I try to avoid posts that only link to other content but this is worth it… It is the Visual Studio 2008 Traning Kit which contains presentations, labs, demos on a lot of the new .NET stuff. Imagine that, a Microsoft link actually worth checking out

Last week i bought a new external hard drive, even though i already had one. The idea was to use the new drive for backups at home, and move the other drive to my parents’ house so i could periodically do a backup over there as well. The idea of having my data at 2 different locations, on 3 disks made me feel quite safe so i told a coworker that not even Murphy himself could ruin my data now. Well, apparantly the old fart just can’t take a joke. This afternoon, the hard drive of my laptop crashed. I already took it to an Apple store, and it’ll probably take about 2 weeks to get the hard drive replaced. Well, between a week and 2 weeks anyway. But i’ll just assume i’ll be without my laptop for 2 weeks. Too bad i already sold my iMac… Oh well, i guess i’ve got plenty of time to read those WCF books i haven’t even started in yet

Btw, the last Time Machine backup was about 45 minutes before the drive crashed, so luckily i haven’t lost any data. I guess i’ll be testing the “Restore from Time Machine drive”-installation feature of Leopard soon

Leopard (OS X 10.5) has been out for a week now, and even though most of you aren’t OS X users, i’m sure some of you have been reading the reviews. A lot of things have been said about Leopard in the past week… a lot of them good, some of them not so good. I figured i’d share my opinion on Leopard after having used it for one week.

First of all, the good parts. Time Machine is excellent, as long as you don’t expect it to be a versioning system for your files. It will keep some different versions, depending on when the backup process runs, but if you make multiple edits to the same file between 2 backup runs, Time Machine will not enable you to go back through each version. It keeps hourly backups for the last 24 hours, daily backups for the last month, and weekly backups until you run out of free space on your external hard drive. The backups are incremental, so you hardly notice them while they execute. Except for the initial backup which obviously takes a loooong time, especially because you’ll usually do that right after installing leopard, which is right around the same time that Spotlight does its initial indexing of your drive… that’s a lot of IO at once, and you’re definitely gonna feel it. Thankfully, you’ll only be in that situation once. Restoring files from Time Machine is very cool, finding them using Spotlight is even cooler

Speaking of Spotlight, it’s also been improved a lot. I used Spotlight pretty extensively in Tiger, and was already pretty happy about it, but the implementation in Leopard is a lot better. First of all, it’s a lot faster. I never thought the Tiger version of Spotlight was slow, but once you use the Leopard version you will not want to go back. Secondly, you can define much more powerful queries in the new version. They even extended it to provide calculator functionality, and it even returns a dictionary definition if you simply type an english word. That might not seem like much, but you actually get used to that functionality being present pretty quickly.

Another great improvement is the new Finder. Not only does it look completely different, it also performs very different. It’s much more responsive than the previous version, and you should experience a lot less lock-ups when you try accessing network resources that aren’t available anymore. The CoverFlow implementation feels like a cheap eye-candy feature at first, but it really is a great way to browse for files. Especially when combined with Quick Look. Quick Look basically allows you to quickly look at the content of a file (text file, images, movies, music, spreadsheets, word documents, presentations, whatever) without actually opening the application you’d usually use for that file. Very nicely done, and it’s especially great when you’re using it in combination with Time Machine (in that scenario all you really need is a quick look into the file anyway). And of course, visually speaking it’s also very nicely done.

The unified look is very nice, even though some reviewers weren’t too impressed by it. The Dock has also been modified a lot… I kinda like it, but i understand why a lot of people don’t like it. If you’re used to using a lot of folders in the Dock, you might not like the new implementation.

Spaces (virtual desktops) are very nice as well… I always liked the idea of using virtual desktops but i never really found a great implementation of it, except for the one that was in WindowMaker (a window manager for Linux). Anyway, Spaces allows you to bind an application to a virtual desktop, which is a critical feature for virtual desktops in my opinion. No matter what desktop you’re on, if you start an application that’s been bound to another desktop you will move to that desktop and the app will be displayed there. Moving between desktops is also very easy and Apple wouldn’t be Apple if they didn’t make it look great. I’m so used to Spaces already that i already wouldn’t want to go without it.

Another important new ‘feature’ is simply the responsiveness of the operating system… Tiger never felt unresponsive to me, but Leopard does feel more snappy, and a lot of stuff is just a lot faster. Especially the new Safari version… you’ll definitely be impressed by its speed. It’s also gotten better at rendering sites that didn’t quite work yet in the Tiger version.

I guess those are the most important improvements for me, allthough there is a LOT more. Almost every application seems to have been improved (especially Mail/iCal/Addressbook) so you’ll keep discovering new features for a while to come.

So, what don’t i like about it? Not much really. The Stacks feature is kinda overrated. It looks nice, but it just isn’t that incredibly handy. The new transparent menu bar… well that sucks honestly. It looks great if you have a dark background or desktop color, but if you have a colourful background picture it looks like something that was ripped off from Vista and that is never a good thing. Other than that i can’t really think of anything i don’t like about it.

Oh and this is the 10.5.0 release so you can expect some issues until the first updates show up. I did a fresh install so that might be the reason why i’m only experiencing very minor issues, but if you’re upgrading a Tiger installation you might have some more problems.

Just a note for Parallels users… the last official build of Parallels is rather buggy on Leopard, but they do have a beta release which fixes most of these issues. That build is of course freely available.

So, all in all i’d already label Leopard as an excellent OS X release. If only Microsoft were capable of this kinda stuff