The biggest problem with any product/service is getting people to come back. “Drive by” users aren’t terribly difficult. Google will bring you those with a little work. However your business comes from users coming back repeatedly. Those are you’re true “users”. They are the ones who will bring others.

Today, I think Facebook and Twitter are the perfect example of companies who understand and utilize this strategy in a way that amazes me. Lets look at this:

Facebook

They are the biggest, so I’ll go through it first. The first method of notification is the obvious alerts when logged into the site. You can keep it open and use it as a client, it works great. Facebook also has one of the best email notification systems on the net. You can reply to a comment or message by simply replying to the email. No “app” to install. Even an old Blackberry can participate. Even people where Facebook is restricted but email works can participate (stereotypical corporate office). Email is the worlds greatest API. They take full advantage of it.

On top of that Facebook apps have push notification for smart phone users. Facebook also supports SMS notifications. They additionally support XMPP (Jabber) so you can use a desktop client with their messaging service.

One thing I never understood is why they don’t officially support and continue their desktop notification service. With a trivial amount of work it would be an even better retention method. However the API’s are clearly there for client support (several use it).

Facebook doesn’t exploit this system for marketing or PR. It’s just a useful way to interact with their system. It’s an interface. It’s an API.

Twitter

Twitter is another company that gets notifications. The most obvious again is their website. Secondly their apps support push notifications. Twitter is also pretty good about email notifications however they don’t accept replies over email. They also support SMS (i.e. “Text follow raccettura to 40404″).

Twitter lastly has an open API and even supports desktop apps like Twitter for Mac and TweetDeck. They encourage their users to stay on constantly and keep up. It’s part of what keeps users addicted to the service.

Again, they don’t market. They just keep users interacting.

Google+, Quora, etc.

I won’t judge Google+ just yet, they are pretty new still. Quora does a pretty good job with notifications however the balance between annoying and useful hasn’t quite been met, at least in my opinion.

It’s easy to overlook this “detail”, but for many users, this is the interface, realize it or not.
I won’t

My solution was to build a USB alarm system: Two rotating LED lights to get attention visually as well as a 76 db piezo buzzer which chirps when the system is activates to help get attention. The buzzer only chirps and only when the system first invokes so it’s not an annoyance. It’s enough to get attention, but not enough to bother others. It has multiple chirps so that I can potentially setup multiple alert types.

Now we can really be on the ball!

Obligatory goofy office signage

Parts Manifest

• 1 Arduino Duemilanove
• 1 Piezo Buzzer (I used RadioShack part# 273-059 but you can use whatever you’ve got)
• 1 set of Woot Lights
• 1 Breadboard
• 1 ULN2803A Darlington Transistor Array
• 1 9V DC Power Supply
• 1 USB Female Type A Connector
• 1 Altoids Tin to hold everything
• 1 USB cable

Plus misc. wire to hold it all together, Dremel to cut the tin, multimeter to test your work, soldering iron to wire up the USB connector, electrical tape wrap all sharp corners and protect the inside from shorts.

Description

Essentially I started with Brett’s simple Woot-Off Schematics (mirrored). I made a few changes to meet my needs. I added a Piezo Buzzer to Pin 2/17 on the Darington Transistor Array and connected it Pin 8 on the Arduino. To avoid needing to modify the USB powered lights, I decided to wire up a USB connector using pins 1 and 4 (see pinout). This made installation logistics easier for me and also looks cleaner and more professional.

Here’s what the schematics look like (click for a bigger version). This is my first attempt at schematics, so pardon the sloppiness.

From there I put together a pretty simple sketch (download below) and uploaded it to the Arduino. Essentially it looks for one of three inputs via serial: 0, 1, 2. 0 turns the alarm off. 1 and 2 turn on the lights and audible tone. The sole difference is the tone is slightly different between the two, this helps differentiate between different events. I could setup an infinite number of alarms. Right now the code is pretty simple and limited to two, but I could expand and put together an algorithm to calculate X tones.

After that I wrote a quick Python script (requires pySerial) to send commands to the Arduino. I then wrote a batch script essentially as a wrapper (all available below).

So how is this invoked? I simply setup an Outlook filter to sniff find emails that meet the criteria for setting off an alarm and make it run an application, in my case the batch file.

