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Leopard’s here tonight

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I have to admit I’m a little excited about the arrival of Leopard (aka Mac OS X 10.5) tonight – though I’m not sure at this point when I’m going to pick up my copy. The Guided Tour gives a good overview of what’s in store during the upgrade. Most interesting for me might be Time Machine, because I’ve become particularly obsessed with having good backups at all times, and Time Machine looks like a great addition to the effort.

I say might be for two reasons. First, I’m disappointed that it won’t work via connected Airport Disks. I have two external drives at the moment. One I keep connected via USB because it’s my backup drive (via Super Duper!) and I never got the backup-to-a-network-drive thing working properly. The other (much larger) disk hangs of my Airport Network. I’d love to use it for one or the other backup, but alas it isn’t suitable for that purpose. So at this stage, I’m not sure how to set things up for convenience, tidiness, AND a super-effective backup scheme. One idea I have had is to split the large drive into partitions – one for Super Duper and one for Time Machine – and use the smaller drive as the network file server.

Trillian for OS X

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Cerulean Studios have announced an alpha version of Trillian for the Mac, which they have gone out of their way to clarify is not a port but an entirely distinct dev project. I’m not sure how relevant Trillian will be in a Mac universe that already includes Adium. It will be really hard for Cerulean to improve on Adium – and certainly Trillian for Windows is nowhere near the quality of Adium.

The most interesting part

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The most interesting part

of today’s announcements from Apple at the WWDC is buried in most stories. In the News.com story linked above it doesn’t come out until the end of the second page. To wit, Phil Schiller has said that there won’t be anything done to prevent someone from running Windows on an Intel-Apple box. At the same time, Apple’s still a hardware company, so you can be sure that Tiger/Leopard will only work on Apple boxes. What that means, potentially, is that if you buy an Apple machine you can run whatever you want – Linux, OS X, or Windows – whereas if you buy a random-PC-manufacturer’s box you’d be restricted to Windows and/or Linux. Sounds like a pretty good strategy to me.

I picked up my copy

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I picked up my copy

of Tiger on Saturday and, after doing a full bootable backup I installed it as an upgrade on my main drive. Unlike others, I have always had a very good experience with upgrade installs, and this time was no exception. Everything works flawlessly.

My main question now has to do with Mail. There are two new, and deeply related, features in Mail – the integration of Spotlight, Apple’s new search technology, and the Smart Mailbox functionality integrated directly in Mail. So, the question is this: is it time to ditch all my Mail folders and keep everything in one mailbox (per account) and just use Smart Mailboxes to sort everything out on an as-needs basis? It seems silly to keep things artificially segregated when I don’t have to do so. At the same time, I have tens of thousands of emails going back to 1994 or so in my system and I wouldn’t want to have performance issues with keeping so many emails in a single master list. Any advice?

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