Since my Cube could not run Leopard, and I did not have any other Macs, I was unable to delve into Leopard right away. Apple NL was kind enough to fix this problem for us, by generously loaning me a brand new MacBook with Leopard installed so I could review it for OSNews. Read on for the findings. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is the Mac OS’ 66th release (not counting the 10.x.x releases), dating back to 1984, making it one of the longest running lineage of operating systems available. Obviously, the Mac OS has seen a massive shift between Mac OS 9.2.2 and Mac OS 10.0, but the lineage remains, and is clearly visible. Despite the massive changes over the past 23 years, the visual similarities between the software on the first Mac and this Leopard release are amusing to see. Apple really stuck to their original design. Commendable.
Still, Leopard is probably the biggest visual shift in the history of Mac OS X. They changed the dock massively, the menubar, the finder, the overall theme, the icons, and so on. In this review, I will start by detailing the visual changes, after which I will delve into the various new and updated applications and features, a few words on the MacBook, followed by a conclusion. Seeing I am not a programmer, I will not go into the various new developer features. For more information on those, I redirect you to John Siracusa’s outstanding review of Leopard over at Ars.
Seeing this was a brand new MacBook, I did not have to perform an installation or upgrade. After the initial ‘new-Mac-setup’, and the update to 10.5.1, I was ready to go. I asked Apple to loan me a fairly basic MacBook, as this basic configuration is most likely the most popular.
The appearance
Leopard has seen a major overhaul of its graphical appearance. If there is one part of Leopard that received criticism even months before its targeted release date, looks is the one. Many people wondered if the changes made actually had a point, if they contributed to better usability or a better user experience, or if they were just a sort of knee-jerk response to Windows Vista’s Aero. I was one of the people who posed a lot of question marks behind all the changes, but I always had, in the back of my mind, the idea that you cannot judge a user interface based on its screenshots. You actually have to use it. In other words, my complaints were based on screenshots, and not on actual usage – which kind of made my complaints rather irrelevant.
Before I detail the changes, I can say that they are not nearly as bad as some people (including myself) have made them out to be. It takes a little bit of getting used to, and yes, their contributions to a better user experience are non-existent, but they do not make it any worse either. This is the central theme when it comes to Leopard’s GUI changes.
What I initially disliked the most was the new dock. Instead of it being a sort of pinboard, that works just fine for every dock out there, it is now a sort of pseudo-3D-but-not-isometric-either plank, with a reflecting mirror-like surface. After a few weeks of usage, though, you kind of just get used to it, and it does not seem to bother me at all – despite a number of annoyances that I will detail here. As said, it does not add anything either, and because of that, you might wonder “why change it in the first place?” This is the question that keeps on wandering through my mind when using the dock.
Sadly, though, the new look has some weirdness too. First of all, what kind of perspective is the dock using? It is not 3D, it is not isometric, what the heck is it? Even though you get used to it, it is still a very unnatural thing to look at. Secondly, the icons in Leopard’s dock are a bit odd. Especially annoying is the dynamically generated shadow atop the icons; on what surface are those shadows falling? They sure do not fall on the desktop! Consequently, it seems as if each icon has a little black cloud hovering on top of it, which only adds to the weird feeling of the new dock. Another irritating niggle is that the dock labels can be very hard to read on some backgrounds (esp. backgrounds with text).
A special note has to be made about the new dock indicators. They used to be clear but unobtrusive black triangles. They worked, they got out of your way, and looked fine. They have been replaced by weird looking blue-ish white lights, whose visibility depends on your choice of desktop background. Not very optimal.
The dock looked fine the way it was, it worked fine the way it was (save for the common problems with the dock paradigm). There was little need for change, and as such, it really does kind of feel as if Apple needed a way to tell its users: look, we changed some stuff around, Leopard is all new! You know, newer is better, different is better, that kind of thing. However, the dock is such a central element to the Mac OS X user experience, and as such, you should not mess with it too much. Apple had a serious opportunity to truly fix some of the problems associated with the dock paradigm, but they blew it. They did not make it any better, but they did not make it any worse either.
Apple also changed the menubar. A lot can be said about the merits and problems of the global menubar (I like it) – it makes sense because of Fitts’ Law, it is cleaner, it sucks for multiple desktops, and so on and so forth. Apple changed little about the menubar, except for that one tiny bit about making it slightly transparent. It is not that bad at all, but again, it is not anything useful either. It does not improve the user experience or usability in any way. It will not kill you, but it will not make you dinner either. This is another case where Apple could have done something really substantial – like fixing the odd behaviour of the global menubar on multiple screen setups – but again, Apple blew it.
Apple also – finally! Sanity! Praise Jobs! – decided to consolidate the ten million billion different themes available in Tiger into one. Sure, they chose the one I personally find the least attractive of them all (the ‘plastic’ look), but I am already thrilled they decided to standardise in the first place. Sure, the standardisation process is long from over (they still mingle those pill toolbar buttons with normal toolbar buttons, iTunes still sports its own widgets, among other things), but it is a huge step forward. The plastic theme itself has been changed here and there too, and I could not help but notice it being influenced by… Platinum from OS9 – which is a good thing, as I love the OS9 artwork. A related change is the easier identification of the active window, even though I personally never had a problem with that in OS X.
The icon set in Leopard has also been changed massively, and sadly, it is not for the better. The program and file icons have all been reworked and look a little bit different (and better), but where Apple really went all-out is the folder icons. And they messed it up badly. The general-purpose folder icons look just fine, that is not where the problem lies; the problem lies in the special folder icons, like ~/Pictures, /Applications, ~/Documents, and so on. Instead of being clearly distinguishable, they now all look alike, and that is such a tremendous error I am not really sure how Apple gave this the green light. It is a major step backwards from the previous icon set, and I’m also not sure how Apple is going to fix this issue. Especially when you place stacks (more on that later) on your dock for easy access to your Documents/Pictures/Applications/etc. folders, you will have to consciously look at the icons in order to differentiate them. A fairly major usability error.
Conclusion
All in all, it is difficult to escape the feeling that Apple made changes to Mac OS X’s look just for the sake of making changes to the look. The changes were surely not dictated by an objective of improving usability. Do not get me wrong, the changes will not really degrade the user experience that much either, but one has to wonder: why change something just for the sake of changing it? Especially seeing they could have been fixing so many substantial things, things that users have been asking for for years?
The Finder
The next area where Apple claims to have made major improvements is the Finder. The Finder has always been a problem child in Mac OS X, and it has been criticised heavily for its inconsistent and downright aggravating behaviour – both by me, as well as more eloquently by Siracusa at Ars Technica. The major problem for me, personally, was the apparent split personality within the Finder: it tried to be a navigational as well as a spatial file manager at the same time, even though these concepts are fairly mutually exclusive – consequently, the Finder did not pass the test in either paradigm.
The biggest problem with this split personality lay not in the fact that the Finder could switch between the two; the problem lay in the fact that the Finder was actually both at the same time. You could press the little dash button to change between the two paradigms, but especially the spatial bit just did not work very well. As I noted in my little rant on the Finder:
“The spatial version of Finder is a bad implementation of the concept as well; for instance, open directories are not marked as such, which is a very important aspect of the spatial metaphor.
But wait! That’s not all! The spatial metaphor is only retained when you start navigating the filesystem from the exact same window you toggled the dash widget on! When you toggle the widget in /usr, destroy that window, and then start navigating in /bin, you get back to the navigational Finder; while when you start browsing in /usr again, you are back in spatial mode! Insanity!”
These were not the only problems. Another irritation is that the Finder litters the filesystem with binary .DS_Store files, in which things like window position and size are stored. You are forgiven for never having seen these files – you will notice them when moving data between Macs and other operating systems – directories coming from a Mac may each contain such a .DS_Store file. Apart from all these problems, the Finder also had major, well, speed issues: the spinning beachball has been a common sight while using the Finder to navigate through network shares.
Apart from the performance issues, none of these problems have been addressed in Leopard. In addition, the new Finder even creates a few new problems.
Performance-wise, as many other reviewers have noticed, the new Finder is a definite step up from the previous Mac OS X releases. I regularly move files between my standard desktop box and my Mac, and I have yet to encounter a spinning beachball while doing so. This will please many of you Mac users out there; I am fairly sure that the performance complaints weigh heavier than the behaviour complaints to most of you.
As said, the behaviour issues have not been fixed. The Finder still suffers from a severe case of split personality disorder (no, not schizophrenia, that is something completely different), and few steps have been undertaken to fix this problem. I second many others that have been saying this for years: split the Finder into the two paradigms, and allow users to select which mode they prefer, and make the Finder stick to that choice. The default should be browser mode, as that is what users have come to expect in this day and age.
Still, Apple has not exactly been standing still either. The Finder’s interface has been renewed, bringing in some major iTunes-esque features such as the new sidebar and Cover Flow. The new side bar is a tad bit annoying. In previous versions of the Finder, you could adjust the size of the items in the side bar easily; you could make them smaller, bigger, you name it. I preferred them bigger, because I put links in there to my most used folders, to be able to drag and drop stuff into them very easily. The new sidebar only allows for the items to be really, really tiny, making it a lot more difficult to drop files and folder into the items of the sidebar. The good thing about the new sidebar is that the layout has been improved, and you can store Spotlight searches in the sidebar, a welcome addition.
