Mac OS 10.5: Leopard
I’m really liking the new Mac OS after using it for three days now. Improvements include: the transparent menu bar, the Finder’s Quick Look and Cover Flow, Safari’s improvements, enhanced Spotlight, Spaces, and even the moving backgrounds in iChat and Photo Booth. It’s not noticeably faster or slower than the previous OS (10.4/Tiger).
*Finder*
With a file selected, hitting the space bar now opens up a Quick Look window that displays a preview of that file. Many file types are supported, including text files, JPEG and GIF images, PDF documents, and of course Apple’s Numbers and Pages documents. Since Quick Look opens instantly, this is far faster than opening a document in the application. The Finder’s new Cover Flow view, like its iTunes equivalent, makes it easy to flip thru a folder of files and locate a particular file “by look”. This is amazingly like opening a real life folder and looking for a page by look. Cover Flow is very fast, and altho you can get a little ahead of it when viewing a folder with hundreds of files it only takes a second for it to catch up with you.
*Spotlight*
Apple’s system-wide search tool is noticeably faster now, and includes some handy additions. The biggest new feature for me is the inclusion of recent web pages in the search. So many times in the past I’ve needed to go back to a web page I had seen a few days earlier. After a bit of googling (sometimes a lot) I’ve usually found the page again, altho not always. Spotlight now indexes all the words on the web pages you view, so they conveniently show up in its search results. Very nice. Spotlight also knows math now, so you can type 468/9 in its search box, and the top result shows “Calculator: 468/9 = 52″ (you can even click on that line to open the Calculator).
*Spaces*
They say that time is Nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. In a similar way, virtual desktops are a geeky way of keeping all your open windows and applications from being open on the same screen. So on my “main” desktop I have Safari and TextMate open, while on another desktop I have a couple Terminal windows open along with my FTP program. Switching between them is as simple as hitting control/right-arrow and control/left-arrow. I’ve been using different virtual desktop programs for the past few years, most recently the wonderful VirtueDesktop, and have gotten pretty -addicted- dependent on them. Leopard includes a built-in virtual desktop, called Spaces, which is pretty well done. I like how F8 now brings up an Exposé-like screen that shows all my virtual desktops, er, spaces, and that I can drag windows from space to another or even drag spaces around to swap them. I do miss being able to name my spaces (they used to be called Here, There, Everywhere, GTD and XP), and how those names would appear in the bottom right corner of the desktop so I could always tell where I was. Spaces numbers its desktops, and displays that number in the menu bar so you know where you are, but it’s not the same. There’s also a quirk with auxiliary windows like the Find dialog, which can pop up on the wrong space if you’ve moved windows around (this is a quirk that other virtual desktop programs didn’t have). I’m hoping Apple addresses that bug in a 10.5.1 update before too long.
*Other Stuff*
Safari tabs can now be dragged around to rearrange them, or even dragged out to become a new window. Searching on a page is so much easier now, and matches jump out (literally). You can turn a section of any web page into a widget that self-updates, so it’s easy to make your own weather widget, or keep an eye on the latest Digg headline. Downloads now go into their own folder instead of cluttering up the Desktop, and it’s easy to get to them using the new Downloads folder in the Dock. iChat and Photo Booth are improved and now support effects and animated backgrounds so it looks like you’re at Yosemite, or on a beach or a roller coaster. People have already started creating their own effects, yesterday I downloaded one from Mac Rumors that makes you appear as a ghost (do a Google search for _hologit_ to find it). PHP5, Ruby and Rails are installed by default, making web development that much easier.
*Incompatibilities*
As with any upgrade to the operating system, not all software is compatible, at least not immediately. Altho most of my programs are working just fine on Leopard, a few key programs are not, and I miss them. iKey -isn’t working- works just fine, it just needed to be reinstalled!_ And the Saft enhancement for Safari -no longer works- has now been updated to work under Leopard, and I can once again use shortcuts like _be_ to edit my blog entries, and _wiki leopard_ to lookup “leopard” on wikipedia or even _mu saft_ to search for “saft” on macupdate.com. My remaining incompatibilities are minor (SlimBatteryMonitor, for instance).
*Perl and MySQL*
From a web developer’s point of view, it’s strange that Apple installs PHP5 but not MySQL. And their support of Perl is pretty lacking, altho they do include version 5.8.8. I’ve installed MySQL and got it working with PHP, but I still haven’t gotten it working with Perl so web development for most of my sites is severely hampered at the moment. Still, I’m hoping some alphageek figures out how to get DBD::mysql installed and working, and I’ll be a happy camper.
*_Update 10:25am_*
Aha! The trick to getting perl talking to MySQL is to install older modules rather than the latest. The magic modules are DBI::Mysql 1.47 and DBD::Mysql 2.9006. Woohoo! 
November 7th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Actually, you can install the most recent DBD::Mysql. The trick is – you have to modify the –cflags and –libs options for the makefile; there’s no way to do that from CPAN shell (as far as I can tell, but I’m a newbie to that), but it works fine when installing from source.
