SafeSheep

So, leopard went into SafeSleep mode for the first time today, and I have to say, it has improved since tiger. Instead of a black screen, there was a black and white blurred image of my desktop with a progress bar superimposed on it. Cool.

(More) Leopard Boot Up and Shut Down

I just realized what makes Leopard startup seem so fast. Leopard eliminated the "Starting Mac OS X" screen. It goes straight from the gray apple logo to the login window. Cool, huh.

Leopard Startup and Shutdown

Leopard starts up really fast, and that is what we've been hearing about. However, to my knowledge no one has mentioned the shutdown time for leopard. I shut down my mac today and the shutdown time is about one second. I have to say: I love this. This is great for notebook owners and people who are usually powering down their computers at night.

I think that this happens because, just as Leopard starts everything up in parallel, it also shuts everything down in parallel. On my computer there is no screen with just my desktop and a spinning wait counter, I press Apple menu ➤ Shut down and confirm. My screen goes black, and within a second my fan turns off. Awesome!

Seashore

I've started using Seashore now, as opposed to the GIMP on leopard. It seems stable, but I cannot find a way to use a checkerboard background for transparent documents, like in the GIMP or Photoshop. However, it works on Leopard without any weird lag.

Another Problem with Leopard

I found another problem: Leopard does not always correctly recognize which applications are supported or not, some things like iMovie '06 or the GIMP, which run perfectly fine, are tagged with a do not enter sign. I have not figured out a pattern to this yet, but I will see how works.

UPDATE: They've gone away now. Strange.

Leopard and HUD panels

With Leopard's release, apple decided to integrate those black transparent panels as a feature within Interface Builder. This means that it will be much easier to do "cool looking" black panels without the work involved before: a custom subclass of NSPanel, rewriting the background view, making the title bar work again, etc.. However, one thing that I fear is that too many people will use them and we will get a Vista-like windowing problem of not being able to tell what window is on top. I think that the main thing UI designers should recognize is that Apple uses these panels sparingly. By just thinking about where I saw them I can think of two places: the quick look panel and the image adjuster panel. Nowhere else. Without the proper restraint we will have applications use them when not aesthetically wise, such as with a normal inspector-like panel. These kinds of panels are good for when you want something to stand out and you do not have very many controls on it. Like most things, when used sparingly and tastefully it works well, when overused it utterly fails.

Core Animation + Photoshop/GIMP

So, I was thinking about the GIMP on leopard, and I thought about Core Animation and Core Animation being a layer-based animation system. What came to me was a very brilliant thought: Core Animation acellerated image editing. If I were designing this system I would use Core Graphics (specifically Core Image) to implement the layers. I find this interesting because one could then implement something like Cover Flow for the layers. The way I thought of it a user would press a button and then the layers would rearrange themselves into something like Cover Flow. I might do some mock-ups later, but for now it is just an idea.

Leopard Compatibility

I have been using Leopard since the day of the release, and I have found a few compatibility issues with the programs that I commonly use. I use the GNU Image Manipulation Program (The GIMP) instead of Photoshop because I find it's tool based UI easier to use. Leopard updated X11 to x.org version 7.2, which seems to cause even more short-term compatibility problems. The problem that I have with the GIMP is that anything on the canvas lags a lot. Also, whenever I try to use the paintbrush or pencil tools on the canvas the program crashes. Lastly, a minor complaint but one that applies to X11 as a whole is that the window title bars were not updated to the new Leopard look.

I also use the cocoa beta version of OpenOffice.org for the mac, and with Leopard the icons are no longer transparent, they have a black background. Again, a minor issue, but annoying.

Installing Leopard on an iLamp

Remember that iMac G4? The one with the screen that could swivel 360°? The one lying in your basement, deprecated because you could not install the newest Mac OS? Well, as it turns out, today I installed leopard on one with a 700 MHZ processor. Processors less than 867 MHZ are not supported under leopard. However, it turns out that the processor was not the problem.

To install, I put the leopard CD into a 1 GHZ PowerBook G4 and rebooted both machines, putting the iMac into FireWire target mode first. The install went off without a hitch; Leopard detected the iLamp disk in target mode, and about an hour and a half later we had leopard installed. It booted up just fine, ran everything fine, and even ran Front Row. However, sometimes when it would fall asleep the iMac would wake up with a rainbow of vertical lines on the screen. I have not found a fix for this yet, but think that it is due to the iMac having a poor integrated video card. It's still not a speed demon, but if you set it to never sleep, but enable a screensaver you should have fewer problems.

UPDATE: The network and computer icon is actually a hi-res iLamp icon; this shows that Apple was perhaps originally going to have supported machines under 867 MHZ, but did not want to support terribly old hardware.