Review The latest version of Apple's operating system, Mac OS X, is here and it's arguably the most significant revamp since X replaced 9. Leopard brings a new look to Mac OS X GUI, and a wealth of new features, some innovations other merely tweaks to old apps. In the first of a series looking at Leopard in depth, we go straight for Leopard's soul: the Finder.

How the Mac OS looks has always been a key component of its much-vaunted ease of use. It's supposed to be immediately clear what things do and how you proceed with the task at hand. That kind of went out the window a bit when Mac OS X debuted. A case in point: the traffic lights. They're certainly more pretty than Windows' equivalents, but with the exception perhaps of the red light, no more intuitive.

Change for change's sake, in other words, and that's a trend that continues into Leopard. Take the Dock. Out goes the flat launcher, replaced by an ersatz 3D version, complete with glossy sheen an icon reflections. Yes, it'll wow AppleStore visitors, but for users it's too much. The separator between the applications area and the documents space now looks like a zebra crossing. Why? Because some graphic designer suggested it would look cool. But the form has no greater function than before, and it's certainly not a visual clue as to what it does.

Leopard's 3D Dock...

... and back again

Fortunately, it's easy to get the old-style Dock back (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2007101815375480), albeit with the new version's glowing running application indicators in place of the arrows of old. You can also easily disable the 'fan' of icons that pop up when you click a Docked folder. Again, fans are in-store demo eye candy. I've no objection to the new style, but why does a new option have to mean the loss of the old pop-up list, which was easier to read and to select from? Still, at least with the new fan and grid views you can drag files out of that folder.

From Dock icon to Fan...

You can select a grid view of icons in place of the fan, which is better - or would be if the icons weren't so huge. Like the look of the Dock, there's no direct way to adjust the icons' sizes to meet personal taste.

... or to a Grid

Setting the grid

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Nor can you opt for a Docked folder icon that matches the kind of file it contains rather than one of the icons from the folder's contents. I can see how a UI designer might once have thought it a neat idea to replace the traditional folder icon with a visual representation of all the items kept within, but this stacking approach not only replicates the notion of a pile of papers, but also the inability to get an instant understanding of what's in the stack without pulling it apart. That, however, is exactly what a custom folder icon delivers - it gives you an immediate visual indication of what's held within.

What kind of document do I file here?

That's why Mac OS X has custom folder icons for the main items in the Home folder: Library, Music, Movies etc. I make my own with Folder Icon X (http://www.naratt.com/FolderIconX.html), which continues to work with Leopard. But put one of these in the Dock and that indicator may as well be gone.

Now, some folk will like this stacked document approach. Good for them, I say - each to his or her own. But why limit either their choice or mine, when a couple of check boxes in the Dock preferences pane allows us each to pick the approach we prefer?

It's this insistence that Apple's right and we're not that irritates me, a point which takes me to the translucent menu bar. I don't mourn the loss of the curves in the top right and left of the screen - though their absence is odd when we have curves everywhere else - but I do like my menu bar to be a consistent colour, not a blanched version of whatever wallpaper lies beneath. Especially when it means there's a mismatch between menu bar and menu: menus are translucent too, but with a much higher level of opacity, enough to suggest a virtual hierarchy of depth but not to make them look a mess. Not so the menu bar.

I've fixed this by adding a 22-pixel 50 per cent grey tint to the top of all my wallpaper images, but that's a brute force approach and I look forward to a third-party hack that sorts this out automatically. Here's one such: OpaqueMenuBar (http://www.eternalstorms.at/utilities/opaquemenubar/).

Clearer Dock labels

There are improvements: I like menus' rounded corners and the new, easier to read name labels that appear as you move the pointer across the Dock. I like the way Apple's added a search text-entry box in the Help menu. Though why all the menu entries below it have to be in smaller text size than all the other menus is anyone's guess. Maybe Apple has a reason, but I'm darned if I can guess what it might be.

The new help menu: but why the tiny menu options?

There's no doubt in my mind, however, that the Finder's new window look is an improvement. The design, taken from iTunes, makes the sidebar more usable, if only because there's room for more entries now, and a better structure in which to place them. There should be a + icon at the bottom to allow you to add new search folders.

And why do search folders have an iPhoto-like icon sizing slider that goes way beyond the 128 x 128 maximum icon size in regular windows? If it's useful here from a file-contents preview perspective, it's useful in ordinary icon views, surely? Leopard supports icons at 512 x 512, incidentally, but of the regular folder views on Cover Flow makes use of them.

Really big icons, anyone?

I welcome the return of the ability to search for filenames, but I can't get it to work fully. Type 'com.apple.' and select 'This Mac' and 'Filenames' in the search bar, and nothing will show up, despite the hundreds of files that begin with that string within your Preferences folder.

