Practicalmadness

Recently I linked to a blog post about Windows Vista, where the author was countering the Vista backlash on the basis that Microsoft’s boring little baby is (in fact) not as bad as everyone says. And you know, I’m inclined to agree with that. Vista is far from a terrible product, and it’s got a lot of things to recommend it, especially for less savvy users who need enhanced protection from viruses and other malware baked right in.

But from an end-user standpoint, Vista comes off as totally lacking in imagination. The biggest, most noticeable changes from XP at the user level are changes to existing functionality, which for a non-enthusiast with other things they could spend $149 on would beg the question: what was wrong with the old way that I should pay for the same features done over again?

I mention that to say this: the difference between Apple and Microsoft — at least when it comes to marketing an OS upgrade — is that Apple knows the value of giving us something new, even if it’s silly or stupid, to create the impression that when we pay $130 for software we mostly already have we’re actually getting something out of the deal.

So today, in honor of Apple’s new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard finally having a ship date, I’d like to highlight a couple of unsung Leopard features, for the benefit of fellow Mac fans who’ve been hearing about the new Leopard hotness for over a year and thus probably already know about headlining acts like the new system UI or Time Machine.

‘Cos while it’s one thing for Apple to just tell us there are “300 new features” in Leopard, it’s quite another to see them all listed on a really, really long web page.

Some of the highlights you may not already know about:

• The Terminal app — praise jebus hallelujah — has got tabs, just like iTerm. Tabs in Terminal work just like they do in Safari 3 (complete with dragging and a “Merge All Windows” command). And that horrific window settings panel (or panels) have been consolidated into an Inspector palette.

• There are tons of small security improvements, most of which could be called preventative since (unlike Windows) there have never been any truly major security exploits on Mac OS X.

  • New applications downloaded to your Mac from the Internet are “tagged” as such, and the first time you run such an app the system asks for your okay.

  • Apps can now be signed with a security certificate for added trustiness, with all Apple-created bundled apps (e.g. iChat, Safari, Mail) coming signed by default.

  • Apps can also be “sandboxed,” limiting their access to the system so as to prevent a security flaw in one app or service from exposing the whole shebang.

  • You can create one-off “Guest” user accounts that are purged automatically on log out, so visitors and other transients can use your computer without mucking around in your stuff or leaving behind a bunch of their own.

  • And Leopard has a “library randomization” feature similar to the one Microsoft introduced in Vista, which places system libraries in randomly-chosen memory addresses to prevent hackers from using their knowledge of where certain things are in memory to break into your system.

• Know how you can type an equation into Google and get a calculation instead of a search? Now Spotlight does that too. (This will be a welcome replacement for my current habit of using an interactive Ruby shell as a calculator.)

• Open/Save dialogs can now display an icon view, in addition to list and column views. The Open dialog now also includes an iLife browser — systemwide. Which means that de facto Photoshop-iPhoto integration is coming in just ten short days.

• Automator (the utility that lets you create automated “workflows” without the use of scripting) now includes a “Watch Me Do” feature that lets you record GUI events (like clicking a button) or actions from apps without their own Automator events.

• iChat now has built-in support for AOL’s Mobile Forwarding service, so you can turn SMS forwarding on or off easily. iChat also now (finally) supports the “invisible” status option.

• The AirPort menu extra (you know, the menu where you select which hotspot you’re using) now denotes secure networks with a lil’ padlock icon, so you can easily find open access points for all your wardriving needs.

• Because all parents are kept up at night by the fear that their children will be scarred by profanity on a Wikipedia article about Teletubbies, Leopard includes a “Wikipedia Content Filter” that “limit[s] access to profanity in Wikipedia.” Sounds good, now how about the other 9,999,999,999 websites?

• The system text-to-speech synthesizer is getting a new, English-accented voice named “Alex.” If you don’t think this is cool, you just haven’t watched enough sci-fi. Or heard John Cleese narrate your GPS directions in your car.

• You may already know that Leopard’s Mail app now has a built-in RSS reader. But not that Safari and Mail’s RSS-reading functions share information, so that if you view an RSS feed in Safari it’ll show up as read in Mail (and vice versa). So really, what you get is one systemwide RSS feature, with your choice of user experiences — Firefox-like, Thunderbird-like or both.

Trading Spaces

All of the things I mentioned are cool things, and I may use some or all of them. But there’s another reason I told my little “feature marketing” parable about Vista at the top of the post, which speaks to the real heart of why Vista’s percieved as a failure.

It’s always a little bit cool and a little bit funny when Apple says they’ve packed over a hundred (or 200! Or 300!) new features into the next Mac OS X, but when you get down to brass tacks there are always just one or two features that get your ass into the stores and your credit card out of your Scooby-Doo wallet. Like when Tiger came out: as much as I could try to convince myself that I was really paying for¹ Core Data or .Mac Syncing or some of the system-level improvements, I must admit the feature I was looking forward to playing with when I got the thing home was Dashboard.

When FedEx brings me my Leopard DVD a week from Friday, I know that after I install it I’ll be enjoying the Ruby scripting bridge, the new Finder UI and many other things for all the months and years until 10.6 comes out. But for me that One Big Feature — the one I’m jonesing for even now — is Spaces.

Yes, I know that virtual desktops have been around forever, and that Mac OS X has had two very decent implementations — Desktop Manager and VirtueDesktops — for a while now. But VirtueDesktops can be a little bit arcane, and it really does not play nicely with multiple displays, particularly with hot-plugging my Cinema Display into my laptop for when I’m at my desk.

I played around with a pre-release build of Leopard a few weeks ago, and Spaces simply blew me away. Apple really has done a terrific job making virtual desktops easy for anyone to set up, navigate and use without sacrificing any power. The killer feature is the ability to zoom out (Exposé-style) and see all your desktops at once, and then to not only jump between them but also to move windows and apps across the different spaces by simply dragging their windows around.

And not only can Spaces gracefully handle losing a second display (each Space simply gets its windows consolidated onto the remaining screen real estate), when that second display is plugged in each space is shown in the correct shape and proportion.

For example, when my 23-inch Cinema is hooked up to my 15-inch MacBook Pro with the lid open, instead of seeing four rectangular spaces I see four shapes matching my current screen layout. I like to use my laptop screen as a “dashboard” of sorts, holding my e-mail inbox, iTunes miniplayer and RSS reader while I reserve the larger main display for actual work. Spaces allows me to not just move windows off into the ether to limit clutter, but to create separate (and separately useful) distinct workspaces that are perfectly tuned to whatever task I’m on.

VirtueDesktops and Desktop Manager can do this too, to an extent. But where Spaces allows me to click and drag, VirtueDesktops forces me to use an arcane set of key commands that don’t always work the way I need them to. Spaces isn’t great because it’s a revolutionary concept, but because Apple has taken so much of the hassle out of using virtual desktops that I can quit fussing with my tools and simply focus on doing great work.

And that is absolutely worth $129 to me.²

¹ Full disclosure: I didn’t actually pay for my OS X Tiger upgrade, because I was working for Apple at the time.

² And I’m not paying $129 for Leopard because unlike some of my fellow iPhone early adopters who used their thirty pieces of silver $100 rebate to buy accessories or shiny new accessories, I chose to hold onto it until it would actually save me money on something I needed. But my point here, and with the Tiger footnote above, is that I would have paid full price for these upgrades if I’d had to.³

³ But I should probably also tell you that as I used a student discount on Panther back in 2003, I have to date never actually paid full price for a Mac OS X upgrade. But if I hadn’t been a college student, an Apple retail employee or an easily-bribed iPhone early adopter I totally would have.