Now when I get an email that meets the standards of setting off an alarm, I literally set off an alarm.

The version I use has a conditional in the Python script to check the day of the week and the time so the alarm doesn’t go off in the middle of the night since that’s pretty pointless. The one below is 24×7. You can modify it to suite you’re needs.

Where to go from here?

I’m contemplating upgrading to a brighter set of LED’s for more visibility. That would be simple enough to do.

It’s also possible to write a python script that monitors something on the web then fires off an alarm when a certain criteria is met. It would be pretty trivial to do. I may do this for an internal tool or two.

For anyone wondering, technically you could use this to build a remotely operated USB Humping Dog or to control any other “usb powered” dumb device. By “dumb” I mean no data connection.

Code

Arduino USB Alarm Controller sketch
Python script (requires pySerial to be installed) + Windows Batch Scripts

John Gruber has a very interesting observation:

Communication systems that succeed are usually conceptually simple: the telegraph, the telephone, fax, email, IM, Twitter. So color me skeptical regarding Wave’s prospects.

A very valid point. Popular technical communication systems solve one communications problem. Attempts to solve more than one so far have failed. A good example is the video phone we were supposed to have in every home 20 years ago. Even today with cheap web cams, video and telephony is rare to combine and is seen as somewhat of a novelty.

Wave also has other limitations such as people who use Wave interacting with people who don’t. Most of the “wow” in Wave requires interacting with other Wave users. Pretty cool if everyone you communicate with is using Wave, but no so much if many/most of your contacts aren’t using Wave. How many people only communicate with others using the same mail provider? Google users never email Yahoo and Microsoft users?

Will Wave be adopted? For one thing it will change the business model of many email providers. Wave will be significantly more resource intensive than basic webmail and POP3 access (or IMAP for the rare few). One could argue spam has made Email somewhat resource intensive, but Email has more slack regarding expected latency since it’s not “real time”. Email is often given away with internet access, web hosting, or just as a freebie because providers know that email keeps users coming back and it’s extremely low cost to provide. It also retains users. For example lots of non-AOL users keep their AOL account just for the email.

Then there’s the issue of ownership. Group editing a wave sure sounds like fun, as it’s so wiki-like. All that collaboration is also a real boost for productivity, but it does have it’s downsides. Who owns that data? Obviously companies are going to be a bit concerned about this aspect. Email has the benefit of being rather concrete. Send, receive. Those are the only two functions supported. Replies are merely a copy of a previously received email with an appended response. Ad-hoc collaboration seems to create a new twist. The courts have also seen their share of email. Wave means new precedents and interpretation in the law. How many companies you think want to test that pool?

One thing the Google team said virtually nothing about was security.

Email was never designed to be secure. SMTP servers initially had no authentication anyone could send using any SMTP server. Auth was bolted on later on, and is still problematic (receive before send anyone?). Presumably since Wave is built on top of XMPP SSL will be we the encryption mechanism. But that’s only on the transport level between federated servers. What about end to end? Is an S/MIME like method supported? SSL to the user is a secure transport layer but doesn’t protect from interception by either server. Since it’s text you could use PGP and send a message, though you loose a lot of functionality and grace.

SPF is a hack for email origin verification. It works OK where it’s supported, but not everyone supports it from a provider or user perspective making it a pretty poor solution. Will Wave be utilizing EV-SSL? How about supporting verification from the actual user? S/MIME signature? Verifying identity is critical to being a successor to email. Both verifying the organization, and the user at the organization.

Lastly spam. How does Wave attempt to mitigate the spam problem? Sounds like one of the possibilities is a whitelist which doesn’t work in email, and is unlikely to work in a Wave. Unsolicited emails are good in many non-spammy situations. For example a friend emailing from a new address or another business discussing a partnership. Sure you can prompt each time to add to whitelist, but then the process itself becomes spam. Do you wish to add “buy-viagra-at-thebiggestviagrastoreintheworld.com@yahoo.com” to your whitelist? You get the picture. I’m sure there will be traditional filtering as well, but that still doesn’t solve the problem.

I think Wave has a chance, but it’s not a very high chance of success. There are a lot of barriers. Email is still the ultimate API for it’s ease of use and implementation. Email didn’t survive for so long because there was nobody willing to build something better. Email survived because it became the standard and worked in virtually all situations. It was simple enough for users and implementers alike.