Initially, I had a hard time seeing a use for Cover Flow other than as a show-off gimmick in Apple Stores and retailers, much like the magnification of dock items. In all honesty, that view has not changed much. I do not think I have ever used Cover Flow in a substantial way – except in combination with the Finder’s best new feature: Quick Look.
Quick Look
Quick Look is amazing. With a simple press of the spacebar, any selected file will be previewed in a slick black overlay window. It works with documents, photos, images, audio files, movies, you name it. You can even use Quick Look in Time Machine mode (more on that later), and you can find Quick Look all over the system. Received an email with an attachment? Select the attachment, hit the spacebar, and see a preview before you ever have to save and/or open it.
Quick Look is one of those typical Apple things: sure, it has been done by other operating systems, but Apple has done it well, in a way that is both unobtrusive as well as easily accessible. A definite thumbs up to Apple, and I would love to see this feature making its way to other desktop environments.
Quick Look has a flaw though – a flaw that is actually caused by the Finder (no surprise there). Let me explain – say you are in icon view, the view I use in my pictures and documents folders, since it allows you to see previews, and still retain good overview thanks to the Finder’s new ability to resize the grid (you can reduce the spacing between icons). Now, the problem with this view is that the arrow keys work in a fairly weird way. Where in other operating systems you can use the left/right keys to browse through the contents completely (as in, you automatically jump to the next/previous row when you reach the last column of a row by pressing left or right), this does not happen in the Finder.
Now, I had the intention to use Quick Look to quickly show pictures to my friends (I find iPhoto overkill for just showing photos), or for simply personal viewing. However, because of the above behaviour in the Finder, you cannot easily browse through a folder’s contents with the Quick Look pane open. If you reach the end of a row, you need to press down to move to the next one. This does not only break the ordering of your files – since the Quick Look pane generally covers the directory’s contents, you cannot actually see the files underneath, making it impossible to navigate through your files. This is a really annoying problem, and it basically means that you cannot use Quick Look to browse through large sets of files while in icon mode.
That is where the Cover Flow view comes into play: in this view, you can easily browse through a folder’s content with the arrow keys. So, in combination with Quick Look, Cover Flow makes sense to me. Still, I should not have to resort to changing view modes just for using Quick Look properly – especially taking the Finder’s erratic behaviour with retaining view modes into account.
Quick Look has an extensible plug-in interface, allowing programmers to write their own filters for Quick Look, so support for file formats can be added later. This flexibility was demonstrated recently when someone came up with a Quick Look plugin for zipped files.
Stacks, Spaces, and Spotlight
Which, quite illogically (don’t ask), brings me to stacks. Stacks are links on the dock to folders that allow you to view said directories’ contents in two views: a fan or a grid.
I find stacks to be a bit of a letdown, in their current form. While the idea shows a lot of potential, Apple’s implementation leaves a few things to be desired. First of all, the stacks’ icons default to the very first item in the directory the stack represents. This means that in for instance the download stack, the icon is ever changing, seriously hurting the ability to easily recognise the download stack icon on the dock. If we were to look at a stack of the Applications folder, you would always be looking at the Address Book icon. This issue is fixed by these overlays, but for me, this solution did not work. That is most likely a flaw on my end, as it works fine for just about everybody else out there.
The second problem is a performance issue. The exploding animation that precedes the grid view drops frames on the brand new MacBook Apple loaned to me when the stack is large (say, the Applications folder, or my Pictures folder which has 38 folders), and that is really annoying. There are other issues, like not being able to pull up a context menu on items within a stack. These are all issues that can easily be fixed in updates, but for now, I do not find stacks to be particularly useful just yet.
Apple also (finally) implemented virtual desktops, known as Spaces, in Leopard. Many people even remotely familiar with the UNIX/Linux or BeOS worlds will welcome this addition to the Mac OS, especially seeing Apple did it in quite the slick manner – yes, another example of taking an existing concept, and making it easy to use. It is not a revolutionary new feature, but its implementation is rock solid.
You can easily bind applications to a virtual desktop, something I could never seem to get right on Compiz. You can also easily add virtual workspaces by simply adding rows and columns, allowing you to create up to 16 virtual desktops. Additionally, you can drop into a bird’s eye view of all your virtual desktops (similar to the ‘Expo’ plugin in Compiz Fusion), where you can drag windows around, and even drag entire desktops around. The bird’s eye view looks a tad bit odd with a multiple screen setup, but nothing serious. There is one tiny other problem, that most likely only goes for Compiz users: there is no shortcut for moving a single window across virtual desktops; you must use the bird’s eye view for that.
Spotlight has also seen some major improvements. First of all, it has gotten so much faster. I already used Spotlight as an application launcher, and the performance improvements make this specific use of Spotlight so much better. Additionally, you can now easily ‘stack’ search criteria on top of one another within a Finder window – I felt all warm and fuzzy inside because it reminded me of (the much more limited) BFS queries. Great stuff. You can now also use Spotlight to search the contents of other Macs on your network, a much requested feature ever since the introduction of Spotlight.
Personally, I still find Spotlight to be the best implementation of system wide search. It is fast, easily accessible (cmd+space for the win!), and quite multifunctional. Compare this to the implementation in for instance Windows Vista, which, somehow, just does not seem to work just as you would expect.
Conclusion
Coming to a conclusion, I can say that the new features and performance improvements to the Finder and Spotlight are really worth it. Quick Look is a great feature, the more robust Finder will please many, and Spaces is an excellent implementation of the virtual desktops concept. Stacks have potential, but for now, the implementation leaves a few things to be desired. Sadly, though, Apple did not take full advantage of the Finder and menubar overhaul by not fixing many of the long-standing issues.
Time Machine
Probably the biggest new feature of Leopard is its new backup solution, Time Machine. Apple’s website says that “Time Machine is the breakthrough automatic backup that’s built right into Mac OS X. It keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac – digital photos, music, movies, TV shows, and documents. Now, if you ever have the need, you can easily go back in time to recover anything.”
First of all, it is dead-easy to set up. Plug in your external drive, and your Mac will ask you if you want to use the drive as a backup disk for Time Machine. Confirm the dialog, and System Preferences will pop up, warning you that the disk first needs to be erased before it can be used by Time Machine. Since I hooked up a brand-new LaCie 500GB external disk, I had no worries about that one. After erasing the disk, Time Machine will start with the initial back up, which logically takes quite a while to complete (as it backs up your entire Mac).
Time Machine will make backups every hour, but since the system works incrementally (using UNIX-style hard links to files and directories), it only writes those files to the backup disk that have been altered since the last backup. It will keep hourly backups of the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups until you run out of disk space. When you do, Time Machine will alert you that it is going to delete old backups, so you will not be surprised when old backups suddenly start disappearing.
Time Machine’s interface is where it gets quite interesting. When browsing a folder, you can press the Time Machine icon on the dock, and the desktop and all other windows will slide out of view, to reveal a view on a galaxy filled with stars, stars that are passing you buy in a science-fiction-y kind of way. In the middle, Finder windows are set up like a set of domino pieces, with the first window being ‘now’, and the others being earlier incarnations of the folder in question. At the bottom of the screen are 3D controls that allow you to go back in time, restore files or folders, or cancel the operation. The interface is pretty much self explanatory, albeit a tad bit ‘too much bling’ for me. I do understand Apple’s intentions though: backing up is boring, and they needed to make it sassy. And they surely succeeded at that one.
Time Machine has more tricks up its sleeve, though. Apart from the ability to restore individual files and folders in a versioning-kind-of-way in the Finder, you can also use your Time Machine back ups to restore your computer after a serious crash or hard drive failure. Additionally, Time Machine works in other applications than the Finder too, such as iPhoto or Mail.app. A problem with this is that it is not exactly clear which applications support Time Machine, and which do not. If you click the Time Machine button while using an application that does not support it, Time Machine will show you the desktop folder.
A problem I personally foresaw was how Time Machine would deal with laptop computers, Apple’s strongest market. Laptops generally do not have external drives attached to them all day long like desktops and workstations do, and that might pose problems. Luckily, Apple’s engineers are actually quite the clever blokes, and they fixed this potential problem by allowing Time Machine to store any changes made in an external drive-less state locally, syncing them with the Time Machine disk as soon as it gets connected again.
Conclusion
I am impressed with Time Machine. It is the cleanest, easiest, prettiest, and yes, funniest back up solution I have ever laid my hands upon. My personal back up habits were a tad bit weird: I have multiple machines running in my house, and I simply synchronized my important documents and photos on all of those machines (manually!); if one installation died on me, I could simply re-install, and copy things over from another machine. Tedious, but it worked. Time Machine is a million times easier, and I can surely see myself relying on this method instead of my OCD-inspired manual synchronisation. A definite thumbs up to Apple and Leopard.
Safari, Mail.app, and iChat
As usual, Apple also updated most of the applications that come with Mac OS X. First off, Safari has been bumped to version 3, and comes with some interesting additions. Just like Firefox has had for ages, Safari now has an inline ‘find-as-you-type’ search bar. A welcome addition, as the search dialog in Safari 2 started to feel fairly archaic. Safari 3 also includes inline .pdf controls, which solves the problem in Safari 2 where .pdf files were rendered a tad bit too small for my comfort.
