Having followed the genesis of Leopard closely, I was wondering if I should be once again (like for Tiger) an early adopter of that cat. I was reassured by a source close to the team in charge at Apple, that the long awaited fruit of their workings was possibly their more achieved yet. So I made the leap and got the new OS installed on my two machines on the day of the release.
Now, how is Leopard relevant to the translator’s experience, what does this upgrade translate into, to paraphrase NCTA’s newest slogan? First, surprisingly enough, I must say that even on my 4.5 year old PowerBook G4 at 867MHz (slowest configuration permissible), this cat is still faster than the previous one. I had read that a particular effort had been made on the optimization of the system and it is notable!
Then, there’s the look: Every time your familiar environment changes, you may be ruffled at the edges. And ruffles there were, notably with the side dock, modified at the last minute to calm the storm. Overall, it’s darker, and funnily, because most of the unified look draws from iTunes, though more serious, it remains very much playful. The icons are even more detailed and the three dots in the top left corner of your window, even shinier! What impressed me the most after only a few hours on the system was how crisp everything had become. There has obviously been a serious effort applied also to the resolution of the characters on the screen. It is a very welcome improvement since Mac users had to pay for more accurate rendition of the fonts with a tad blurriness… until now.
If you don’t feel like those enhancements are enough to pull your wallet out and spend $129 of your hard earned money, Apple has over 300 more reasons on their site to convince you. One of my favorites in the list is screen sharing, to take over mom’s machine in France and fix remotely the shenanigans that scare her, without any prior voodoo settings, and allow you to grab your home machine from your laptop on the move to get a file you had forgotten or even work on that remote machine! And don’t start me with the Finder: You can now see the front page of most of your documents (Office, PDF, images, and more) in Cover Flow view like you do in iTunes. No need to open anything to see what you are looking for and get rid of unnecessary files.
And the best for last: the application I will not be using yet because I’m a good boy backing up my machine every single day with Super Duper! but I haven’t figured out yet how to combine this with the new feature, Time Machine. That is pure high tech magic made simple. Don’t ask me too much about the hard links that keep your files on the drive after you have trashed the files they link to, but this is what allows you to virtually go back in time and retrieve long lost documents where they were at the time you are rolling back to in the past. And you can then restore just any piece to your present! All you need is an external drive, configure the app for the type of files you want Time Machine to protect. Besides, it also keeps hourly snapshots of your system. In case of major crash, you can restore your whole setup from a happier time. Welcome to the advent of the “no configuation, no excuse” backup, all in the background.
So visit Apple.com/macosx, and if you don’t find a good reason to upgrade, or switch to that superb platform that has become the Mac, email me. You may also want to join TransMUG and debate with us the merits or issues you have with your computing environment. Please visit our Yahoo! Groups page for more info.
Finally, if you will attend the ATA Annual Conference in San Francisco, come see TransMUGians Catherine, Christine, and I in the panel discussion “The Merits of Using a Mac in a PC-centric Translation World,” Thursday November 1st at 3:30. More on this panel discussion here soon.
Written by Yves
A friend, recent switcher and member of our user group recently emailed me to ask if he should install some kind of security software on his new MacBook. For his virtual PC installation, this goes without saying, but on the Mac side, what am I to tell him? I kept that idea in the back of my mind until I read about the Pwn2Own contest, part of the 
Pages and Numbers, the core applications of iWork, are now at version 4 and deserve a new review. Is the Apple Office suite ready to compete with the top tier of the market? When Pages (Word replacement) and Numbers (for Excel) were added to Keynote (for PowerPoint) to form iWork, the comparisons were not favorable, although Keynote was superior to PowerPoint in many respects from the start. Pages and Numbers were more like a modernized version of AppleWorks split in two, minus the drawing tools. The combo didn’t feel like a real Office contender. 