I think it’s much more likely that concepts from Wave will end up elsewhere, rather than Wave replace email. Because of that, I’d call it a disruptive innovation.

Order Confirmation

Order confirmations should be sent shortly after an order has been sent and the credit card has been accepted. It should contain the following information:

• Order # – This should be in the subject as well as the body. Obvious.
• Sanitized payment information – The last 4 digits of your credit card should be included, or other billing information.
• Itemized order list – Each item, description, quantity, stock status (or est. date) should be listed in a table.
• Shipping Address – Where is my stuff going?
• Shipping Method – USPS? UPS? FedEx? Overnight? Ground?
• Estimated ship date – If different things have a different shipping date, it should be per item, otherwise one date specified.
• Contact Information – Email address, link to contact form, phone number to get in touch with store

Shipment Notification

A shipment notification should be sent for each day something ships. All shipments from all warehouses should appear in 1 email. For example if I order 3 things and it ships from 3 warehouses on 1 day, I expect 1 email. If I order 3 things and it ships over 2 days from any number of warehouses I expect 2 emails, one each day. If there is more than one package, I expect each to be listed in the email.

The email should contain the following:

• Order # – Again, obvious
• For each package it should tell me:
  • Delivery Address – Where is this package going?
  • Shipment Method – How the item is being mail (USPS, UPS, FedEx, overnight, ground etc.).
  • Estimated Arrival – When is this package expected to arrive?
  • Tracking Number – Tracking number to track package, there should be a direct link to shipper to track package NOT a page that requires you to login first. Most stores mess this up. I shouldn’t need to login. I just want the number. (Pro Tip: search Google with your tracking number for an quick direct link to the tracking status page).
  • Inventory – What is in this package? Should be an itemized list with quantity.
• Contact Information – Email address, link to contact form, phone number to get in touch with store

It makes things so much easier the closer companies get to following this. Most companies get about 80% of the list, only a select few get this done correctly 100% of the time. The closest I’ve seen to date is ThinkGeek who has been pretty close to perfect every time I order.

Character Encoding

VideoSurf sent me an invitation to check out their product. Unfortunately I’m a somewhat busy person and just haven’t gotten around to it. They noticed this and sent me a reminder, which I thought was kind of nice. Unfortunately like many companies these days, their mail software doesn’t set a character encoding, meaning their email looks like garbage. If I change the character encoding in my mail client to UTF-8 all looks great. What’s the lesson here?

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

That’s all it takes to make sure I see every character in your email. It’s not hard.

Unnecessary Backscatter

Yahoo’s Flickr service sent me an email that my “upload has failed”. I know that’s not true since I don’t use Flickr to host my images. Viewing the email it’s obvious a spammer trying to abuse their service forged the From: header with my email address. This failed for the spammer, and the fail notification went to me. I host SPF records so that recipients mail servers can verify if an email originated from a system that’s authorized to send emails from my domain. Why doesn’t Yahoo check to see if this email they received forged headers? This would obviously be a good way to tell if someone is trying to spam their system, and would stop other innocent victims from getting backscatter.

It supports any POP3 or IMAP account similar to Thunderbird, with options for Gmail and Yahoo Plus in the wizard (for those who don’t know what type of email account those are).

My general impression is pretty neat, but the UI needs work. It often has scroll bars to view the contents of a window (just like a webpage). This is normal in a browser, but just feels strange in what is designed to be like a client side application. Even setup has this problem.

So far I still think Thunderbird and Apple Mail provide a better desktop experience. But Zimbra’s the new kid on the block, so I wouldn’t underestimate it. It is Open Source. It will be interesting to see who contributes to it.

If anyone else tried it, I’m curious to know what you thought of it.

Today Google announced it’s rolling out the ability to remotely sign out other computers from your Gmail account. You’ll also be able to view the IP address, interface (web, mobile, IMAP, POP3), and time that anyone has logged into your account. This is a groundbreaking change in regards to email security.

Now it’s possible for email users to review the logs and see if and when anyone else has accessed their personal email.

I suspect Yahoo, and Microsoft will be working to copy this feature, perhaps with their own enhancements (invalid password logging maybe?). I can also see Facebook and MySpace rolling out a similar feature in the near future. It’s an easy enough enhancement that provides a lot more comfort and security to the product.

