MacOS X 10.5 - is it any good?

Quite the question really, and it very much depends on what you really want. I've been using MacOS since 10.2 on an iMac G4 and am now the proud owner of an iMac G5 and a MacBook Pro both of which I have upgraded to 10.5 from 10.4. What are my impressions?

General UI
At first glance the UI is not vastly different (which is good, why change everything so radically you have no idea how it works). The new interface has a few tweaks with a transparent menu bar at the top and the new 3d-ized dock at the bottom. Nothing spectacular, but nice eye-candy all the same.

Spotlight seems to be a fair bit faster than in 10.4 and displays hits from the dictionary as well (nice touch). The ability to switch between multiple workspaces is a huge improvement over 10.4 for me as I live in this all the time. It works very well by simply keeping the desktop the same and switching to the applications running on the new desktop. Rather aggravatingly you don't seem to be able to move an application from desktop to desktop and if you start a new instance of an application (say Safari) it will open on the desktop where other instances are running.

Mac help has taken a fairly significant upgrade and will now point out menu items for you with a large arrow if you type command rather than anything else.

Finder
The Finder has a new set of default icons that look no better or worse than the old ones. Perhaps the look is a little cleaner but thats about all. Of course, the "cover-flow" addition to Finder has made the news and it does look very nice, but I am not all that convinced its worthwhile. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that in addition to the file formats that you would expect, OpenOffice 2.x files are supported and a preview is shown, albeit a little fuzzy.

The Finders "Shared" section shows network computers and makes it easy to connect to other Macs or SMB/CIFS shares on Windows and Linux. Of course if you are a .Mac user, things really get interesting. A new feature of 10.5 is "back to my Mac". The principal is very simple, and the execution rather elegant. If you are traveling with your MacBook (for instance) and have a need to connect to your Mac at home for disk sharing or even screen sharing it could be quite the trial.

You'd have to know your public IP address on your router, punch a hole through your firewall and also have a screen sharing application installed. With back to my Mac, no need to worry. .Mac tracks your home machine and displays it in the "Shared" section even when connected from somewhere else. I have found this particularly useful and the screen sharing has been a boon for me. As of writing, .Mac has had two updates to improve this service and its working fairly well for me. Of course the screen sharing is just a slightly modified version of VNC, but who cares if it makes life easy?

A couple of other Finder improvements include new search folders (All images, All Movies and anything modified in the past Day, previous day or week) and the ability to execute a search against a remotely connected Mac.

Bootcamp and Windows
Of course 10.5 features the in-built ability to boot into Windows rather than Mac OS via "bootcamp". I used the bootcamp beta and it worked pretty well. This time round the drivers are on the Mac OS install DVD rather than a separate CD. I will confess that I have had issues getting this to work and I attribute the problems to having run bootcamp in beta form first.

Windows is (well) Windows and the MacBook runs it perfectly well. The function keys all work well with the Apple keyboard remapping tool. An additional feature for 10.5 is support for Vista which will make a few people rather happy.

Time Machine
The really big new feature of 10.5 is Time Machine. In general terms Time Machine is automated backup software for your Mac. It is, however, far more. On first use your Mac hard drive is (effectively) imaged to an attached hard drive or network drive. Thereafter, changes are backed up on an hourly basis whenever the drive is available.

Clicking the Time Machine Icon while viewing a finder window shows all of the available backups stretching back in time. Its then easy to find the file, or even version of a file, and restore it simply by clicking it.

It has an additional advantage is that if you want to reinstall your Mac and restore all the data, boot from the Mac OS DVD and select "restore from Time Machine". Sit back and let the system do its job.

Everything Else
There are some additional goodies in 10.5. Safari 3.0 is a little faster and a bit more stable than 2.0. Parental controls are rather better with improved content filtering, time restrictions and logs.

Network settings and controls are also easier along with a far more intuitive Bluetooth settings control panel. The iChat screen effects are frankly useless, although the screen sharing is a boon (I've used it a couple of times now), although the video quality seems to have improved quite a lot.

The Verdict
As with all other Mac OS X 10.x upgrades this one is an evolutionary step. Each minor revision adds some key new feature that makes you wonder how you got along without it (Spotlight is now almost indispensable). I've upgraded and would have no hesitation recommending it to anyone else.

Why upgrade? "Spaces" and Time Machine alone are worth the upgrade and for .Mac users Back to My Mac is icing on the cake.