROM drive, would it boot (USB) from a PowerBook? The warranty I believe expired, so how would I go by replacing it cheaply as possible? Apple Store and pay them or do it myself? Is it accessible to open, I know their form fitting goodness makes tweaks much more difficult compared to the Dells I deal with at work.
I’m not sure about DVD ROM drives, but I know hard drives only boot off USB on Intel-based Macs.
Depending on how easy it is to open the case, I would probably just do it myself. iFixit sells replacement parts for many Mac components and offers the best installation guides I’ve ever seen. Even if you don’t buy from them, I would recommend using their installation guides.
Awesome website! Found a great deal and just bought it. The instructions are daunting, but I think it will be a fun worthwhile project. Hopefully I complete it! I guess if I want Leopard I will!
Regarding your jailbreak: How did you arrange the icons? I can’t seem to figure it out! And posting comments seem to be extremely slow again… Maybe its my office connection.
I manually edited the plist file containing the icon order. However, there is an application called Customize that will handle the ordering for you.
No, it’s not your office connection. I’ve been experiencing it the past couple of days. I just sent a rather lengthy support request to Media Temple, so hopefully we can track this issue down. The last time you mentioned a problem there was a huge server wide network issue, but as far as I know, they’re not experiencing anything like that at the moment.
Jonathan, Media Temple just made some changes on my site that should dramatically speed up load times. Is it any better on your end or is everything still slow?
I have used various incarnations of “spaces” on a few different Linux platforms and never was impressed but space son Leopard really did surprise me there is something very useful about how they have implemented it that makes it very useful and even a little exciting.
I will make a double post I suppose now to test it out…
Well that post seemed just about as slow as before. Though FiOS has been acting up here lately. I will check again Monday at the office to see if the T1 is faster.
Okay, I lied, response #20 was faster than #19.
Okay time to check at the office for you…
#22 took longer than I would of liked, Firefox was waiting for your domain to connect for about 5-6 seconds then it posted quickly after it did. But the initial delay that I been experiencing in the past does seem a bit quicker, but still present unfortunately.
Thanks again for reporting back. Currently it’s looking like the issue may be localized to the East Coast / West Coast internet connection. I’m noticing the issue is appearing on a few hops before it makes a West Coast connection. Would you mind running a few traceroutes and emailing me the results?
For app browsing I have a folder grid set up on the dock which speeds things up considerably. Great feature
Ron, thanks for the tips here. I was happy to find out about path bar mainly, but I honestly haven’t even tried spotlight to launch anything since I’m an avid QS user. But you’re right, it does work well, and it’s fast.
I think one of my favorite things about leopard besides spaces is apple mail, i’m really digging it.
Also – do you know of a free alternative to spanning sync? Thanks.
Unfortunately, not. Spanning Sync appears to be a one-of-a-kind program on Mac. Thankfully, Spanning Sync has been greatly improved under Leopard since I wrote this article, but I can still understand looking for a free program.
Thanks, I may give it a shot anyways.
Re: Mail instead of Gmail?
You can also thread conversations in Apple’s Mail (this may even have been around before GMail’s, but I’m not sure). Just click View -> Organize by Thread, and you get the same thing. Replies aren’t listed inline, but the ‘Reply Arrow’ next to messages you’ve replied to brings you right to your reply to each message.
Re: iChat instead of Adium?
A nifty little add-on called Chax will let you unify your lists from multiple networks into one window on iChat, and I’ve been using this for a long time with no stability issues or other wierdnesses.
I have recently setup Time Machine with FreeNAS as the backup medium using a AFP share. It works well once setup. There are a few things you need to do to get it to work without a a HFS+ formatted drive.