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26 October 2007
Posted in
MyBlog
One of the coolest features of Leopard is something that I touched on in my last post, that of Automator's "Watch Me Do" feature.
I've used this feature before under Novell and Windows Server has something similar but nowhere near as cool as Novell's offering.
Basically what it does is record your movements as a Workflow allowing you to do some truely amazing things. How much it imitates Novell's ZenWorks remains to be seen but then most of the features of ZenWorks were for application snaps which is a different kettle of fish to being able to access ev ery aspect of the OS including applications that don't have Automator functions like say for instance logging into a website.
But one of the things I've heard about is the sheer speed of Leopard even on older machines. The guy who wrote the review seemed genuinely surprised but I'm not. Mac OS X has progressively gotten faster and faster with each successive release. Considering Leopard doesn't have Classic support, doesn't support things that allowed Panther to work with the latest OS, as well as other aspects Leopard is more streamlined than other apps. Incidentally this was precursored with iLife '08 which is a smaller install and much quicker than previous versions.
Apple's frameworks are some of the best in the world and getting them to run faster has been achieved by removing all support for Panther. This has brassed a few off but truthfully they should have upgraded their software by now. This is the same for Classic. Is there really a need for Mac OS 9 anymore? Is there really NO alternative? Mac OS 9 has been dead for over 5 years so I seriously doubt this is the case.
One thing that has annoyed people is Apple killing support for Panther on .Mac. While you can still get your e-mail you can't synch calendars etc between Tiger and Leopard machines. Once again, is there really a valid reason why you are on Panther as opposed to Tiger? Are you really so cheap as to not be able to afford to upgrade to Tiger which is faster on older machines anyway? The dropping of support for Panther has its place. Features of Leopard need a different backend to .Mac to work so to make .Mac better something has to give... Panther support. Hopefully .Mac will be much faster as a result.
As of writing my order is still showing up as "Not Yet Shipped" which sucks considering I ordered directly off the Apple NZ site and did so on Wednesday. If it's not here by Wednesday then there will be hell to pay. ;)
So far I haven't yet heard any issues that will affect me. Oh sure there are many screaming about 3rd Party apps but frankly don't take that out on Apple, take it out on the developers of those 3rd Party apps. If they were too cheap to get themselves into the Developer programs then how's that really Apple's problem.
What I'm seriously keen to see is how GTK apps like Gimp and all that work. If anyone uses Gimp and has it running on Leopard can you please tell me if it requires X11 still or if it runs transparently? If no one is then this will be the first feature I will try out.
Incidentally for all those Photoshop lovers why not try Gimp a bit? It's almost as powerful, it's high quality, and if you get GimpShop then you will use all the Photoshop shortcuts etc as well. You'll lose nothing and will be guaranteed to get it working on any Mac OS X version that has at least X11.
[b]Update:[/b] My copy of Leopard has shipped and will be here hopefully tomorrow. Weekend removal on its way. :)
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