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Yes, I don’t care if Mac OS X Leopard finally makes it such that iCal’s Dock icon dynamically updates to reflect the correct date. Today, July 17th, 2008, marks six years since iCal was first announced at Steve Jobs’ last keynote at Macworld Expo New York in 2002, and it is a day worth remembering, especially since everyone using Leopard no longer has a Dock icon that can remind you.

And so, Happy Birthday, iCal! And Happy iCal Day to everyone out there on the internets.

Tags: iCal Day, Mac OS X Leopard, Macworld

Contrary to my usual habits, I was very excited to get my hands on Mac OS X Leopard, to the point where I went ahead and pre-ordered it, thus officially deeming myself an “early adopter.” I then spent the month of November on Webmacster87.info with my so-called Leopard Feature Presentation. However, Leopard had a few disappointing attributes, which I summed up best in the following quote that I wrote on December 1st:

Leopard does have a share of downsides, and does suffer a bit from an “Apple knows best” syndrome in the fact that a number of features don’t come with preferences to allow the user to choose what he/she wants in his/her user experience, and probably the best example of this concerns Apple’s new desktop, translucent menu bar, and 3D Dock.
From Review and Final Recap: Mac OS X Leopard

Well, at long last, these downsides have been corrected. Three and a half months after Leopard was released, 10.5.2 was published, an 180 MB update that among making many, many bug fixes, also reverses some of the “Apple knows best” attributes.

For one thing, the translucent menu bar is no longer as translucent, but even better, they’ve added an option to turn off the opaque menu bar completely! What’s now there is a greyish gradient menu bar, which is actually fairly reminiscent of the rest of Leopard’s interface (and easier on the eyes than the white translucent menu bar type I was using before).

Also, I have finally fallen in love with Stacks. Apple has now made it possible for you to set the folder icon as the representative icon for the stack (instead of a “stack” of the top three files), and the pre-Leopard list view has returned–even better because you no longer need to right-click to get to it. While I’m going to keep using Fan mode for the Downloads folder, I love the list view so much more for Applications and Documents stacks.

As for the 3D Dock, the Mac developer community is so awesome that there are a large number of freeware tools available that let you switch to the 2D Dock style if you prefer, so I think that the complaints over the 3D Dock have died down (not that I ever had problems with it).

All in all, I’d say that now with 10.5.2, Leopard is finally truly an undisputed worthwhile package that I highly recommend everyone upgrade to. Apple may have taken three and a half months to catch up, but Vista has been out for 13 months now, and Microsoft still hasn’t fixed that!

Anyway, I’m very glad to see 10.5.2, and feel so much happier using my computer thanks to it. Now let’s see if perhaps it has the power to fix random shutdowns…

Tags: Dock, features, Mac OS X Leopard, menu bar, Stacks, update

November on Webmacster87.info mostly focused on the Leopard Feature Presentation, which was my own way of reviewing the new features in Mac OS X Leopard, and since it takes time to write those articles, that was pretty much what I was doing on this blog for the month. However, there were a number of other things that happened elsewhere in my life, so let’s take a look at the past month on Webmacster87.info.
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Tags: article, Best Of, Mac OS X Leopard, Personal, Webmacster87.info

As of today, it has now been a full five weeks since I installed Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook. It is no secret that I gave much more focus to Leopard than I gave to the iPhone during its late-June release, and that is because I am a Mac user and the first new OS X release in two and a half years is much more important to me. That’s why, during the week of the Leopard launch, I counted down to the Leopard release in my own way with my Tiger-to-Leopard series, which attempted to put the time difference between Tiger and Leopard into perspective. Then, for the 30 days of November, I wrote my Leopard Feature Presentation series, which selected one new feature per day from Mac OS X Leopard and reviewed it based on my experiences with that feature. Not only has it given me the chance to express my opinions about what I think of Leopard, doing the Leopard Feature Presentation has forced me to discover some of the other new features in Leopard that I might otherwise have overlooked.

So now that I have dedicated a full 45 (now 46) posts on my blog to covering Mac OS X Leopard, and have been using Leopard earnestly for the past 35 days, I will now make my final review of Mac OS X Leopard and do a final recap of the Leopard Feature Presentations during the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.
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Tags: Apple, features, innovations, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, operating system, recap, release, review

Sorry folks, but try as hard as I might, I was unable to get my hands on an external hard drive or on any friends who have a Leopard laptop with an external hard drive that has Time Machine set up. I even postponed the Leopard Feature Presentation on Time Machine to be the penultimate post for the month of November in the hopes that I could use it before then! Therefore, I have not been able to get my hands on Time Machine, and therefore, I cannot honestly review it. I could regurgitate how it works, but what’s the point of doing that? We ALL know how it works! I want to talk about my opinions based on using it, and how can I do that unless I get a chance to use it.