Proper filename searching returns

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It'll find other documents, but not these. Why the restriction? And why can't I opt to have Filename searches as the default rather than Contents? I probably can by hacking, but you should be able to do this through the UI. By the way, the Contents option in Finder-window searches means we no longer have to visit the now-unhighlighted Spotlight icon in the top right of the screen, though that icon works as it did before.

You can now adjust the icon spacing directly - a feature that's been missing from Mac OS X until now - and that makes folder icon views much more readable. List views now have Mac OS 9's alternating blue and white background, which makes them easier to read too. The new, iTunes-supplied Cover Flow view is cute with photos but not much else. But at least, unlike so many other parts of the Leopard UI, it's not compulsory.

Big, Tiger-style wide icon spacing...

...or as tight as you like

Quick View is far more useful, and a real gain for Leopard users. Where Tiger could do a slideshow of photos, Leopard will present almost any document for inspection, allowing you to get not only a better view of pictures, but also multi-page PDFs, Word documents, Excel files, TIFs, Photoshop documents, QuickTime movies and so on. Software developers will have to provide view applets, of course, but even now it's a very handy way of (very) quickly referring to a document without opening up an application. I can't praise this enough.

At last - instant, readable document previews, even of multi-page PDFs

Ditto the decision to ditch the brushed metal window look, which Apple took to its heart and implement way beyond its own interface guidelines. It was supposed to be limited to windows that replicate the functionality of a consumer electronics device, and so it was until Tiger used it for Finder windows, and then everyone had to use them. Now, they're gone, replaced with a more sedate grey look, again taken from iTunes. You see a pattern here?

Like main menus, contextual menus sport rounded corners, but all additional entries - added by dropping plug-ins into your Library's Contextual Menu Items folder - now appear in a sub-menu, More. This makes the initial menu tidier, but if you do use More items, the menu can quickly become a mess of sub-menus and sub-sub-menus. Neither approach - nested menus or an all-in-one menu - are ideal, and I'd like to see some UI innovation here. Single-size menu with a scroll-bar, anyone?

Contextual menus: time for a new look

Mac OS X already extends the Get Info and Inspector windows - the latter a NeXT-sourced and, for me, much used version of the former that is able to handle multiple items. It's about time Apple merged these, or at least - again - let you choose which one appears as the default with Command-I key-presses.

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There are bugs, of course. Open a folder that's in icon view. Double-click on one of the contained folders to look inside and set the window to show the contents in list view. Click on the back button, and while Finder correctly takes you to the previous, parent folder, it displays it in list, not icon, view - even if the Always Open in Icon View checkbox is set in the folder's View Options panel.

Some will argue that's a feature, but for me it's a bug. I like folders to show up the way I want them to, based on what they contain. If I want to temporarily view a folder a different way, I'll change it - I don't want Finder to do so for me. I've grown used to the Finder-as-file-browser approach introduced with Mac OS X, but if we're going to allow each folder to record its own display characteristics, Finder should, as default, obey them.

Finder's list view: now with OS 9-style stripes

And opening a new window into a folder that's already open not only fails to switch to the open folder - as Finder really should - but overwrites the original folder display settings with those of the new one. Case in point: click on the Finder icon in the dock to open your first window. Now press Command-N to create a new window showing, like the first, the contents of your Home folder. Close both, one after the other. Click on the Finder icon and the window that appears mirrors the second one, not the first - an annoyance if, like me, you expect windows of the same folder to appear in the same place every time.

Leopard's Finder is more responsive than the app has been in previous versions of the OS. It's certainly easier to go off and do something else while a Finder window is, say, being populated with icon picture previews, for instance.

As someone who religiously prunes apps for localisations I don't need, the Get Info panel makes this more logical than before: select the languages you don't want and click the new - button. Doing this for several apps in rapid succession caused, for me, Finder to crash, but it's hard to tell whether this was the result of a flaw in the code or part of the inevitable post-upgrade shakedown.

I installed Leopard using the installer's Archive and Upgrade option - in the past I've always done a reformat then a fresh install - and while it managed the process smoothly, retaining all my settings, the downside is that you get all the old cache files kept. Ditching those in my Library folder improved Finder performance, but whether doing so before I zapped the localisations would have prevented the crashes, I can't say.

What I can say is that if, like me, you find the installer taking what appears to be an age to finish, despite saying there are only seconds to go, check its Show Log option for a real-time progress report. You may find what's taking time is the settings migration, which isn't clear from the main installer progress screen.

Cover Flow: only good for pictures?

Verdict

Apple clearly wanted to not only improve the look and feel of Mac OS X, as defined by its primary app, Finder, but to revive it for the Windows Vista era, and that's largely what it's done with Leopard. Some major gains have been made: Finder's window sidebar finally makes sense as something more than a Dock alternative, Spotlight is more tightly integrated into Finder, and QuickView makes reading documents a doddle.

But there are still too many tweaks that users are offered as a fait accompli rather than an option. For all the eye candy, Leopard is an improvement on Tiger, but new UI elements should come in addition to what's gone before not in its place.