Article 6202: : Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Mac OS X Leopard has been out now for over a month, and as of this writing version 10.5.2 is around the corner. Leopard has been the primary OS on my main production machine since then, and I've been running it for much longer on my secondary iMac. Apple's new OS is an interesting upgrade. It has so many new features that it's hard to pin down the real winners (or losers). In fact, it may be hard to find two users who like the same things about Leopard, from a user or even a developer standpoint. That's what we're here to try, though, so let's dive in.

I've run Leopard in its client and server versions on hardware from MacBook Pro 17" (Leopard client) down to a Macintosh Quicksilver minitower with dual 800MHz PowerPC G4 processors (Leopard Server). It runs about as well as you'd expect on the G4 machine. I had some significant issues at first, but I think that was due to the early Server beta build I used. I'm running the final Leopard Server OS on a G5 XServe, and it seems to be pretty responsive and snappy.

Leopard client was much the same way. I noticed little if any change in performance between Leopard and Tiger on my MacBook and Core Duo iMac. I recently worked on a 366MHz iBook with OS 9.2, and I was a bit surprised at how snappy it was. At first, it seems to put Leopard to shame. But raw speed is not responsiveness, and I'd much rather have all of the things that OS X gives me over my nostalgia for OS 9.

As you may have heard, stability in the Leopard betas was, shall we say, questionable. I am truly amazed at the way Apple puled it all together in the last few weeks before Leopard's release. Since Leopard's been released, I've had one kernel panic just a few days ago (but it was a very majestic panic, slowly filling my screen very smoothly). I'm very comfortable running Leopard with Office, Adobe products, and of course, REALbasic.

By now you've likely heard all you want to hear and more about the new dock and the new menu bar. Frankly, it's a matter of personal taste. I have no issue with the dock. I keep mine at the bottom of the screen, and I like the new slanted look. The menu bar is a different story. Depending on the desktop picture you choose, the menu bar's transparency renders it almost unusable. I hate to alter the "stock configuration" of my OS, but I've made my menu bar opaque with a tip from Mac OS X hints. I'd feel much more comfortable with an option from Apple to set the transparency, though.

The dock preview is another sore subject. I welcomed the new file previews gained by clicking on folder icons in the Leopard dock. The fan preview on the dock became tiresome within a day though, so I set my folders to use the grid preview. The preview works pretty well in a workflow kind of way, but I wish that there were a third option: just open up the folder in the Finder. Sometimes the old way works too, Apple. I could even live with a modifier key and clicking on the Dock folder icon to open it, but if this is possible, I've missed it so far.

The new finder window sports a new sidebar. The "SHARED" section is the most intriguing. On a large network, you see every machine on the network. You can connect as a specific user, and you see PCs as well. Sadly, Apple's choice of icon for PCs is a blue screen monitor. I think they went a bit over edge on this one. More important, you can connect to machines with screen sharing using VNC. It works much like Apple Remote Desktop, but much more fluidly (and more stably to be honest). This is a sleeper feature that everyone should be aware of.

I never took to multiple desktops much, even though I've used them since Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Spaces is another story. Once I set up my applications to use their own separate spaces, I find that I rarely hide and show applications. I simply switch screens. Even better, I keep Parallels on its own Space in full screen mode, and flip to it constantly. Once you get used to it, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

I really looked forward to Time Machine, but I have to say that it's been a big disappointment to me. I've worked from a laptop for over sixteen years now, but I'm rarely in the same place for more than a few hours. Plugging in an external hard drive for Time Machine to use is clunky for me. I've configured things so that backups occur over the network at work, but that doesn't help me at home. And Time Machine doesn't let me choose two backup drives (work and home). Until it becomes more flexible, a regular backup program is a better choice for me. Depending your your own situation, it may work better for you.

The big news for REALbasic developers is that 64-bit is here. PowerPC is fading away, and Intel 64-bit is the future. More importantly, Carbon is going t start fading away too. In 64-bit Leopare, non-GUI portions of the Carbon API are supported but mainly because they're shared with Cocoa. 64-bit GUI Carbon APIs are not supported at all. This is a conscious decision on Apple's part. Carbon GUI 64-bit support used to be in Leopard beta seeds, but it was pulled sometime over the beta process. In addition, the C api for Quicktime is not there for 64 bit. As John Siracusa says in his Ars Technica Leopard review, "The future is Objective-C, Cocoa, 64-bit. Full stop, no waffling, everyone get on board the train." That means that REAL Software will hopefully continue its course of migrating REALbasic to the Cocoa frameworks. Apple's move isn't instant; there is plenty of time left for us to plan and make our moves to the new order of things. Big applications developers with huge Carbon code bases have a lot more to worry about. Adobe and Microsoft alone have some heavy issues to grapple with, as might Quark. Frankly, we may see an opportunity for small, quick REALbasic developers to make some profitable moves while larger developers wallow through code rewrites.

Apple has evolved the OS X kernel in Leopard. It's better at scheduling processes, better at handling multiple cores on a processor, and better at swapping the most appropriate memory out to disk. Leopard is better at managing things so that our applications will be more responsive. While this doesn't affect us directly as developers, we' should see indirect benefits. More importantly, Leopard is better at resource limits. For instance the number of open files has been increased in Leopard. In Tiger, we tried to run a Postgres server for a front end REALbasic application. The server maxed out at just over 90 users, which we traced to Tigers number of open files. We had to rebuild the Postgres server as a Linux server. Leopard ostensibly removes that issue.

Leopard gets a new standard text API, Core Text. This replaces ATSUI, among other things. It remains to be seen how and when REALbasic takes advantage of Core Text, but Apple has done a nice job of cleaning up the various text predecessors to Core Text. It would be nice to see REALbasic give us access to this new API at some point.

On a more visual note, Leopard gives us applications with huge, beautiful icons. Unfortunately, we can't take advantage of this in REALbasic. The largest icons we can make are 128x128. If we want to make huge pretty icons, we need to open up our built application packages on OS X and edit the .icns files, in a situation analogous to using ResEdit on our old OS 9 applications. Then we can make 512x512 icons for user enjoyment.

I could discuss a good deal more with Leopard: resolution independence (coming, but not quite here yet), how my favorite applications work with Leopard (Growl, QuickSilver, MenuCalendar Clock), the shortcomings of some favorite applications (Mail, why don't you have options like WidescreenMailPlugin and Mail Act-On built in?), the lack of true Exchange email and calendar support (half a solution is better than none, I guess), and more. Really though, you'll just have to discover they joys and heartbreaks of Leopard yourself. If you don't have it yet, get it. And if you do have it, keep digging for features you haven't tried yet. Mac OS X 10.5 is the best version yet, and it takes time to discover and appreciate fully.

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Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard