Welcome to Part 2 of Deep Thought’s review of Mac OS X Leopard, the latest version of Apple’s venerable operating system. In Part 1 we discussed the user interface changes in Leopard; for the most it is an improvement but there are some areas that could be implemented better.

Like the first part, this section has a score at the end of the article. Again, note that this score pertains only to this section and not to the review as a whole. When our review is complete we will assign a cumulative score.

This second part will cover Spotlight and the Finder. I am reviewing both in the same article because Spotlight and Finder are tightly integrated in Leopard. No longer is there a fundamental difference between a Spotlight search and a Finder search; the only things you don’t get in the Finder that you get in the Spotlight search menu are calculations and word definitions. I’ll explain this more in a moment. For now, let’s take a quick look back in time.

A spotlight on Spotlight

Spotlight: the early days

Spotlight was hyped as one of the main features in Tiger, and it was an improvement over pervious search functions on Mac OS X in terms of speed. But unfortunately, Spotlight left a lot to be desired. Users expected an instant search feature; instead Spotlight in Tiger had an annoying tendency to lag before displaying results. And for some inexplicable reason, if you selected the “Show All” command from the…
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If you’re a Mac user, you may want to think twice before visiting that porn site, especially if you’re, uhm, unprotected.

Today Intego released a security alert regarding the discovery of a trojan horse affecting Mac OS X. The trojan horse targets visitors of pornography sites, and poses as a message advising users to upgrade to the newest version of a QuickTime codec.

Unlike some previous trojan horses on OS X this one is not just a proof-of-concept; it is actually malicious. From Intego’s warning:

This Trojan horse, a form of DNSChanger, uses a sophisticated method, via the scutil command, to change the Mac’s DNS server (the server that is used to look up the correspondences between domain names and IP addresses for web sites and other Internet services). When this new, malicious, DNS server is active, it hijacks some web requests, leading users to phishing web sites (for sites such as Ebay, PayPal and some banks), or simply to web pages displaying ads for other pornographic web sites. In the first case, users may think they are on legitimate sites and enter a user name and password, a credit card, or an account number, which will then be hijacked. In the latter case, it seems that this is being done solely to generate ad revenue.

As usual, the best advice is to be paranoid online and never download anything from web sites you are not familiar with. These type of schemes prey on gullible users. Also, you may want to…
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So the first part of our Leopard review is up; my thanks to those who read it and left their comments. The second part will cover the Finder and Spotlight, and should be posted tomorrow (November 1). To hold you over until then, though, here are some more observations on some of the smaller changes made to Leopard.

It brought up the right card!!

Here’s an awesome little touch. Mail in Leopard has a feature called data detectors that recognizes various sorts of information like phone numbers and addresses. My brother had moved, and a few days back I emailed him asking for his new address. He replied yesterday with his new address. It was a perfect time to test out data detectors. I moused over the address he had given me; as expected, Mail recognized the address and put an outline around it, along with a down-pointing arrow indicating a pop-up menu. I clicked the arrow and selected “Add to Existing Contact...”. I fully expected to be presented with a dialog box or something asking me to pick a contact, but Mail saw that it was my brother and pulled up his address card automatically, giving a preview of the card with the new address. Sweet.

Pick a network, any network

Mac OS X has always had the option to let you know about WiFi networks in the vicinity if it can’t find any of your preferred networks. Leopard improves upon this feature by listing the available networks when notifying…
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Ah, at long last, we get to review Leopard! Leopard, of course, is Apple’s marketing name for Mac OS X version 10.5. If Apple didn’t opt for keeping the OS X moniker, we’d probably be up to version 12 or something by now. But I digress.

We plan on offering our review in multiple parts, since there is a ton of material to cover. And no, before anyone asks, we’re not planning to out-Siracusa our friend over at Ars Technica, whose gigantic Leopard review went up Sunday night. This review will be targeted towards the enthusiast: someone who is a very tech-savvy end user but doesn’t necessarily need to know extensive under-the-hood minutiae (besides, it would be foolish to go up against the likes of Siracusa--his reviews kick ass!).

This first part will focus on the most immediately obvious changes to Leopard: the user interface. There is a reason why I start almost every review I write with a discussion on the user interface. If you’re going to stare at a computer screen for hours on end, you had better enjoy the software you’re using, and much of the enjoyment factor rests on the interface. Does the interface enhance or detract the software’s usability? Is it ugly? Is it attractive? Are there areas that seem awkward and need tweaking? Why should I care? These are the sort of questions I hope to address in this first part of our review of Leopard.

A quick note about the score at the bottom…
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Dear Apple,

Last Friday you launched your new operating system, Mac OS X Leopard, a.k.a. Mac OS X 10.5. I was expecting that those of us who have purchased a Mac in the last few months would be allowed to upgrade at a discounted or free price. However, it appears that I am wrong. From what I can find all that you offer in this realm of customer service is a free upgrade to those who purchased an Apple computer after the first of October, 2007. This I find completely unsatisfactory, as I have owned my Apple computer for less than three months as of the date of this writing (ordered August 23, 2007 received August 31, 2007). I am appalled by the fact that the common customer should have to pay for an operating system upgrade within three months of purchasing their system. There is no reason not to allow customers from as far back as the month of August to freely upgrade to OS X Leopard. This is in my eyes a despicable move to drain the money from our pockets and drain the love of all things Apple from our souls.

I respect that Apple is attempting to keep the price of the upgrade down to a reasonable price. However I do not feel that allowing two twelfths of the over 7 million Apple computers sold in the last year to be freely upgraded is going to damage the revenue of Apple in any way. Furthermore I see…
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