I am no fan of tabbed browsing (ok, I hate it), but I would still like to mention that Apple has implemented dragging tabs, and the possibility to drag a tab out of its parent window, creating its own window. You can also easily create Dashboard widgets now by simply selecting a piece of a webpage which will be turned into a live widget. My most beloved feature in Safari 3, however, is the fact that you can tell Safari to re-open the last closed window – or all the windows in case you shut Safari down. This is a great little tool, and a small step towards my ideal of a system-wide undo. Sadly, the tool has no shortcut key assigned to it (it is in the History menu).
Safari has one big problem though: it is unstable. I am used to Safari being an application that I could run without ever having to worry about it crashing or hanging up on me – apart from badly designed websites with lots of Flash and Java stuff that would bring the poor thing to a crawl. In Safari 3, however, even the simplest of websites can lock Safari up completely, with the infamous spinning beachball out in full force. It happens once about every two to three days, and I noticed in the Resource Monitor that during such a hang, Safari would eat up 16777000 TB (tera bytes!) of shared memory (see the screenshot). Something tells me that cannot be right.
Mail.app has also seen numerous improvements. Sadly, it still uses the odd-looking pill buttons, but to compensate, there is now a nice and long-overdue activity section placed conveniently in the Mail.app main window. Additionally, you can now create and manage notes and to-dos in Mail.app, which are accessible system-wide. You can also convert emails directly into notes or to-dos. I can sure see how that would eliminate the need for emails to yourself, something I see people do quite regularly.
A more debatable feature is the new stationery element of Mail.app – more commonly known among us geeks and nerds as annoying html email. I have an absolute distaste for html-based email, whether Apple calls it stationery or not. Yes, it looks ‘Applelicious’, is easy to use in an iWork kind-of-way, and yes, I can see the usefulness of the feature for people who want to make birthday invitations for their children – but still, I cannot get over the fact that Apple just reintroduced html-based email and even put the spotlight on it. As a geek, I find that all email ought to be text based, period.
iChat has also been significantly overhauled. Apple has done some amazing stuff with iChat, I simply have no other word for it. Firstly, you can play around with Photo Booth effects when you are videoconferencing. Not particularly useful, but definitely a fun thing to do with your friends when you are bored. It also includes a backdrop feature, a feature also seen in the new Photo Booth. It will ask you to step out of your camera’s view, after which you can step back in and it will know where to draw the backdrop. This can be a bit problematic on a laptop, though, when you use it on the couch. Nice playthings.
The star of the iChat show, however, is iChat Theatre. With iChat Theatre, you can show nearly any file to your friends in a videochat; it will even play music, slideshows, you name it (if it does Quick Look, it will do iChat Theatre). Ever seen a keynote by Steve Jobs? You can now do all that in iChat yourself. You can also do screen sharing, and pass on control of your Mac to your friends, so they can help you in troubleshooting sessions. You can easily record all these iChat sessions in ACC or MPEG4, but only with full consent from the people in the chat.
Misc.
For the rest, just about any application or utility in Leopard has been under the knife. iCal’s interface has been reworked, Preview has finally gotten the ability to resize/crop images, and to order and merge .pdf documents. As I already mentioned, Photo Booth has gotten the backdrops feature, while also receiving some new effects and the ability to record video. Front Row has a completely new interface, similar to that of the Apple TV. It is still amazingly easy to use, and actually looks a little bit better than previous incarnations, if you ask me.
A few notes on the MacBook
Since Apple loaned me not only a copy of Leopard, but also the MacBook to actually run it on, I want to make a few notes on the MacBook too. I have always been a fan of Apple’s notebook offerings; as far as I am concerned, there is still nothing on the market today that can beat the lower-end iBook/MacBook in terms of features, looks, and price.
The new MacBook is no exception. The build quality feels a lot better than on my G4 iBook (which was a tad bit flimsy), and the various innovative (yes, they are innovative) features such as the magnetic screen lid and the MagSafe power cord really add to a high-end feeling, even though this is actually the lower-end Apple notebook offering. The screen is also quite slick and bright, and the iSight works fine.
There are a few problems too, of course. I know I will get flamed for this, but Apple, please include a two button trackpad in your notebooks. I know it is a touchy subject, but now that we have the Mighty Mouse, it only makes sense to include multiple buttons on notebooks too. Additionally, the package does not include a mini DVI -> VGA/DVI connector. I had to go to the Apple retailer and buy one myself for 20 EUR. My iBook G4 did come with an ADC -> VGA connector.
All in all, for 1099 USD or 1049 EUR, the MacBook is a lot of bang for your buck, and there is little in the form of competition for it. If you are in the market for a small but full-featured laptop, the MacBook is actually the only sane choice.
Conclusion
When I first entered the world of Mac OS X, during the Panther (10.3) era, on a G4 iMac, I was blown away. I came from a BeOS, Windows, and Linux world, and back then, I had the feeling that OS X truly was the end-all-be-all of operating systems. I could not help but think, if people can get this, than why on earth are they still chugging along on their Windows and Linux boxes? What is wrong with these people?
Of course, it did not take me long to realise that the Mac OS was far from the end-all-be-all operating system I thought it to be during the first few days of using it. It had its fair share of flaws, limitations, and oddities that made me understand that OS X was ‘just like everybody else’; it is good at some things, it sucks at a whole lot of other things.
Over the years, the Mac OS did improve significantly. Especially in the performance department, each successive release performed slightly better than its predecessor, which is a far cry from its competitors who have gotten significantly slower over the years. In addition, new OS X releases seemed to introduce new features that actually made sense, that actually tried to solve problems real users coped with. I still consider Expose to be the best graphical user interface idea this century. There are other features in a similar league, like Spotlight.
Panther was a huge improvement over Jaguar, and Tiger was a huge improvement over Panther; is Leopard a huge improvement over Tiger? It may not be a huge improvement like Panther and Tiger were, but it sure is an improvement – contrary to some of the reports we see online. Even though this review started a tad bit negative, you have to realise that the start of this review dealt mostly with the looks of the system, simply because Apple itself made quite a fuss of it. Looks, however, are quite subjective, and as such, it may very well be that other people totally dig the look of the dock or the new folder icons. And even if you do not, you can change these things (although it is still Apple we are talking about here, so they have not made it easy).
As for the real new features, Leopard does in fact carry a serious punch. Even though many would rate Time Machine as Leopard’s ‘killer feature’, I would rate Quick Look as the killer feature. To have instant access to any file without ever having to launch an application is a major step forward from the single tasking days of yore, where not the document was central, but the application. Quick Look does away with the application-centric paradigm even more, while being available system-wide, and this makes it my personal killer feature.
However, do not underestimate the power of Time Machine. I have often harped on it for being inflexible and too bling-blingy compared to Windows Vista’s Volume Shadow Copy, but the cold hard truth is that VSC is only available to those who have either Vista Ultimate or Business, and even those most likely have no idea how to set it up or use it properly. Time Machine may do less than VSC, but what it does do, is done so much easier, better, and prettier it is almost scary. Time Machine makes backing up easy and fun, and that is a major achievement.
The new iChat deserves a special note. The sad thing about iChat is that it is fairly useless in my country, since we all use MSN Messenger, and nobody uses AIM (and Macs are not exactly that widespread yet either, even though it is getting better and better), but with a few test chats with my OSNews colleague Adam, the power of the new features just left me flabbergasted. Being able to watch presentations, pictures, and videos together in such a slick fashion, despite the Atlantic Ocean being in between us was just awesome.
Leopard is a great release, despite its bugs and annoyances. It certainly is not as big an improvement as Tiger or Panther, but definitely worth your money.
Software title: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Publisher: Apple
Price: 129 EUR/129 USD
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
“The sad thing about iChat is that it is fairly useless in my country, since we all use MSN Messenger, and nobody uses AIM….”
You forgot to mention that you can use a Google Talk account with iChat, and then you have the power of gmail accounts and friends
Yes, but you don’t get the flashy iChat Theatre and screensharing stuff.
Yes you can, I use my google account to have video talks and have played with backdrops and screen-sharing. Obviously the other person has to be using iChat as well
Edited 2007-12-06 21:06
You forgot to mention that you can use a Google Talk account with iChat, and then you have the power of gmail accounts and friends
Here in Finland MSN Messenger is the most widely used service too, and personally I don’t know of a single person who’d use AIM, Google Talk, ICQ or anything like that
well now you do
and all of my friends here use gmail or ICQ. Granted we all have a msn account a well but i use iChat a LOT with friends just like skype.
cheers
//Vic
Great review, Thom. I agree that Leopard is a nice step, and Quick Look seals the deal for me.
One thing I want to mention is “stationary” in Mail. You said
I think this stems from some sort of elitist holdover from some core geeks who believe email should remain plain text only. I happen to use plain text email, but the fact is that the rest of the world uses it differently, and it is very useful to have things embedded.
When people tell me HTML email is evil, I always press them to tell me why. Except for embedded scripts, which are usually blocked these days, I don’t know why “geeks” have a mission against it. If people are anti-HTML, they ought to close down their browsers and go back to elinks and USENET, after all, their browsers usually use the same rendering engine as their email client.
Edited 2007-12-06 17:27 UTC
Mmm, browser… you mean wget plus cat, right?
😛
I have to agree with both sides about the “stationary” thing.