Employers going through employees personal email has been hostile waters for a long time including a recent high profile case. This is certain to agitate that. I suspect there are a few companies who will be updating their policies in the next few weeks to try and protect themselves. There will even be a few who will sue Google claiming libel or that Google’s privacy policy should cover you when you log into someone else’s account provided you have one of your own. This is guaranteed to happen.

It’s a good move by Google. This feature greatly enhances the security of Gmail and puts it in a class well beyond what Yahoo or Hotmail currently provide. This is likely the biggest threat to email other than viruses which they all scan pretty well, and phishing, which they also do a decent job with.

Enterprise Offering

Pretty impressive, at least the way it sounds. I have a feeling they are dead serious on this one. Exchange support, and the administrative stuff will be very big wins. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the line ends up splitting so there’s an enterprise line of iPhones with a more business set of features, and a “personal” line. That will help them compete more on both sides by being able to focus more. Software likely will be identical among them.

The one thing I can’t figure out is cost. I have a strong feeling a price drop for the current EDGE based iPhones will come in June, as the new 3G models are revealed. It’s still a hard pitch for enterprises to buy iPhones when Blackberry’s are getting cheaper and cheaper. Not to mention they can shop for prices among wireless providers. Because of this, I think there’s a price drop in the works to bring the iPhone to where it can really compete.

SDK

I can has SDK? Still can’t download it. Apple’s on Akamai, but their developer stuff is generally not. That really sucks. I’ve been trying all afternoon.

I wonder if the $99 one time fee (setup fee) applies to open source projects? I’d hope they provide an avenue for them to signup at no charge. Especially considering Apple’s involvement in open source.

Other Thoughts

Still no Apple SSH client? I really hope terminal.app is available for download when this thing actually ships.

More when I actually get my hands on some SDK bits.

Phone Numbers Suck

Phone numbers suck. Why? Here’s a few of the more obvious ones, and I’m sure if you think about it, you can come up with some more:

• Hard to remember. The number of easy to remember numbers is limited. The rest is just randomness.
• Portability. If you move too far, you have to get a new number to be “local”. If a phone number is your identifier in the telecom world, it should stick.
• Limited. There are only so many numbers. With growing populations, multiple phone lines, and 5 year olds with their own phone, more digits will be needed. Who wants that? I know I don’t.
• New area codes. Can it be any more painful? Ever have this? Ever live in an are where more than one area

I keep asking myself why we can’t deprecate phone numbers. It seems silly that in 2008 there’s still no better way of doing things. I really don’t understand why VoIP needs to keep these artifact in our lives. VoIP could easily keep compatibility with existing POTS lines and do something better than phone numbers.

Why can’t we have a system based on DNS? So that you can use a domain name (on any TLD) by simply assigning a record (give it a new name, perhaps ‘TEL’). It works great for email. Most people never even realize if I’ve moved my email to a new server. They still send to the same address, and receive from it. Why can’t that abstraction be applied to phones? Considering VoIP works over the internet anyway, it’s an even more obvious solution.

On top of that, it replaces the stupidity we call “extensions”. Why have 1 (212) 555-5555 x1234 when you can have support@mycompany.com?

DNS Based Dialing

Requesting the main number (phone@domain.tld) on POTS:

s1:~ robert$ dig TEL accettura.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4-P1 <<>> a accettura.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 26161
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;accettura.com.                 IN      TEL

;; ANSWER SECTION:
accettura.com.          3600    IN      TEL      20 "pots=121255551234"

Or try the cell cell@domain.tld on POTS:

s1:~ robert$ dig TEL cell.accettura.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4-P1 <<>> a accettura.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 26161
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;accettura.com.                 IN      TEL

;; ANSWER SECTION:
accettura.com.          3600    IN      TEL      20 "pots=12125551111"

Or to get another number (work@domain.tld) on POTS:

s1:~ robert$ dig TEL work.accettura.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4-P1 <<>> a accettura.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 26161
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;accettura.com.                 IN      TEL

;; ANSWER SECTION:
accettura.com.          3600    IN      TEL      20 "pots=12125552222"
accettura.com.          3600    IN      TEL      30 "pots=12125552223"

And yes. There’s a fallback number there. Could be handy.

