Leopard Love

You know, I spend quite a bit of time in this space dissing OS X, but I’d have to say that Leopard has been one of the more pleasant infrastructure surprises in recent years.

Time Machine · I just now typed rm -rf * in the wrong directory, and no more than ten seconds after saying “Oh, shit!” I thought hey, hold on a second... and another ten seconds later I had revivified the victims.

You gotta love that.

Mail and Calendar and Phone · At some point in the last year when I wasn’t looking, my Samsung phone showed up on the list of devices supported by iSync. So for the first time in years, I have my whole calendar and telephone book there on the phone. I am a Fully Integrated Person. By the way, at least on this phone, an event’s “Location” field is strictly limited in size; if you need to put in a couple of phone numbers or directions to the meeting, use the “Notes” slot.

But what’s really cool is that these days, if there’s a date or a time in an email message, you can click on it and it’ll make an effort to figure out event details and jam them into iCal automatically. It gets lots of things wrong, but usually not the time, so at least you get an event opened up at the right place in the screen, so you can fix up any mistakes and put the details in the “Notes” field.

Spotlight · You know, now that it works (never did in Tiger for me), Spotlight is actually a pretty great feature. I organize everything by timeline, YYYY/MM, under a very few top-level directories like “Sun”, “Pictures”, and “Personal”, and, well, post-Leopard, I’m spending a lot less time poking around looking for things.

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