I haven’t used Leopard. So, I really don’t know what they mean by stationary, but if it is anything like Outlook’s concept, it really is annoying when someone uses a stationary theme out of the box. They are so ugly. Considering this is Apple, I concede that if the two concepts are basically equivalent, Apple generally does a much better job at avoiding ugly. I have also seen some very professional stationary themes made by individuals, but in general, I wish that people wouldn’t use them.
With that being said, I have to agree with Adam. I just don’t get the aversion by some geeks to HTML in email. Plain text just can’t do everything. Just because some people use HTML to embed pictures (and stuff) in some retarded [spam] chain letters (among other things) does not mean that HTML is evil. I avoid the garbage, and I enjoy the extra functionality that HTML offers.
I’ll tell you why. When I spend time in Australia, my bandwidth is metered. Most Australians don’t have unlimited bandwidth. That means that HTML emails is actually costing me directly. It would be like telemarketers being allowed to call your cellphone in the US (they legally can’t under most conditions).
The extra bandwidth that HTML email uses (more than double, since the original message is also usually present in plaintext form) wastes my bandwidth which I have a limited amount of.
I’d rather use that bandwidth for browsing, downloads, etc.
Likewise when I’m using a mobile connection where I get charged for bits I download I also don’t want to be charged extra because of the wasteful practices of some people.
That is why HTML email is “evil”; though evil is the wrong in my opinion.
not to mention some people “love” to use “fancy” styles when writing mail.
Only if you download the images, which few email clients do by default now, including Mail.app, which is what we’re discussing here, and Outlook, Windows Mail, Gmail, Live Mail, etc. In that case, you should also stop using *all* email, because attachments can be a real bitch.
No, that isn’t true. HTML email is a lot more bloated than plaintext. It’s over double the size alone just for an HTML formatted message.
The arguments about stationary apply equally to the HTML and not just to the images.
Correct, but you’re generally talking about bytes or kilobytes more at most – only the actual markup. It would only be inline images that make any significant size. If that’s your concern, make it a mission to abolish attachments that are unnecessarily large. PDFs, Word docs, hell, even most spreadsheets could probably be expressed in plain text files, and that would save you several cents more!!
Megabytes in some cases if you’ve seen some client’s horrific HTML. It’s almost always kilobytes; remember that HTML messages almost always include a full copy of the original in plaintext format due to mail client behaviour. So it isn’t just the markup.
As far as attachments, I can live with that as its usually date I intend to parse.
HTML formatting, on the other hand, generally provides no benefit to me.
I would rather someone attach a PDF or send a link to one then send me the entire message HTML formatted if it’s a large enough message. PDFs are compressed
The attachments thing is totally unrelated and is not an equivalent point of argument.
The HTML formatting is not necessary to transport the message.
Attachments are necessary for the data they contain.
While I’m all for getting rid of useless attachments, I can live with those since they can be dealt with in a fairly automated fashion. Dealing with HTML email is not so easy.
Edited 2007-12-06 19:18
Yes, because sane email programs send you both plain text and the html.
The argument that it eats up bandwidth is bullshit though. It’s not 1990 anymore, the few Kb email takes is a drop in the ocean compared to the bandwidth taken up by , for example, browsing osnews or youtube or myspace etc etc.
It’s not mine or anyone else’s problem that your ISP is screwing you by metering your bandwidth.
Sure, HTML mail can suck badly when people go overboard but so can anything else. It’s not an HTML mail problem, it’s a people problem.
HTML email allows embedding “cid” images. The markup refers to the embedded cid images. Fortunately this kind of email does not occur frequently from what I can tell.
I don’t have anything against HTML email in general. It is abused quite badly though. It gives people with no idea of what works visually too much flexibility. Companies normally have style guides but you end up having people insisting on inserting their product / company / brand logo in every email. This is terrible if you value server space in particular but also tacky.
You end up where people start thinking of emails like company letterheads. Company letterheads are for official communication. Email is less formal due to how easy it is to fire an email out.
I would like an email client that allowed you to specify styles and limit people to using those like you can do with javascript based WYSIWYG HTML editors. That way the company style guide can be enforced you don’t get 16 point italic script fonts etc. but you allow people to produce consistently readable well formatted email.
Well, then there is a lot of these elitists out there, including me and almost all the people I exchange e-mails with (no, we’re not living in anybody’s mother’s basement). I always set every and each e-mail to be displayed as plain text and if it’s unreadable, I won’t place any effort to read it. I just don’t care what they have to say if they can’t say it in text, only mixed with useless tags and flashy and colored junk. On the extremely rare occasions I’m still curious about it, I read it and begin my reply with telling the sender to use plain text when sending e-mail to me, they can use their tacky html decorations for the rest of the poor fellas they send e-mail to.
Simply not using HTML doesn’t make you elitist. Hating it without valid reason does.
Obviously you don’t use email for work then, or in any professional sense. If I got a response email like that from a company I was patronizing, I would cancel their service immediately.
I don’t hate HTML, I just don’t like it being used in e-mails.
On the contrary.
Sorry, but this is falls into my definition of elitist
On the other hand, I have to congratulate you, since you seem to have so many clients that canceling one of them for such a reason wouldn’t hurt your businness.
Edited 2007-12-07 06:23
Uh, dude, you totally misunderstood my comment. I’m saying if I business who I HIRED to work for me – if I were the client – refused to accept my emails because they didn’t like that I put an inline image in it, I would cease to do business with them.
Please read the comment again. It will sound much different.
You’re right, I thought the opposite of that (my internal dictionary can hit some bugs from time to time). From your point of view I’d consider dropping them as acceptable.
// BTW, I generally wouldn’t consider just including an image to be that bad, since that in itself won’t distort the mail too much when displayed as text.
I’ll tell you why – pink italic text on purple backgrounds.
Just who are you emailing, blixel???
Oh, it’s always the aunts, who tend to misuse the technology to make things LESS readable and make the presentation WORSE.
I saw the comment about stationary and immediately thought of those messages I used to get from my aunts. You know, the emails with the pink curlicued text (or several different fonts and colors, just to be shocking!) that come with fifty FWD: and RE: markers, and then some pictures of babies and puppies and kittens. Generally these are followed by an admonishment to forward this message to twenty people in the next hour to show them somebody loves them.
They stopped sending me those things when I forwarded those chain letters back to THEM the requisite fifty-some-odd times.
Of course, they probably think I hate kittens now.
Edited 2007-12-06 21:01
People still send those?
Not to me they don’t.
My step mother does. 3 a day at least. Several years ago I asked her to stop and she did. Then I visited her and they started up again. I just don’t have the heart to ask her to stop… again…
I’d say idiots who install incredimail; the source of all email problems and many hours spent trying to fix up peoples installation of Outlook Express – because their dipsey daughter decided to have a ‘cool candy coated emails’ to send to their friends.
Like I said with a previous post, give an inch and the end user will take a mile; give HTML to an end user and it goes from being a nice way to add emphasis to emails to completely abusing the features that are made available.
You can’t educate these people, they only way to ensure it doesn’t happen – don’t provide the feature in the first place.
Edited 2007-12-06 21:16
//You can’t educated these people,//
Apparently not!
I see this at the software company I work for, there are some ladies in the house that really like this combination (2 or 3, not all of them). And they always like to make gossipy announcements with these fonts and background.
The good part is that when it comes to work this isn’t used.
Anyhow, worse than that, there’s some guy in the organization that collected news items to keep us software engies up to date (some of us wouldn’t read the news otherwise). Guess what we get, a 50 line of text with interesting headlines, formated in a 1MiB html email. What makes it so big is an ugly orange bar the guy uses to separate the “News title” from the actual headline items.
My quota at work is 50MB, and doing cleaning up every week is not fun.
Still, if it still has its purposes when used correctly. Those two scenarios I wrote about are not the case (at least for me).
I’ll tell you why music is evil: Britney Spears.
The logical conclusion of me not liking Britney Spears is of course that all music is evil. Everywhere. Always.
Come on now, you can’t tell me that “Toxic” doesn’t make your toes start a-tappin!
Because html email does not solve a problem. Like I said, it might be nice for a birthday invitation or something (but my personal value system dictates that birthday invitations are sent via paper mail or extended personally), but for day-to-day use of email, which constitutes 99% of email usage, it is utterly, utterly pointless and does not add anything to the overall functioning of email.
This is apart from technical reasons like different rendering engines rendering html mail different from one another (or the evil thing where html emails do not render correctly when you do not have the proper width set, or add a horizontal scrollbar), or the fact that html mails take longer to load, require extra clicks like telling it to download images. On top of that, we have the obvious security issues which rear their ugly head on not only Windows, but also OS X.
Edited 2007-12-06 19:20 UTC
Know what else doesn’t solve a problem? CSS. HTML outputs plain old Times New Roman in most browsers, and that would be perfectly readable.
Come to think of it, colored clothes don’t solve a problem – all clothes in white or tan – whatever cottom is – would be just fine.
Let’s get rid of spices, the only problem solved by food is nutrition, and we don’t need it to taste good to meet our caloric and nutritional requirements.
Obviously, the point here is that the world is not black and white. HTML email does solve problems for most people: inline images are useful and quicker, formatted text grabs attention and higlights important text, etc.