The problem is, mysql by default installs itself into /usr/local/mysql
Perl assumes that includes and libs are in /usr/local/mysql/include/mysql and /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql respectively. To get it to work, we just have to correct that misconception:
perl Makefile.PL –cflags=”-I/usr/local/mysql/include -Os -arch i386 -fno-common” –libs=”-L/usr/local/mysql/lib -lmysqlclient -lz -lm”
make
make install
and there we go
November 7th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Thanks for the tip, codeFiend, now I can update to the latest and greatest when I get a spare moment!
November 17th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Is
perl Makefile.PL—cflags=”-I/usr/local/mysql/include -Os -arch i386 -fno-common”—libs=”-L/usr/local/mysql/lib -lmysqlclient -lz -lm”
working for other people? I get usage directions and this:
Unknown option: os
Unknown option: arch
Unknown option: fno-common”—libs
Unknown option: lmysqlclient
Unknown option: lz
Unknown option: lm”
November 18th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
It’s crucial that the perl modules are compiled with the same architecture parameters as perl (apparently).
For DBI:
export CFLAGS=”-arch i386″
export ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386″
perl Makefile.PL && make && make install
For DBD::Mysql:
export PATH=”$PATH:/usr/local/mysql/bin”
perl Makefile.PL –CFLAGS=”-I/usr/local/mysql/include -Os -arch i386 -fno-common” –libs=”-L/usr/local/mysql/lib -lmysqlclient -lz -lm”
That worked for me..
Adam Stokes, verify your command line arguments. You might miss some spaces or quotes
November 19th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Adam, make sure to replace the long em-dashes with two regular dashes – this comment system reformats – - into –.
November 28th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
OK, to get the make, etc. commands to work correctly on OS 10.5 you need to install Xcode 2.5 Developer Tools
The Developers Tools that are on the OS 10.5 disk do not open.
Earlier developers tools do not install correct make commands.
Go to http://developer.apple.com/
and signup. They just require basic info.
Once signed in, go to Downloads and click on Developers Tools.
Download the Xcode 2.5 version, other versions don’t work.
Install the tools, then restart. The perl Makefile.PL, make, make install commands should then work for DBI and other modules, without extra parameters.
Note: make install has to be done using sudo.
Still haven’t checked if the DBI works with Perl and MySQL, but this is a start.
December 11th, 2007 at 11:22 am
All I can say at this point is that I am very disappointed in Leopard (OS 10.5). After several tries at getting MySQL and SQLite to work with Perl CGI, I have given up and am just going to have to use tab separated data files to store on-line data.
I have been the ‘computer guy’ in an state office for almost 10 years and we have used Macs exclusively. I haven’t seen an OS so buggy since 10.0. 10.5 won’t even untar a compressed file. Hopefully, they will come out with a free fix to Leopard, like they did when they offered 10.1.
For now I will just have to limp along with 10.5 as it is. Well rant over for the morning. Good luck to anyone else wrestling with the Leopard.
–BC
December 11th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Other than struggling with Spaces switching unexpectedly, I really haven’t had many issues with Leopard. I got MySQL working with PHP and Perl (see above), but I have to admit I don’t use SQLite. No problems compressing or uncompressing files (.zip or .tar or .tar.gz).
One other thing I’ve noticed is that CocoaMySQL won’t let me drag and drop table columns to reorder them.
The 10.5.1 update didn’t fix my Spaces problems like I’d hoped, but maybe the next update…
December 18th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Well, BodhiCat must apologize. The computer was shipped with 10.4, which is what I have been using. So my problems were with 10.4, not 10.5. It did include a 10.5 disk, apparently 10.5 came out just before it was shipped. So I will install 10.5 and see if it takes care of some of these problems.
December 24th, 2007 at 10:22 am
I’ve been unsuccessful at getting DBD::mysql to install successfully on Leopard. Following the instructions from Beatnik and codeFiend both result in builds that don’t throw errors, however DBD::mysql doesn’t work, and make test throws gobs of errors. Any further tips?
December 24th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Dan:
Did you have any luck installing older versions, specifically DBI::Mysql 1.47 and DBD::Mysql 2.9006? That did the trick for me. If that doesn’t work, I can only advise continuing to search for solutions from other adventurous souls.
Good luck,
– d
December 24th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Thanks for the suggestion, Dave, but I did try those version of the modules with no luck. I feel I must be missing something obvious because others have obviously made it work. The search continues!
December 30th, 2007 at 10:22 am
For anybody else reading, here’s what I did: http://groups.google.com/group/perl.macosx/browse_thread/thread/60f2db2fcda3b240/458ad807d0754f9f?#458ad807d0754f9f
Basically, I needed a /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/ folder with the lib/ files in it. I know the –CFLAGS switch should take care of that… but whatever, at least it works!
January 1st, 2008 at 9:21 am
Glad you got it working Dan!
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:47 am
Thank you for the hints, had the same issue with DBD and Leopard.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Also try symlinking the sock. Worked for me.
ln -s /usr/local/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock
June 14th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
[...] these error messages turned up surprisingly little. On another blog with a post titled, “Mac OS 10.5: Leopard” that mentioned difficulties with DBI, commenters suggested various solutions, but none of them [...]