Practicalmadness

The fine folks at Macworld just published a rundown of their favorite Mac OS X Leopard features, and it seems like the consensus is that Time Machine and the new iChat are the top draft picks from the 300+ new features in the new OS.

On the eve of Leopard’s worldwide launch tomorrow, here’s my list of the top ten features I’m looking forward to sinking my fangs into:

1. Spaces: I’ve written previously about why Spaces is awesome.

2. AutoFS and other networking improvements: Yeah, this will never make it onto a t-shirt, but apart from finally having usable virtual desktops this is the one change that will solve the most day-to-day problems I have with Tiger. And if you’ve ever gotten a ten-minute Spinning Cursor of Doom while working with a network drive, WebDAV share or iDisk from the Finder, you’ll find Leopard’s new networking code is a godsend, as the system now has a multi-threaded, robust system for handling the mounting and unmounting of networked volumes. In English, that means no more Finder crashes when you try to open a shared disk on a computer that’s been turned off.

   It’s not clear how deep the improvements go — or, for example, if they’ve made the Finder’s WebDAV access solid enough for .Mac’s iDisk to be worth using — but just the mount/unmount improvements will make using shared volumes in the Finder much, much smoother.

3. Simple screen sharing in the Finder/iChat: You can now take over control of another Mac on your network — or, using iChat, over the internet — with a single click. While this feature is being positioned as a collaboration tool (where you can simply hand control of the screen off to whoever you’re working with so you could, say, collaborate on a document or get hands-on help from an IT guy), it’ll also be a great way for people or workgroups who are using another Mac as a server to manage those machines without leaving their chairs. I plan to use it with the old iMac G5 I’m using as a media server.

4. The new iCal: iCal’s UI has been a bit pathetic — it’s still brushed metal in Tiger, and has seen woefully few changes since the app was introduced way back in OS X Jaguar five years ago. In addition to now having the iTunes 7-like “Dark Metal” default appearance shared by all Leopard apps, there’s now inline editing of events and kick-ass integration with Mail. More importantly, iCal supports group scheduling using CalDAV, an open-source calendar sharing platform. Apple’s released a free, open-source Darwin Calendar Server, which serves as the backend for the iCal Server tool bundled with the server edition of Leopard. The main difference between the two is that Calendar Server requires some sysadmin know-how and is strictly DIY, whereas iCal Server has an easy-to-use graphical interface and is fully supported by Apple.

   I’m not keen on having to set up a CalDAV server for myself if I’m the only one using it. But imagine how cool it would be if Google were to add CalDAV access to Google Calendar?

5. Calculations in Spotlight: I mentioned this briefly in my last big Leopard post, but you can now run simple mathematical queries directly from the Spotlight search bar. Whenever I need to do some simple arithmetic, I’ve been opening up an iTerm window, launching the interactive Ruby interpreter (irb) and using that as a ridiculously powerful pocket calculator. This is like using a bulldozer to look for a china cup, and being able to use Spotlight will be much faster.

6. Tabs and other UI improvements in the Terminal: Speaking of iTerm, golly gee — I guess since 2005 somebody at Apple realized some of us use the Terminal for more than the occasional bit of Unix troubleshooting. iTerm (an open-source shell interface with such lovely features as tabbed windows) is nice enough and has gotten a lot less quirky in recent releases, but it’s never been as fast or solid as Apple’s built-in Terminal client. But I work in Rails, and my workflow involves having at least two terminals open at once (one for tailing logs, one for running commands). And Leopard’s Terminal also has a streamlined UI for customizing the look and feel of my command line experience, will be pretty nice.

7. Time Machine: I mention it just to get it out of the way. Time Machine is one of those things I hope I will never need and will seldom use, which is kind of the whole point. I’m not all that wild about the wacky full screen space-travel interface for navigating Time Machine backups, but at least it’s intuitive. And the important part is that it backs my stuff up automatically in the background.

8. Secure AirPort networks now denoted with an icon: Because seriously — looking for an open hotspot by trying every network and seeing which ones don’t prompt for a password is stupid.

9. iLife browser in the system file chooser: Because, really — why should I open up iPhoto or Photo Booth if all I need is to get to that one goofy photo I took of myself last week for a blog post?

10. Dashcode and Safari 3 (Final): I’m putting these in a tie for 10th place because they’ve both been out in beta for a while. Which isn’t to say there won’t be any welcome polishes or new features I’ll be glad to get into. I love the new, non-brushed metal look/feel in Safari, and it’ll be good for Safari 3 to be out of beta. And Dashcode is just awesome — not that one strictly needs an IDE to make a freakin’ Dashboard widget.