Leopard apps, system tools offer subtle, powerful changes
- 02 November, 2007 11:19
The changes in Apple's Leopard touch every part of the Mac OS, including its built-in applications and its system tools. The tweaks made to the Safari Web browser, which has been out in beta form for months, have been well documented, and we won't go into them further here. Likewise, the impressive Time Machine backup tool and even speedier Spotlight have already been amply covered.
But there's a lot more to talk about. The productivity applications Mail and iCal have both been upgraded with many powerful features. And OS X's Parental Controls tool, introduced in Tiger, has been made even more flexible and given enough new features to warrant its own identity in System Preferences. These improvements should make mundane daily activities much more productive for individuals and companies alike.
Simplicity is the theme of the new Mail. The core application and its functionality haven't changed much from Tiger, but there are a lot of new extras that will make your e-mail and productivity experience more enjoyable.
The first thing you'll notice about the new Mail is that creating and adding accounts is much simpler. If you use Gmail, Yahoo Mail or AOL Mail, as a lot of us do, you can now just enter your e-mail address and your password instead of looking for server names, SMTP addresses, port numbers and security settings.
At the same time, if you are using proprietary settings, the fields are laid out in a very functional way with hints to help you along with the details.
If you're upgrading existing accounts from Tiger, as most Mac users will be, Leopard Mail will upgrade your e-mail database when you first open it, just as Tiger Mail did during the upgrade from Panther ( Mac OS X 10.3). After this relatively quick process, you will likely notice that searches run much more quickly -- both from inside the Mail application and from Spotlight -- and Smart Folders assemble their contents more briskly.
For instance, on a MacBook Pro with three IMAP accounts and a few thousand e-mails in each, it took about three minutes to update the database. Your mileage will, of course, vary.
When you get to the main window, you'll notice two new buttons added to the row along the top: Notes and To Do. Down the left side are the same Inbox and other mailboxes that were in Tiger, but you will also notice new Notes and To Do folders below them inside a Reminders folder, as well as an RSS Feed box. Until now, built-in support for RSS feeds was part of Safari.
The RSS folder lets you subscribe to and view feeds the same way you look at e-mail. This is very similar to the popular open-source Vienna and NetNewsWire (NewsGator, US$30) or Outlook 2007 (part of Microsoft Office 2007) on the PC. If you set your default feed reader in Safari Preferences to be Mail, anytime you subscribe to a feed, it will be pushed into the Mail RSS Folder.
Apple now has two built-in ways to read feeds -- the old way in Safari and now in Mail -- and the two will sync, meaning if you read a feed article in one, it will be automatically marked as read in the other. The decision to offer two methods will likely be cheered by some but could be confusing to others. I'm sticking with Vienna for now.
The To Do item is another great feature with a simple yet intuitive "why didn't I think of that?" interface. You can add a To Do by selecting some text in an e-mail and hitting the To Do button or by right-clicking and selecting New To Do. If you want to start from scratch or with material copied from another application, just click the To Do button in the toolbar.
Once you create a To Do, the item shows up in between the message list and the reading pane -- right in the middle of the screen. If you add more, they will be stacked on top of each other, and you can rearrange their order by simply dragging and dropping.
You can also set an item's priority and due dates, set up alarms, and assign it to an iCal calendar. When the item is completed, simply mouse over it until a red X appears. Click it and the item goes away.
Notes works in a similarly straightforward fashion. Selecting a Note creates an e-mail that looks like a page from an old yellow-lined notebook. You can, however, use modern HTML text and image formatting in the Note. Saving a Note uploads it to .Mac or to your IMAP server just as an e-mail would be. You can then see your Note on any Mac or iPhone that is synced with that server. If you have more than one account, you can choose the one your note uploads to.
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To Dos aren't stored on the server, so they don't sync by themselves. But you can embed To Dos within Notes and sync them that way. All of this may take a while to get your head around, but after using them for a few days, I am already starting to wonder what I did without them.
Smart Mailboxes have also been beefed up. You can now make a new Smart Mailbox by right-clicking on an existing one, selecting Duplicate and editing it from there. Smart Mailboxes are also quicker at gathering data than they were in Tiger, repeating a theme that carries over elsewhere in Leopard: Old functions and new are snappier.
One of the biggest additions to Mail from an aesthetic standpoint is the Stationery tab. When creating a new e-mail, clicking the Show Stationery button in the upper right presents a menu full of designs that range from birthday cards to photo templates to fun notes. You can also browse your iPhoto Library for images to drop into your e-mail or stationery template by clicking the new Photo Browser button.
The downside to using Stationery, of course, is that it inevitably increases the size of a message -- e-mails that would be only a few kilobytes in size as text can easily get several times larger once you add graphics and photos. But if tools become available for creating third-party stationery or corporate identity templates, this may well become a huge sleeper feature.
You are now also able to create Archives of POP3 accounts by right-clicking on the mailbox. While a lot of people will be using Leopard's Time Machine backup feature, it sure feels better to have a fully portable copy of your e-mail account in .mbox format.