In fact, if you ever use bold tags in your articles, you ought to understand why some people believe that the ability to use HTML in email is worthwhile.
So if my problem is that I want to present an image to someone inline with instructional text, what is the solution? Suck it up and attach a rich text document at 200K or just go HTML email and do it in 40K?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
looks like a geek, smells like a geek, reads like a geek… yup. its a geek.
going back to the point I made that programmers/geeks think of the quickest way to do a job when ‘normal’ sociable people prefer the nicest way.
By that doctrine, the web should also be plaintext.
It amazes me how a fellow self-proclaimed UI Analyst can pass such a harsh and definite judgment on HTML email.
Creatures who are color blind would most likely never miss color. In fact it’s most likely impossible for them to comprehend color.
HTML email can do precisely what colors and smells do for us in real life. Not to mention extra features such as embedding links etc. I don’t know about you Thom but I would rather live in a world with Color than without one.
P.S. When I say color in the real world I’m not talking about colored text in html. I’m talking about the extra sensory elements that you can add to the entire experience.
Like I said, there are indeed specific use cases where it makes sense. However, most emails sent today (if you disregard spam) are short emails along the lines of “Jim, did you finish that report?” or “Jack, did you contact that client?” or “Wanna go see a movie tonight?” – I’d wager a bet to say that 90-95% of email consist of those types of emails (wild guess, no facts to back it up). What, exactly, can html email do for this common use of emailing?
Exactly, nothing. And hence, for 90-95%, it serves absolutely no purpose AT ALL, and seeing people regularly abuse the technology out of ignorance (I don’t blame them! I do a lot of ignorant things too in other fields!), it is simply better to restrict the ability to put flashy colours and such in emails.
Browse MySpace or the Dutch equiv. Hyves.nl for a while, and you’ll understand.
When you get those, just right click on the e-mail, mark it as junk. Pretty soon you don’t see those anymore. I don’t know if they are blocked from downloading to my Mac or not. But I don’t see them anymore.
The difference for what I see on Mac Mail (web based) vs the same inbox on my iMac is amazing how much **#*# I don’t see in Mail (on my iMac).
So you’re one of those people who use pink letter paper and spray it with perfume are you?
Yeah like LSD
It has nothing to do with elitism. It has to do with the fact that it is bloat; what does it add to the conversation by the fact that the mail has 40 different types of fonts used for a 4 line email? nothing is achieved. Infact, the clarity is made worse and quite frankly, within an enterprise setting, its yet more features which distract the end user from the core purpose of email.
I’ve received html emails, and I’m on a metered internet connection, every bit of garbage added to the email by virtue of their ‘creative juices’ – it costs me. Run a USENET server with, in some cases, groups with 20,000 articles; imagine if each one was HTML, and added another 2K to the article, thats another 40MB, then over a server with 50,000 news groups – it makes it even worse.
Its the old story of ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves’ – by themselves they aren’t bad but imagine when it is extrapolated over several hundreds of thousands of end users.
THose of us who hate HTML email (along with USENET) don’t hate it because it makes things interesting, we hate it because people completely lose the plot on what is acceptable to send, and what isn’t. Give the end user an inch, and they’ll take a mile.
Meh. A few people abuse it, so wipe it out for everyone everywhere.
Your response is essentially “users are too dumb to know any better (than I do), so let’s take it away from them.” That’s elitist in my book.
ps. I’ve never in my life seen an emal with 40 fonts. 99% of HTML email I receive is one font, one background. Hardly the mess you’re painting.
Of course, what benefit does it add for YOU? nothing, absolutely nothing. Is it necessary to change the fonts – does it some how magically change or improve your email? of course not!
I receive emails for information purposes. I get an email to inform me of something; how the email looks by way of font, colour, layout or what not has no impact; infact, if you send me a candy coated email that looks like a teeny bopper has written it, it goes instantly into the trash.
Yes, users are dumb. For some here they seem to have never gone through the stark realisation of the world as it is. Most people hit it when they’re 19, sometimes in their mid twenties, and in my case, when I was 9. Realising that the world isn’t so fabulous; basically that moment when life crushes ones own spirit.
A realisation that people are morons, and it isnt elitist, it being a realist. Look around you, we have people who have children who can barely support themselves – then they turn around and demand hand outs from the government. We have people know full well what the cause of obesity is but think its because of everything else besides eating too much and doing too little exercise.
So no, I’m not an elitist, just observing mans ability to take stupidity to all new lows, and worse, the seemly celebration of ignorance which popular culture seems to perpetuate.
Then obviously you haven’t been out for long. I’ve seen HTML not only utilised, but abused on a mass scale. Its like going from being a moderate gamer to the gamer who plays a game for 70 hours straight (and then subsequently dies – occurred in Korea to a young lad)
My company has received 6.2 million emails since late 2004, accordingly to our mail gateway. Of those emails, approx 85% have been rejected before delivery to our mail server. If they are massively loaded with abusive HTML, they are rejected. Most HTML emails are not, they are perfectly acceptable.
I’ve been out long enough to understand HTML email and what it is, as well as when rogue admins decide they will enforce their whim upon their users. We know better, so everyone must alter their way to suit us. I think it’s lame. If you can’t learn to meet your users’ requirements, you have no business being a network administrator.
By the way, I can’t help but think this is a bit like the DMCA argument: since a few users will pirate this DVD, we’ll lock it down for everyone, since obviously, no one can be trusted.
We don’t refuse delivery based on mime type, we don’t alter emails at the server. Large companies just don’t work that way.
Meh. A few people abuse it, so wipe it out for everyone everywhere.
I would support such an initiative.
This whole thing might make an interesting separate thread, with a poll. I’d be voting for “hate html mail and would prefer never to receive any ever again.”
Spam uses a large chunk of bandwidth. The use of HTML mail makes it more than twice as large as it needs to be. The same can be said for the many legitimate messages that go around. They are using more than double the bandwidth they need to. It doesn’t hurt too much with a single message, but email and spam is never “a single message.”
HTML mail is especially aggravating when it’s sent to a mailing list whose archives can be browsed online. Odds are it won’t be rendered correctly for people browsing the archive, and is therefore mostly useless (not to mention it will most likely simply be ignored.)
Finally, there are still folks who use the console for lots of stuff, including reading email. HTML email is an impediment.
Some of these reasons obviously aren’t going to apply to you (console email client) but some at least apply to everyone (mountains of bandwidth). Even if you don’t agree you at least have to see where people are coming from when they dislike it.
I too refuse to read HTML formatted email. If my livelihood depended on email (and replying to every single message) I might rethink that, but in the meantime I’m very happy to discourage its use. For the good of the internet or something.
You are complaining about bloat in e-mails and yet you have your picture in your posts. What’s up with that?
You choose to look at this website, you don’t choose whether or not an html email is downloaded, you don’t choose whether or not HTML messages are posted to an USENET server.
In a USENET, you’re forced to download all the messages, HTML and plain text. When you download your email, you download the whole lot at once, again, no choice in process.
When you view this site, you choose to go to the website, you choose to view HTML, you make all those choices yourself. If everytime an HTML email was sent to me, I was given an option to delete the file before it is downloaded, you would be right, but that isn’t the case.
“You choose to look at this website, you don’t choose whether or not an html email is downloaded, you don’t choose whether or not HTML messages are posted to an USENET server.”
You chose to live where you have a metered internet connection, deal with it.
I prefer HTML mail because I can format it any way that I want. I’m not going to stop because someone is using a 1980s grade internet connection. It’s 2007.
And for whose benefit is that, exactly?
You write e-mail for the recipient, not the sender. How do you know that the recipient agrees with your choices of colours/fonts/sizes? How do you know that your choices are sufficiently readable for them? More importantly, how do you know they want your choices imposed upon them?
That’s right, you don’t, you’re just imposing your choices on those you communicate with, not because it benefits them, but because when you look through your “Sent mail” folder it’s pretty—to you.
Yeah, I can see why that’s such a concrete justification…
Tell me how you’d format a table of data and include pictures in a plain text email?
Thanks for the opinion, but when I send html based email it’s not for glitter, it’s to format a message so it is easy to read and understand.
Yes I am imposing a choice, and I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t benefit them. I don’t send incredimail junk I send data that’s useful, and I send it in HTML.
Oh, wait you are talking about hating mail because someone sends you mail that’s pink and pretty.
That’s no reason to discount the use of html in email. It’s not like a few extra tags are that expensive.
Again, it’s 2007 not 1988.
You’re correct, it is 2007, and in 2007 (2008), there’s increasing diversification in the means and modes of sending and receiving e-mail. You have no idea if your recipient’s going to be sat in front of a PC on a corporate LAN, or receiving mail on a PDA, smartphone, (or not-so-smartphone—given pretty much every phone released in the past 5 years or so can do e-mail).
The “few extra tags” aren’t expensive, if they’re marked up properly by hand, but the only people who would even consider doing that are people producing e-mail campaigns rather than ordinary person-to-person messages. The rest of the time, the expense is determined—in general—by a team of people in Redmond, and they’re not renowned for spitting out anything that isn’t several multiples in size of the plain-text equivalent.
Pictures? Attach them, every mail client in popular usage will render previews anyway. Tables of data? Attach them—then at least they can be manipulated, copied and pasted sanely, and so on.