Ideally for VoIP you could operate more like a mail server:

s1:~ robert$ dig TEL accettura.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4-P1 <<>> a accettura.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 26161
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;accettura.com.                 IN      TEL

;; ANSWER SECTION:
accettura.com.          3600    IN      TEL      20 "voip=VOIP1.PHONECOMPANY.com."
accettura.com.          3600    IN      TEL      30 "voip=VOIP2.PHONECOMPANY.com."
accettura.com.          3600    IN      TEL      30 "voip=VOIP3.PHONECOMPANY.com."
accettura.com.          3600    IN      TEL      40 "voip=VOIP4.PHONECOMPANY.com."

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
VOIP1.PHONECOMPANY.com.  2773    IN      A       192.168.1.1
VOIP2.PHONECOMPANY.com.  2608    IN      A       192.168.1.2
VOIP3.PHONECOMPANY.com.  336     IN      A        10.10.1.1
VOIP4.PHONECOMPANY.com.  2773    IN      A       10.10.1.2

My VoIP provider with multiple servers on 2 ASN’s (private IP’s as an example). Very nice.

More than one way to do this

There are some things to note here. This example is modeled after TXT so both POTS and VoIP can live in the same record and are distinguished by voip= or pots=. Most DNS records like this (A, CNAME, MX) don’t work as a string. There’s several ways one could do something like this. I personally just like this one since it seems pretty flexable for the next best thing. It doesn’t allow for subdomains though, but I don’t think that’s a disadvantage since there’s so many combo’s with new TLD’s coming around every so often. There’s even a perk I’ll mention later.

Theoretically you could have a successor to VoIP as the first response, and the VoIP as a fall back. The user agent would ignore what it can’t connect to and use the next one on the list.

accettura.com.          3600    IN      TEL      20 "vidphone=VIDEOPHONE1.PHONECOMPANY.com."
accettura.com.          3600    IN      TEL      30 "voip=VOIP2.PHONECOMPANY.com."
accettura.com.          3600    IN      TEL      30 "voip=VOIP3.PHONECOMPANY.com."

Smooth transition

That said, this is still pretty workable. Anyone with a domain already could technically set it up to do this. Anyone with a internet connected phone would be able to use it. Old POTS numbers could continue to work, and you could have both. It’s essentially an alias. Thanks to DNS being well designed it could handle things like fall back, and even allow for successor technologies to be gracefully applied.

Your email is now your phone number. With XMPP it’s also used for IM. Now you’ve consolidated your various contacts into one easy to remember identifier.

Now regarding that small perk you’d give up for no subdomains, look at this:

Consolidate Identities with OpenID

Since your using cell.domain.tld as the hostname you lookup already for the TEL record. Why not set the A to point to a webserver hosting your OpenID identity? Now you’ve consolidated your IM, Email, Phone, and various logins all into one easy identifier.

Robert Scoble asked the other day how the web is screwed up. His belief is that it’s because services don’t know about each other. I think this is one giant step. By consolidating identifiers we make a lot of progress. OpenID can then be expanded to not only host your basic “signup information” but to support some standard profiles. For example:

• Friends – Buddy list, Friend lists, etc. Various attributes. Think vCard for Web 2.0.
• Media – Photos, Videos, etc. Keep a copy of your data with you online if you want (optional since capacity = cost).
• Bookmarks – Favorite websites, news stories, digg’s, Videos.

Websites would then keep data in sync between your OpenID and their service. So if you were to add a friend in Facebook, it would be added to your OpenID friends profile. On your next login to LinkedIn, they will know that’s a person to add to your contacts. Obviously users opt to share what info they want with the providers they want. Complete control, standardized, flexible, expandable.

Still Private

No, you don’t have to give up privacy to make this a reality. First of all, nothing forces anyone into this matrix. You could host an OpenID account anywhere that’s in no way linked to your phone. Totally anonymous. And regarding OpenID data profiles, you’d need to explicitly grant a provider access to each profile.

It does however provide an extra layer of protection against spam, and some fraud. Because your OpenID and phone are potentially joined, a website such as an ecommerce, or financial site could use that as an additional identifier.

Worried about spam or telemarketers? Don’t be. No real additional risk today than before with automatic dialers. If anything this is more secure since there’s billions of potential addresses (rather than numbers which you can easily increment through).