Archives don't appear to be compressed -- in my testing, their file sizes have corresponded with the original mailbox size -- but you can always compress the Archive after exporting.
Although there are a lot of really cool features in Mail, the coolest might be the "data detectors." If you get an e-mail with a signature or a date included, you can mouse over it and see a bit of Apple magic: A triangle will appear, offering a drop-down menu that indicates information that can be imported into Address Book contact or iCal.
While the feature isn't 100% perfect, it really cuts down on data entry time and works so intuitively that, within days, you will automatically be looking for data detectors within your messages. The amount of extra information that you can easily gather from your e-mails will skyrocket.
Apple has truly taken e-mail to a higher level with Leopard Mail. While the list of new features is impressive, the implementation is what blows my socks off. Everything is so intuitive that it barely takes any learning, yet I am using Mail in a completely different, more productive and fun way. Kudos, Apple.
iCal
iCal gets a big design overhaul, but like a lot of other things in Leopard, there's nothing that will confuse or distract people from the task at hand.
The first thing you'll notice is that it's done away with the brushed metal look and adopted the smooth gray look and feel that characterizes Leopard. The bottom of the left nav bar now has a more legible monthly calendar with much bigger numbers. The Day/Week/Month View buttons as well as the search window have moved from the bottom to the top in Leopard, making them more visible and useful.
The left nav bar still lists your Calendars, but now also includes the IMAP e-mail accounts where you store your To Dos. The pushpin button brings up your To Do list, as it did in the previous version, but now the To Dos created in Mail are part of the list.
You can reprioritize them and close them from here, or move them into other calendars. In the publishing field, you can now also publish your To Dos to your .Mac or other Webdav calendar.
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Events can be created in much more interesting and robust ways. You are now able to change the details of an Event directly in the Calendar pane, instead of needing to open the Info drawer as in Tiger. You can also now insert just about any type of media file into Events. Attaching a music file or movie to help explain the purpose of an Event could certainly be a nice way to send a meeting invitation.
You can send notice of the Event via e-mail to colleagues or friends, who can view the media content in the (sometimes huge) .ics file. Note to Evite: Watch out!
Apple is also pushing the CalDAV back-end calendaring protocol (which is supported in Leopard Server). It allows calendar sharing with a lot of the same functionality as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.
One such feature is setting up meeting rooms and assigning equipment -- think cameras and projectors -- their own calendars. That way, people can look up their availability and check them out when needed. People can also advertise their work hours to others so their colleagues know when they have free time. (This may not always be a good thing!).
Apple's Leopard Server back end will allow application developers to add more robust features that work with iCal down the road. I would expect to see the iCal-Server combination move toward being a strong option for business project management.
Parental Controls
Parental Controls are still managed through System Preferences, but they've been made much more robust in Leopard. While in Tiger parental controls were just a tab in the Accounts System Preference, Leopard's version has gained so many features that it gets a preference pane all to itself.
The first tab in Parental Controls lets you choose what applications your little user can access, as well as offering the choice of the simple Finder, as you could in Tiger.
The second tab gives you the opportunity to block profanity from the dictionary. (Holy @$4!%! There's profanity in the dictionary?!) You can also control which Web sites can be accessed by Safari.
In Tiger, you could only whitelist sites by adding them to an account's bookmark. Leopard's controls are much more flexible: You can blacklist sites as well or choose to let the system restrict access to adult-themed Web sites automatically. These settings don't apply to Firefox or other browsers, however, so be careful of those enterprising kids.
The third tab is dedicated to allowing only certain users to contact the child via Mail and iChat. If someone unauthorized tries to contact the child, they will get an e-mail notifying them that they are blocked and giving an e-mail address where they can write and ask to be added to the approved list.
Time limits are a new feature and allow a parent to fine-tune when a child is allowed to log onto the computer. It even has convenient bedtime and school-night features.
Finally, a fifth tab allows parents to set up logs to view what their children have been looking at and what applications they've been using.
These are very helpful, and as a former Macintosh lab manager at a university, I wish these features were available and built in the system a few years ago. I am sure more than a few libraries and schools will use the Parental Controls for more easily managing their Macs for their users.
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Conclusion
Kaizen is Japanese for "continuous improvement." As a business philosophy, it's mostly used in reference to successful manufacturing processes, but it is obvious that Apple embraces the concept as well.
The more I use Leopard, the more I can appreciate the creativity and hard work that went into making the productivity applications and system tools so much more useful. There are no drastic changes in the way you already do things, and the new things you can do are easy to figure out and start using right away. If that's not improvement, I don't know what is.
Seth Weintraub is a global IT management consultant specializing in the technology needs of creative organizations, including The Paris Times, Omnicom and currently the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile. He has set up and managed cross-platform networks on four continents and is an expert in content management systems and large-scale PC and Macintosh infrastructure. He also blogs for 9to5Mac.