Yes, HTML e-mail could be fine, were it limited to a smattering of minor embellishments. Just emphasis and tables would cover 99% of the legitimate requirements for it, in fact. But that’s not how it works. The vast majority of HTML e-mail sent and received is unmitigated bloated and the world would do well without it; you might use it sanely, but you’re in a distinct minority, and if you’re smart enough to use HTML e-mail without inducing cancer of the retina, you’re smart enough to use alternative mechanisms for achieving the same thing anyway.
MS is one of the worst for HTML formatting. I get emails and NNTP posts that look vaguely like:
<p class=”xsd:WordFormat5.0 alf:SomeMoreCrapHere xxx:JustForTheHeckOfIt” font=”12pt Sans Serif Microsoft Only Font With A Huge Name” style=”normal with a touch of sass”>Hey, what’s up?</p>
And repeat that for every paragraph, because the render engine surely needs to be reminded. Use a style sheet or a div tag? Don’t be ridiculous!
Edited 2007-12-07 07:18
Actually, I don’t *choose*, outside of the US of A, the rest of us have metered access. Just because you have bad manners to send crap to me in a format which I detest, doesn’t make me elitist, it makes me a potential customer whom you might have pissed off or friend whom you’ll never an email from again.
If I don’t want emails in HTML, be courteous enough and don’t ram it down my throat.
You do choose to live outside the USA. Yes, I do have bad manners. Yes I will send you HTML email if I choose. If that means that I piss you off, and you won’t be my friend then yes that does make you an elitist.
Don’t worry I’m not concerned that you wouldn’t want to be my friend or customer. If you are that petty I wouldn’t want you to be my friend, and I absolutely wouldn’t want to do business with you anyway.
I default to plain text email like most, however if I choose to send HTML mail, don’t cry over it, it’s really not that bad.
What does it cost? $.001US?
Thanks.
Edited 2007-12-07 04:15
Stop confusing New Zealand with the world. Just because you have ISP’s from the last millenium that likes to screw their users doesn’t mean the rest of the world does. In most countries either there is no metered access or you have a choice between metered/unmetered.
Actually, I don’t *choose*, outside of the US of A, the rest of us have metered access.
Say what?! I happen to live outside “the US of A,” and I also happen to have broadband. Don’t generalize things you clearly know little about.
Furthermore, if you worry so much about your traffic, what on earth are you doing on this site, or any other site for that matter? Please note the fancy borders around every comment, the logos, icons, differently sized text, colors, etc. They all cost a heck of a lot more on your Internet bill than your e-mail.
Please note that I’m not trying to be an ass or make you feel bad, I’m only trying to show you that your arguments against HTML e-mail are very weak and you’re contradicting yourself by everything else you do on the Web aside from e-mailing.
Or maybe you’re on of those people who turn off images, overrides every web page design with your own “no-style” stylesheet, and refuses to use any other browser than Links. But then again, why did you bother to add an avatar picture of yourself — surely you realize that you’re “ramming it down my throat?”
I’ll tell you why: because it’s obnoxious and rude.
I want to read e-mail in the format and style that’s most comfortable to me; anything else and you’re immediately hindering any chances of me dealing with your message in an efficient fashion.
Businesses don’t send people letters by post set in Comic Sans, or in magenta-coloured type, or in 16pt text for exactly the same reasons: you are in no position to judge how the recipient would best prefer to read the messages you’re sending them, and so the only sensible option is to be as neutral as possible and allow them to make that decision for you.
Every GUI e-mail client lets you choose how exactly plain-text messages should be rendered: typeface, colour, size, etc. In contrast, very few allow you to override how “rich” messages should be rendered.
If it’s that vitally important that rich formatting in something related to the message be preserved, send an attachment. My experience suggests that sending attachments isn’t something anybody has any difficulty with, after all (indeed, I regularly receive screenshots which are pasted into Word or PowerPoint documents and then attached, presumably because people don’t realise they can usually just paste directly into their e-mail client and it’ll create an attachment automatically…)
Yes, the geeks do, but a good proportion of the business world uses an e-mail client whose rendering engine is paralleled with its companion word processor’s, rather than any web browser in production (and another portion uses an e-mail client whose rendering engine is like nothing else on the planet, mentioning no IBM Lotus Noteses)
Back on-topic… I don’t find the MacBook only having one touchpad button the slightest bit of a problem: two-finger tap on the touchpad itself is (if you switch the option on) a right-click.
“When people tell me HTML email is evil, I always press them to tell me why.”
I’ll tell you why: because it’s obnoxious and rude.
I want to read e-mail in the format and style that’s most comfortable to me; anything else and you’re immediately hindering any chances of me dealing with your message in an efficient fashion.
I think it’s hilarious that your case against HTML formatting uses both italics and bold text. Thanks for proving yourself wrong. Saves a lot of time for the rest of us.
I didn’t make against against HTML formatting, just its use in e-mail.
(FWIW, I make my living as a web developer, so making against HTML as a whole would be somewhat ridiculous).
I didn’t make against against HTML formatting, just its use in e-mail.
(FWIW, I make my living as a web developer, so making against HTML as a whole would be somewhat ridiculous).
How is e-mail different from any other form of written communication? Why, in your opinion, should it be allowed to use formatting on web pages, in printed magazines, newspapers, books, postcards, letters — but not in e-mails?
Your case is somewhat ridiculous.
Do you really not understand the fundamental difference in model? Just ]think about it.
A good proportion (possibly the vast majority, indeed) of e-mail is unsolicited: granted, there might be a relationship between the sender and recipient, but that doesn’t necessarily extend any further than “potential client” and “potential supplier”.
With web pages, you choose to navigate to a site. If you don’t like it, you generally don’t go back. People like my colleagues are paid a reasonable amount of money to ensure that most people won’t fall into that category. Moreover, most browsers offer the ability to override styling and presentation of a properly-written site if you either have a preference for doing as much, or if you have a medical condition that requires it. No such preferences exist in most e-mail clients.
Printed magazines, newspapers, books and postcards are all professionally designed, and aren’t generally required reading for conducting business.
Personal letters—who cares, really? Just the recipient. Business letters—go back several posts in this thread and I’ve already answered that.
If POP and IMAP servers commonly had the ability for clients to request that only the plain text part of a multipart/alternative message be sent when the message body is downloaded, and mail clients generally had the ability to allow users to state that they prefer plain text over HTML formatted versions, it would be fine. But most don’t.
Moreover, HTML e-mail has quite possibly done far more harm than good: the edge cases of HTML e-mail being legitimately used are just that, on balance; the rest are a horror of horrendous formatting (16pt magenta Comic Sans on whatever background colour you happen to have) or attempted exploits.
E-mail doesn’t work like any of the things you mentioned, because they’re all “published” and you choose to view them (and when, and how). E-mail isn’t like that. Somebody sends you an e-mail, you read it. E-mail clients send crappy bloated HTML, and invariably the same clients (and servers) don’t give you much in the way of an option to not receive it (it’s one reason I used to use mutt for reading all of my e-mail in preference to a graphical client—using a client that couldn’t support HTML e-mail but was still powerful was about the only way to not receive it without writing a mail filter to strip the HTML parts out, and even then I still received it, I just couldn’t view it).
E-mail doesn’t work like any of the things you mentioned, because they’re all “published” and you choose to view them (and when, and how). E-mail isn’t like that.
Do you really not understand the fundamental similarity in model? Just think about it.
E-mail works exactly the same as personal letters and postcards: the sender decides how it’s formatted.
You’re half right.
E-mail, by and large, is a business, not personal, communication tool.
If people sent business mail the way they did e-mail, they’d invariably find themselves looking for a new job.
And yes, the sender does decide, but that doesn’t mean they have the final say when the technology is far from rocket science to allow the recipient to have final say (which is more than can be said for personal letters and postcards—having difficulty reading the handwriting on a postcard isn’t exactly uncommon, but the equivalent is trivially avoidable in e-mail).
WTF? Email is both, or doesn’t your grandmother write you email? Send you pictures? Everybody I know does.
When people tell me HTML email is evil, I always press them to tell me why
I’ll tell you why HTML email is evil. The only emails I get that are HTML are either advertisements/spam, email from family members that have too much time on their time, or company emails. Obviously I don’t care for advertisements/spam in my inbox and when it comes to family members, their emails would be no different without HTML. It’s pretty much useless unless you are a spammer. Companies love to add their graphics to their confirmation emails etc but is it really necessary to chew up bandwith so I can see your logo? I have a better question for you. What benefit does HTML email give ANYONE?
Aside from those who pay per megabyte, who cares if a little bandwidth is used to send a company’s logo?
HTML mail CAN do more than plaintext. Don’t be willfully ignorant. You can format what you say, you can add images, and overall make an easier to read document.
Seriously. The Greeks had minimal forms of punctuation, and didn’t even put spaces between their words. All of you HTML haters would be that guy saying punctuation is evil and an assault on good taste.
Do you prefer the books you buy to be well formatted, with an easy to read table of contents, and helpful diagrams, or would you rather have a greppable text file with no formatting? There is no uniform right way to do things, and if you could just stretch your concept of things just a little, you’d find that there are a lot of wonderful things you just have to deal with openly as a human being, rather than trying to dominate them, and force them to fit what you already know.
