PC Magazine: Apple’s OSX Leopard 10.5.2 Makes “The Best Operating System Ever Made”, Even Better

When Edward Mendelson of PC Magazine reviewed Leopard only ten days after it’s initial release, he declared that it was the “best operating system ever made”. Now, upon reviewing Apple’s second update to Leopard, Mendelson states, “I think that’s even more true now…”
The list of fixes in this update include improvements to stability, reliability and speed in Safari, Mail, iCal, iChat and the Parental Controls. Mendelson writes, “The biggest change in Leopard is that the Stacks features finally works the way it should-with custom folder icons and an option to display a list of files.”

For those unfamiliar with the term, a “stack” is an icon on the OS X dock which represents a folder. If you click on the Stack icon, you will open either a grid-type display or a fan-style stack of the folder’s contents. These have been translucent with Leopard, but are now less annoying and less translucent.

Mendelson states, “Now Stacks lets me choose to display a folder icon for the stack, so the Documents Stack and the Downloads Stack have the same distinctive icons as the Documents and Downloads folder in the Finder. (This was clearly the way Apple had always intended Stacks to work, because the explanation of the feature that came with Leopard’s first release showed those distinctive icons.) And Leopard now lets me display a Stack as a compact list-just as folders used to display in the Dock in the previous OS X version.”

So why all this talk about Stacks and the Menu bar? Largely, I suspect, because there is so little negative about Leopard which can be spoken of. The article reveals its real purpose, which is to ask “With this wonderful operating system, isn’t it time to make the switch to a Mac?” Mendelson answers, “I buy a computer to run programs, not an operating system, so for me the most useful operating system is the one that runs the programs I need to use. The Mac has the advantage over Windows in just about every software category…” Mendelson also acknowledges that “Leopard-to-Windows networking seemed even snappier and more reliable than before” the upgrade. Altogether, it’s hard to understand why a person wouldn’t make the switch.