Want to change your number? Get a new domain to start a new life, or a new phone (newphone@domain.tld).

Government tracking you? No harder than it is today.

Packaging

Apple’s packaging has always been known for being better looking and easier to use (no need to rip it apart, easy to get stuff out). Unlike Mac OS X 10.0 – 10.4, Leopard uses a new smaller box. It’s about the size of the DVD box Apple ships with the Mac Mini (and I believe the iPod has a similar box). On the front is an eye catching holographic cover. Inside is one DVD set inside the cardboard sleeve (rather thick) unlike the plastic/paper cover used in previous boxes. Also inside are the standard Apple stickers and a rather thick color book going over new features in Leopard. The photos are a little small, but good enough for the explanations. In an age where most manuals for software are in PDF format, a physical manual is a real luxury.

Install

I decided to do a clean install on my Mac Mini (rev 1 G4 @ 1.4GHz 1GB RAM) since I installed 10.4 on top of the stock 10.3, and lots of stuff has been installed over the years. I made two partitions one for Mac OS 10.3 (so I can try running 10.3 with Classic), and the main partition for Leopard and my data.

Install went very smoothly really nothing to complain about. The OS DVD has improved since 10.4. The first great enhancement is that it now can partition without reformatting (technology first seen with the Boot Camp public beta’s). I choose to zero my drive anyway, but it’s nice to know I can adjust partitions. Also interesting is that if you look at the top right side of the menu bar, you can see that WiFi is available on the installer. Not exactly sure what you would use it for, but you can connect to an access point. Overall it took over an hour until I was ready to restart into Leopard. Initial restart brought me to the first launch video “Welcome” obviously redone for Leopard. Setup went as expected an I was on my desktop without any pain. Afterwords I put in the Mac OS X CD that came with the computer and installed the apps that came with it (AppleWorks, iMovie HD, GarageBand). Also very painless So now onto the toys.

Finder

Overall the look and feel of the OS is great. The most obvious change is the newly remodeled dock. I personally think it looks pretty nice, but maybe that’s me. Since I’ve got a Mac Mini with an ATI Radeon 9200 (a mere 32MB) I don’t get some of the more fancy graphics/animations such as the semi-transparent menu bar that’s so controversial. Regardless it looks good. Rounded menu’s are a nice little bit of polish.

Coverflow is an interesting way of browsing media. I didn’t expect it to work on my Mac Mini because of the weak graphics card, but it actually works pretty well. It did however consume a bit of CPU, and disk IO was a little high so if you went to fast, the images weren’t always preloaded. Still handy.

Stacks are rather handy, especially for downloads. Not having them clutter the desktop is a major win. In just a few hours I can see how great this feature will be in the long term. Downloads are also tagged (similar to IE on Windows) so you’re prompted the first time you open them. I’d love to see the ability to turn a folder on the desktop into a stack (for easy access). The new sidebar is really good, it makes things even easier to access with less clicks. Notable is that it found my file server and make it a breeze to connect to. I can’t complain about that.

Scrolling windows that are not in the front is also a great usability tweak.

The Path bar, disabled by default (In the view menu select “Show Path Bar”) is great for keeping track of where you are. Adjustable grid spacing = awesome.

Quick Look

Really fast, and really awesome. I can see myself using it quite a bit. This is definitely a time saver. Ability to go full screen is just a bonus.

Fonts

It looks like Apple did some tweaks to how it handles fonts. Most obvious is that the default minimum for anti-aliasing is now 4px, down from 8px (which looked bad on a few websites with smaller fonts). The fonts look a little more crisp than they did before, but still feel much smoother than they do on Windows. I think it’s a significant win.

Spotlight

I didn’t really use Spotlight to much on my Mac with Tiger. With Leopard I think I will. It seems good enough to get rid of QuickSilver which I have yet to install. You can indeed use it to launch applications. Indexing didn’t take to long, search is pretty zippy.

Spaces

The one feature I really wanted most was Spaces. I love the feature of multiple desktops when using Linux and really love that Apple adopted the innovation. The spaces implementation is pretty good, it’s in the dock for easy access, also available in the menu bar and via key commands. Easy to use. The one thing I would like to see added is a graphical representation of what’s in each space on the icon. So I know what spaces are occupied and what are empty like Linux does. This is a minor thing. Overall it’s great.