Just because you can’t control everything people send you anymore doesn’t mean HTML mail is a bad thing, it means you have control issues.
This topic is going down the tubes. And I honestly feel the unreasonable ones are the people who have such a strong irrational hatred of something that could be useful to other people.
I’ll go so far, (and this is true, BTW) to say that the technology ratrace makes me unhappy, but that’s because I’m an unhappy individual, and what used to be my hobby turned unhealthy after several personal events sent me reeling. But why shouldn’t others be able to use something they find useful? If HTML mail makes you unhappy maybe you should find out why.
Edited 2007-12-07 01:47
HTML mail CAN do more than plaintext. Don’t be willfully ignorant. You can format what you say, you can add images, and overall make an easier to read document.
If you want to send a document why not send an attachment?
Just because you can’t control everything people send you anymore doesn’t mean HTML mail is a bad thing, it means you have control issues.
This has nothing to do with control. I can block all HTML email messages if I want to. The problem is that it adds absolutely no benefit at all. If you need a structured document there are better options than HTML in an email.
This topic is going down the tubes. And I honestly feel the unreasonable ones are the people who have such a strong irrational hatred of something that could be useful to other people.
I wouldn’t say useful but rather over used. How often do you save documents as HTML? I don’t see it being the document type of choice for anyone so why try to use it for something it was never designed for when there are better options?
You do realize that using attachments “wastes” even more bandwidth than HTML mail?
If you want to send a document why not send an attachment?
You mean resorting to leave your mail client and use a separate application to read an e-mail?
You mean telling your recipient “Hey, I’ve sent you an email, but don’t read here, click on the attachment, because I added emphasis on a few words to aid readability.”?
You mean making the e-mail at least five times larger because of a) the attachment itself and b) the way attachments are encoded in an e-mail?
I hope my rhetorical questions answer your question.
Obviously, you haven’t read this thread.
If the *only* HTML emails you receive are ads and spam, then you’re not using email professionally.
I use email everyday “professionally” whatever that means and when someone sends me a structered document they send it to me as an attachment. I often get excel spreadsheets, word documents, and pdfs as attachments. Otherwise text is plain.
“I often get excel spreadsheets, word documents, and pdfs as attachments.”
Funny. You waste bandwith with bloated Excel, Word, etc. attachements just because you don’t like to use such a simple thing as a html table within the e-mail message?
This html-or-not-discussion is so ridiculous.
Maybe we should start to make the internet plain text and add everything else as separat download.
Of course its absolutely waste of bytes to use header markup tags. Instead we should rather use a lines of ============================= and —————————– to tell readers that the text was meant as a heading. This save so much bytes!
Let’s go back to 7bit ASCII and forget about Unicode (who needs chinese or arabic letters anyway?).
Down with bloated XML!
Forbid any formatting tags – because there will always be people with bad taste misusing them.
And we should start a petition that OS News removes all pictures and stuff to save bandwith (starting with the comment section, I guess).
Funny. You waste bandwith with bloated Excel, Word, etc. attachements just because you don’t like to use such a simple thing as a html table within the e-mail message?
It’s not just about bandwith. Wasting bandwith so I can see you stupid logo, or a “pretty” background is worthless. There is a need to send structured documents but using HTML email is not the way to do it. It isn’t meant for that and doesn’t work well for that. We have very good structured documents already available that are pretty easy to attach to emails.
Maybe we should start to make the internet plain text and add everything else as separat download.
Of course its absolutely waste of bytes to use header markup tags. Instead we should rather use a lines of ============================= and —————————– to tell readers that the text was meant as a heading. This save so much bytes!
Let’s go back to 7bit ASCII and forget about Unicode (who needs chinese or arabic letters anyway?).
Down with bloated XML!
Forbid any formatting tags – because there will always be people with bad taste misusing them.
And we should start a petition that OS News removes all pictures and stuff to save bandwith (starting with the comment section, I guess).
It seems you miss the point entirely. Neither you or anyone else has shown a valid use for HTML email. I keep hearing blather about tables but that’s not much of an argument. Structured documents exist, lets use them. HTML email brings way more harm than good. The fact that you can put a table in an email doesn’t make up for its mis-use. There are other ways to accomplish the same thing.
Formatted text. You know, bold, underline, emphasis, that kind of stuff. Why should you have to attach a different document written in a different program just to format your text?
Btw, what benfit does using the osnews quote tag give ANYONE?
Edited 2007-12-07 05:15
I have a better question for you. What benefit does HTML email give ANYONE?
* The ability to add emphasis, something we do all the time in e.g. these article comments
* The ability to add simple structure, which is really helpful if you are writing a longer e-mail with some sub headings.
* The ability to use real links instead of using third-party services like tinyurl just because plain text e-mails force you to show the full urls all the time.
* The ability to put an image where it makes the most sense in the context. For example, when comparing things, you can immediately show what you mean instead of writing e.g. “see attachment xyz.jpg.”
* The ability to present relevant data in a structured table without a lot of tedious manual ascii formatting work.
* The ability to do all of the above without resorting to an attachment, forcing you to use two separate programs to read an e-mail!
There are several reasons:
– the number of EMail users who can’t view HTML EMail is actually increasing (thanks to the rise in EMail-capable handheld devices).
– it’s unnecessarily wasteful of bandwidth, especially since most mail clients send two versions of the same message (plain-text and HTML) to accommodate clients that can’t view HTML.
– most of the capabilities of HTML that *would* be useful in EMail have been disabled because of their potential for abuse (want to send out a web-based form by EMail? Too bad, since it won’t work with the latest versions of Outlook).
– spammers often use uniquely-named images in EMails for address validation (if there’s any traffic to the image, then they know the address is valid) – so newer EMail clients don’t load images automatically.
– and on a more subjective level, it enables annoying crap like “IncrediMail” (if you’ve ever received an EMail with auto-playing background audio or animations in the signature, you know what I mean).
I’m not one of those “purists” who believe that all EMail should be plain-text and nothing else – I just wish that there was some standard for text formatting in EMail that wasn’t quite so heavyweight compared to plain text (the size of a message shouldn’t quadruple simply because a word has been italicized).
– the number of EMail users who can’t view HTML EMail is actually increasing (thanks to the rise in EMail-capable handheld devices).
As it should from a handholding security point of view.
No nasty links you can click on might save your day. As in not being phished.
I think that may be going a bit too far – personally at least, I find quite a bit of utility to links in EMail (even when the messages themselves are displayed as text, but URLs are rendered as links). It would probably cost me at least an extra half an hour every work day with copy-pasting.
I guess an argument could be made for disabling that feature as the default – but I’ve found similar “security features” in Microsoft Products (E.g., attachment blocking) to be more hassle than they’re worth. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked people through disabling attachment blocking over the phone – just so they could access legit/desired attachments. Although that does seem to be par-for-the-course with the new Microsoft security philosophy of “escaped horse, meet iron-clad, barred, and triple-locked barn door.”
I wish I could turn it off.
I put my applications folder on the dock and it has basically the Address Book icon with lumps.
I keep an external drive in my dock. Due to the poor functionality of stacks I have been reduced to putting a shortcut to the external drive on the dock.
Some may like the new stacks feature, but if anyone knows a way to revert back to the Tiger behavior, please clue me in.
Edit: Nice review, Thom.
Edited 2007-12-06 17:30
No way to go back to the Tiger and older behaviors, unfortunately… There are third party utilities that mimic the old behavior such as Quay, but I’m not a huge fan of them either…
I think Stacks is a work in progress and will regain some of its lost functionality as 10.5 progresses.
Quicklook is the killer feature, especially from the command line…
Take a look at this MacOSX Hint:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071104012738617
It works with wildcards as well
This is a very nice feature for people like me who almost live at the command line. Thanks for pointing it out.
Thom, I’m surprised you didn’t encounter the weird focus issues related to using many applications with Spaces where you have numbers of windows of various applications in various spaces. The fact of the matter is that the tabbing order that’s enforced is less than logical, and BeOS has a much more sensible solution as to which windows are selected when changing spaces. I realize I may not represent the typical user scenario, but I tend to use the keyboard to do most of my GUI navigation, as well as tending to keep a lot of windows open at once, and Spaces falls down in a weird way there.
I expected a working cloning solution for osx partition, that would allow me to clone the whole disk in preparation to transfer it to another HDD. OSX imaging tool that creates .dmg failed till 10.4.x to do that even though they designed it to do that function.
I can currently successfully clone any windows and any linux(ext3) with Acronis TrueImage products without wasting the size on destination, because this tool can clone also osx but on sector by sector method which will at the end fill up 160GB for a 160 GB HDD occupied with 20 GB worth of data.
Other unix tools are not safe to clone osx too and they have issues with permissions and other things. Even Acronis have issues with osx, due to osx nature of nagging about size differences and other non-BIOS EFI based problems.
So, Apple should help administrators to clone mac partitions without issue to let me step into this OSX once and for all.
?
I’ve used Apple’s disk utility to create “clones” since 10.3 with no trouble. Teamed up with netrestore servers, you can push out images quite easily over a network…
If you make a compressed image it only takes up the space of the data…
Take a look at CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) for a nice GUI tool to automate the process….
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
Perhaps we’re talking about two different things, but how come Disk Utility fails for you? You’re using the “Restore” option to (erm) restore the image, aren’t you? And you’re building the images with the sparse option turned on, right (either that or the compress option, but on my pretty old G3 it takes forever to finish a compressed copy)?