Therefore, although it’s kind of awkward, this post shall serve as an IOU. I promise, at my earliest possible convenience, to update this post with a full-fledged Leopard Feature Presentation for Time Machine as soon as I have been able to set it up, use it, and feel like I’ve worn out my back up lights. So, whenever that is, I will finish up the last little bit of this blog series. I promise.

Feature Satisfaction Rating: *insert random repetitive excusing explanation here*

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: backup, hard drive, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, portal, Quick Look, restore, review, safety, Time Machine

Automator premiered in Mac OS X Tiger, dubbed as “AppleScript for the rest of us.” Well, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but it hasn’t really seemed to have caught on for me. Maybe it was because some of the aspects of the UI were quirky, or maybe I just don’t do enough repetitive tasks on my computer.

Leopard only brings a few changes to Automator, which mostly acts the same as it did before. Now, one would pretty obviously guess that there’s now new Automator actions out of the box, which is nice, considering that Tiger’s Automator always seemed to leave certain actions out. Automator also now gives you access to variables, so you can easily drag in today’s date, or your short username, or a random number, for example, and these variables will automatically reflect the status when you run the action. And, like practically everything else in Leopard, you have an iLife media browser. (You know, I find it weird that practically all of Leopard has access to your iLife apps, but you STILL have to buy iLife separately!!!)

Probably the most notable new feature in Automator is the ability to record actions. When you click the new Record button in Automator, Automator is hidden and a floating window appears to let you know that Automator is recording. Then, you do your action, and when you’re done doing your action, you hit Stop. Automator creates a new action called Watch Me Do which lists your actions.

However, I repeatedly tried recording different actions, and found Automator to be VERY unreliable. Automator actually records your mouse movements, so when you play back these actions, it actually moves your mouse around. However, Automator doesn’t check to see if the mouse is doing the same thing to the same window, and almost always gets screwed up. (One action that I played back ended up selecting and deleting the text in a document, and then saving it, even though that’s NOT what I told it to do!) And sometimes, Automator completely ignored various actions that I did with my mouse. In short, this feature is horribly unreliable and I wouldn’t trust anything to it.

So Automator has a few new features, but other than for having access to some new actions, Leopard’s Automator is not going to be a reason for Automator-lovers to upgrade. And as for that Record button, Apple’s going to need to order some boxes of bug spray direct from the warehouse.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: actions, AppleScript, Automator, bugs, features, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, recording, review

Preview, Mac OS X’s PDF/image viewer, has always been kind of an iffy subject and its fate has been uncertain. When Panther was released, Preview was hailed as the fastest PDF reader on the market, but it still was a bit clunky, and for me, personally, the relatively recent release of Adobe Reader 8 persuaded me to make that my default PDF reader.

However, Preview in Mac OS X Leopard has been greatly enhanced with a significant number of new and enhanced features which really define it as a serious PDF reader, and also brings a few tricks up its sleeve that formerly have only been available to PDF consumers after the purchase of Adobe Acrobat Pro. So what’s new? Let’s take a look.
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Tags: editing, features, images, iWork, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, PDFs, preview, review, viewing

One of Leopard’s “big new features” is a feature for those .Mac members who got suckered into spending $100/year for Apple’s suite of services which probably are only worth about $50/year, if that much. It has to do with the Finder’s improved sharing features (file sharing, screen sharing, etc.), and it’s called Back to My Mac.
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Tags: Back to My Mac, file sharing, Finder, iDisk, internet, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, network, review, Screen Sharing

On Apple’s 300+ Leopard Features List, iChat earns the recognition of having the most new features in the list–24 to be exact. Although iChat 4 includes a nice series of new features for the AV crowd and some other new ideas, is the new iChat any better at just plain, old-fashioned text chatting? I spent a couple of weeks with iChat to find out.
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Tags: Adium, AIM, audio, chat, Chax, collaboration, features, Google Talk, iChat, iChat Theater, Jabber, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, preview, Quick Look, recording, review, Screen Sharing, sharing, text, Video

Mac OS X Tiger was the first version of OS X to bring what could be considered a comprehensive set of parental controls to the Mac platform, but at last, Leopard goes all out to provide a wide array of parental controls in order to control what parents can do on the computer. Err, um, I mean to control what kids can do on the computer.
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Tags: accounts, feature, Leopard Feature Presentation, limits, Mac OS X Leopard, Parental Controls, review, System Preferences, users