Safari

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard ships with Safari 3.0.4 (5523.10) installed. Perfect for downloading Firefox. Kidding aside it’s fast and sleek. Nice additions include the ability to resize a text area on a form (Firefox extension will do the same). Also new (and very handy) is Web Inspector.

Dashboard

Dashboard didn’t change much, but there’s now a feature (in conjunction with Safari) called Web Clip which lets you select a piece of a web page and turn it into a widget. Not a bad idea, but I doubt I’ll be using it much since I don’t really use Dashboard that much to begin with.

Front Row

Front Row is now available for those computers that didn’t ship with it, such as my Mac Mini, but without a remote I’m not sure how useful it would be without the buying a remote such as the Keyspan ER-RF1.

iCal

Lots of little stuff, but until CalDAV is a more accepted standard and accepted by Google and friends, it’s mostly useless to me.

Developer Tools

I need to play with DTrace. Xcode looks good as usual, Dashcode is awesome, more polished than the developer preview under Tiger. Also noteworthy is Tiger includes:

• Apache 2.2.6
• Perl 5.5.8
• PHP 5.2.4
• Python 2.5.1
• Ruby 1.8.6
• Java 1.5.0_13

Mail

I don’t use Mail to often, but on occasion I play with it. Forward as an attachment is finally available. RSS integration isn’t bad, but not very powerful. In no way would replace Google Reader. Archiving mailbox isn’t such a bad idea. Could use that in Thunderbird.

Preview

Preview got a few nice little additions including a more polished UI that just seems more
intuitive. It also seems faster with large files. Lots of new features I’ve yet to play with.

Printing

I was able to setup my networked HP DeskJet without a problem. Wasn’t the greatest quality or the fastest but good enough. I wish HP would provide good drivers themselves, but they are still trying to push their overpriced JetDirect system. I can always use my Laptop to print so it’s never been an issue (can also print to PDF for easy transfer).

Terminal

The terminal now has tabs! My #1 request for a long time. Yes there are third party replacements that add this, but those are buggy at best. This officially makes Terminal cool.

TextEdit

Everyone’s favorite text editor now supports OpenDocument and Word 2007 Formats. Other than that, I don’t see anything too noteworthy, just polish (smart quotes, auto linking, etc.). All work very well.

Time Machine

I haven’t tried time Machine since I don’t have an extra drive large enough at the current time. I don’t keep much data on my Mac since my PC laptop is backed up frequently. As a result I mount the drive when I need something. Works well enough. This might change things though. So much for reviewing the most talked about feature right?

Performance

Overall the performance of Leopard on a 1st generation Mac Mini is extremely good. I personally think it feels more responsive than Tiger and Panther did. You won’t see the fancy animations or graphics (it still looks stunning though), but it’s very usable. I originally thought it might be a little sluggish based on the discussions of optimizations for Intel based Macs, but Apple seems to (for now) still care at least a little about PPC users.

Quirks

I did notice a few quirks with Leopard:

• Panther/Tiger let me put the computer to sleep and switch to the other computer on my KVM switch. As long as the switch was done pretty quick the computer just went to sleep. Leopard doesn’t like this. The workaround is to switch, wait about 10 seconds then hit the power button once to put the machine to sleep.
• When switching back to my Mac, Leopard doesn’t see a mouse and prompts me to connect a bluetooth mouse. Obviously my mouse exists, but it’s USB and my KVM doesn’t emulate hardware. Not a major problem, but a little annoying. See below for instructions how to disable this.
• Safari seems to have become a little more memory hungry. Might be a leak, I only have 1 tab open. See comments for instructions how to disable this.
• Time Machine doesn’t let you use network volumes to backup. Would be the best option of all.
• Not a quirk but something that’s “missing”: Still no ability to use iCal to write to Google Calendar.

So that’s all for my initial impressions with Tiger after almost 24hours. I personally really like it, a worth while upgrade. Can’t wait until I can upgrade at work. It’s by far the best OS Apple has ever put out. Having played with Vista I can safely say it is a much more functional, easy to use, and more powerful OS. It’s clearly designed with the user in mind.

Edit [11/4/2007 @ 10:15 PM EST]: There is a way to disable the bluetooth input device prompts.