What about using ditto, wouldn’t it work for you (since regular Unix tools indeed fail to keep forks intact)?
And IIRC the Unix tools on Leopard were updated to handle those cases, too, but I’m just too busy to look it up and see if I’m not mistaken (just gave myself a 5-min break, else I’d BSOD
)
Edit: not that you’ll see anything glaringly wrong after the edit, but boy does it show I’m tired.
Edited 2007-12-06 18:50
why are you angry at apple for not providing this functionality when it is 3rd party on your other platforms?
Should your anger not be directed at Acronis for not supporting HFS+?
p.s. I have always used CCC myself and it has been flawless
“Should your anger not be directed at Acronis for not supporting HFS+?”
I am not angry at all; but I wish they fix things they claim to work as I also wish from MS to make their backup utility work fine (for opened files and hidden important files).
I wish not to see any software features if it would end up unstable or buggy for me.
And for Acronis I cannot push them to do it, that’s their capability and which led me to abandon Norton Ghost, which doesn’t support but windows. If another X company comes and creates a solution for all of these platforms then I will abandon Acronis, and direct my money for X.
It’s not exactly clear what you’re trying to do… Perhaps you should explain what it is that you’re doing because as someone who manages large amounts of Macs, I find imaging and deploying incredibly simple and easy to do…
“It’s not exactly clear what you’re trying to do… Perhaps you should explain what it is that you’re doing because as someone who manages large amounts of Macs, I find imaging and deploying incredibly simple and easy to do…”
macUser: Two things stand out here. He, Thom, either knew or could not get OS X to install onto his Cube and he also had to borrow a Mac Laptop. The Cube is ridiculously old. It’s very much akin to trying to install a modern flavor of WinDuhs onto an eary Pentium or even a 486 box.
I’m glad Apple there allowed him to borrow a laptop for review but it is not a true test of the OS X system.
There are a few visual nags that I do not like about Leopard but that is really all they are. I have nags in in WinDuhs, Linux and OS X. I switched the Dock to 2D and made the Grid as the folder view. The wallpaper had to go as-well. Performance and stability have been the results of running Leopard so far.
I too work in a larger environment where there are lab deployments. The whole process is refined to an art and stable. I honestly wish some of the WinDuhs advocates which haunt the proverbial halls of OSNews actually were systems administrators in larger environments so they could give honest evaluations of their favorite WinDuhs platforms. I was a Windows-only sys admin for six years and I’m sure I can spot the BS’ers who say they have zero problems in their Win-only shops.
You can store searches in Tiger’s sidebar too, in fact it asks you if you want them to appear there every time you save a new one.
absolutly right, I agree with the author.
At first I thought: “ohh damned! They removed the rounded corners! oh no – the menu bar is semi transparent! Oh no, the dock…” and so on.
But after 3 weeks using it, I never want to go back to tiger.
And the author is totaly right, I can not live without QuickLook. It’s that usefull.
I have one minor nit about Leopard: when you open finder on a folder in column mode, you can’t back up to the parent folder by scrolling the columns left. You have to use the little parent folder drop-down.
My praise is for the AWESOME feature they added to Mail. When somebody sends you an email that has contact information in the body text (address, phone number, etc.), you can put your mouse over it and a little bounding box with a drop-down arrow appears around it. When you click the arrow you have a choice of adding it to your contacts in a variety of ways. This rules..
Works with iCal too…
I just want to say what an excellent review this was (whether or not you agree with all the details). It has a good combination of details and conversational writing style. Most reviews of this length would put me to sleep. I am not even a Mac user, but I found it very interesting. As for the details, it seemed pretty balanced. If I were a company (hello Apple), I would take reviews like this to heart and extract all the flaws mentioned. None of them in particular seemed too hard to fix. The one I agreed with the most were the “special” folders all looking alike. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of having icons! You might as well just use little text labels.
Kudos for the review!
nice review! one nitpick:
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is the Mac OS’ 66th release (not counting the 10.x.x releases), dating back to 1984, making it one of the longest running lineage of operating systems available.
you call classic & osx one lineage and count the minor versions of the former but not the later? really strange. i’d count differently: osx 10.5.1 is the 10th major and 57th minor public release of nextstep, dating back to 1988. or the 9th major release, if you count osx 10.0 and it’s big bugfix 10.1 as two – and that’s the version number of the kernel and darwin.
ed.: not counting the server releases, the os of iphone & ipod & apple tv, and the public beta.
Edited 2007-12-06 23:30
Never mind the nice pseudo-3D appearance, because this may be only icing on the cake.
However the new appearance with the Dock icons sticking out, make it much easier to distinguish between them. It also gives a nice separation between the windows, which are (initially) restricted not to slide under the Dock (and now, the Dock icons).
Further, try to go back to the old Dock and you will understand why the new appearance is WAY better.
On dark backgrounds they show up better, but on lighter backgrounds they don’t.
there is no shortcut for moving a single window across virtual desktops; you must use the bird’s eye view for that.
You can drag a window to another space by dragging it to the edge of the screen.
You can move single windows by clicking and holding the window title (as if you would move it) and then pressing your mapped Space key (defaults to ctrl+1-4).
Spaces has a lot of neat little shortcuts such as that one. You can also quickly view all your spaces by pressing and holding F8 (by default), when you release the key, you will automatically come out of the Spaces overview. You can even use Expose in this quick overview mode by still holding the F8, and pressing and holding F9.
You can collate all windows to a space by pressing F8, hover over the space you want to collate to, and press ‘c’.
Or you can quickly move windows between spaces with Expose by pressing F8, then F9 and just start dragging the exposed windows to other spaces. Easy to test after collating all the windows to a single space.
I think the whole thing is stupid. For me, plaintext mail is more comfortable, or something, but I can DEAL with it if I receive an HTML formatted mail.
A reasonably thorough Leopard review and the majority of the posts are arguing about one point on the merits of HTML mail.
Pathetic
HTML mail is great for mark-up to show emphasis, italics etc. I frequently use minor markup in my email to about the extent that it appears in this post. It has succesfully been used this way in print for hundreds of years because it aids legibility The fact that it can be abused in totally disgusting ways is not a case for banning it. Thankfully you whiners aren’t in any positions of real power.
NO! That’s my opinion.
The one button trackpad is so much more comfortable than any, ANY of the two button trackpads I’ve used. I can rest my thumb anywhere while I’m using the trackpad and it is always comfortable.
It´s funny how you get used to things quickly. I was also initaially turned off by unround corners on the menubar, translucency on menus, no blue apple anymore… I installed Leopard about a month ago, and last weekend I was on my dad´s iMac that still has Tiger. Suddenly, the omnipresent pinstripe in menus and nonactive apps seemed so, well, dated. As did the not-so-translucent menus. So face it, it´s just looks. Fashion. Gosh, I even suspect the shelvelike Dock to grow on me after a while (I should switch it on, though).
“The future is Objective-C, Cocoa, 64-bit. Full stop, no waffling, everyone get on board the train.”
Poor Adobe with millions of lines of Carbon code 🙂
You do understand that you got the €1249 version of the macbook.
Click on the titlebar and press Ctrl 1, 2, 3 or 4 to move the window to another workspace.
Learn this trick after spending two weeks 16 hours a day reading tricks/shortcuts for my first Mac(Book) after years of OS/2, Windows and the last 7 years Linux; Leopard, I love it really very much!
PS: I am a Dutch (much older) guy too but where did you learn (and write) English so very well ?!
Cant believe no one mentioned the 64-bit or Native Mutlicore support. Most user wont see much use of the 64-bit but many Mac users are using graphics and other creative apps that are actually starting to take advantage of the extra and larger register’s on the Core2 Duo and Xeon CPUs. The performance boost is huge if you got the right software to take advantage. Also even in 32-bit, the native multicore support is great. CS3 can use multiple CPUs to process but without the OS support of it, it has been hindered until now. Leopard is great for creative professionals or anyone using highly demanding software.
Blah, blah, blah, who cares about that? Let’s keep bitching about HTML in mail.
LOL! Back on topic, have you SEEN the “Sentiments” category of templates? Tsk.
What is this Native Multicore support? I’ve been on the original Macbook for a year and a half now and I’m very sure it makes use of both cores.
Thom, I have a mac mini (2.33 core 2 duo) running Leopard, I don’t drop frames (at least not that I can tell).
Also, the fact that stacks glom together the icons from the first three items in it make them stand out a little on the dock. But I agree, it could be more dramatic and consistently indicated by some sort of iconic emblem or wrapper.
Performance has been pretty good. Networking seems much improved (at least my VPN connection w/work seems smoother, faster).
I’ve managed to hose a few things with my “customizations” but all in all a good experience so far.
Seriously, what the hell is up with STILL only having one button? Oh and the glidepad / trackpad provided is a usability nightmare! If Apple really cared about usability they would include a trackpoint!
Main reason why they’ll have to pry my Thinkpad T60p from my fingers when I’m dead… the trackpoint!
God bless IBM! 🙂 (oh and Dell and Toshiba has some models with trackpoints as well 😉
I select/click by tapping the trackpad with one finger, and “right click” by tapping it with two. I rarely use the physical button below the trackpad.