Review: Can Leopard Take On Vista?

File management: Leopard tries to atone for its usability mistakes by allowing users to view the files without opening them. Apple has brought Cover Flow (familiar to iTunes and iPhone users) into Finder. When Cover Flow is enabled, a large preview of each selected file appears about the list of files in a folder. Since these previews are live, they can be accessed without opening them: users can scroll through multipage PDF files through Cover Flow.

Quick Look is another such feature, letting users preview files without opening the file, and equivalent to Vista's Windows Preview Pane in Explorer. Quick Look is a bit more powerful, however.

Apple's Stacks is brand-new. Any folder placed on the right side of the dock takes advantage of this stacks feature. When the folder is clicked, all the contents are displayed, either as a grid, or as a neat list of icons. A default stack keeps all downloaded files in place and the desktop is no longer the default destination. Having all the downloaded files in an accessible folder cleans up the desktop.

Advantage: Leopard

Desktop: Leopard's desktop has new colors for its windows " gray " but old colors for its buttons and scrollbars " aqua blue " which seems a little off visually. Test Center engineers had about six applications open at one time, and it was difficult to identify which of shade of gray was the active window.

Like Vista's Aero Glass interface, Leopard also has translucent windows, which Test Center engineers found, frankly, annoying. At one point, engineers had Microsoft Word and Safari open at the same time on the Macbook. The animated banner ad on the Web browser was visible through the palettes on Word, which was a distraction. While the semi-transparent windows lend to the whole eye-candy effect, it is very difficult to work with on a regular basis.

Test Center engineers tried to reproduce the effect on the Thinkpad and noted that while the underlying windows were visible at the edges of the window, this effect wasn't as pronounced. For Vista Basic users, they are spared the transparent look.

Advantage: Vista

Hardware requirements: Like Vista, Leopard has some strict hardware requirements. While Leopard can run on any Intel-based Mac, it can also be installed on some PowerPC G5 and G4 configurations with 867MHz or faster processors. The OS requires at least 9 Gbytes of hard drive space and 512 Mbytes of memory. Based on these configurations, machines as old as six years old, may be able to run Leopard with some limitations. For example, Boot Camp runs only on Intel-based Macs and some features of Photo Booth won't work on a G4.

Vista, on the other hand, can work on hardware as low as 800 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 20 GB hard drive with 15 GB of free space. For the ideal experience, a 1 GHz processor and 1 Gbyte of system memory is recommended. The video card has to support DirectX 9 graphics and have at least 128 MB of graphics memory. Vista will probably work on machines sold within the last two years, but any older is tricky.

While Leopard will run on older configurations than Vista, Mac hardware is not as readily available as PC hardware. System integrators can easily build a PC capable of running Vista and solution providers can shop around for the best price. Business customers can probably upgrade their existing Mac hardware to Leopard much easily than their PC counterparts can move to Vista. However, hardware costs may not justify the move to an all-Mac environment.

Advantage: Draw

Next: For backup, Leopard puts in a strong performance