Caffeinated Cocoa

Leopard is out!
I never got the beta, so I am pretty excited to finally have it. As Walt Mossberg put it, Leopard is a evolutionary, not a revolutionary new OS. I would consider only 10.0 and 10.4 to fall under the latter. In my opinion, though, Leopard is the best evolutionary release ever, and exactly what Apple needs. Tiger added a lot of huge features, but lacked polish and consistency. Leopard pretty much leaves no part of the OS untouched. It seems like most every detail has been rethought. John Gruber gives a good example of this. That means a lot of small features will likely be hard to find, but will make the overall experience of using a Mac considerably better. 
But enough of that, there are plenty of Leopard reviews out there. On to my software.

PhotoBook

Good news! It looks like PhotoBook 1.0.2 runs great on Leopard. I am pretty surprised that in my early testing, I did not find any new problems. I probably just need to tweak some of the colors to better match the new window style, and drop in a 512×512 icon for funness in CoverFlow. Thanks Apple for such a clean upgrade.

There are so many new features I can add to PhotoBook that are made possible in Leopard, so I intend to start requiring 10.5 pretty soon. Think better slideshows, smart folders, animations, iChat Theater sharing, etc. Therefore, I will probably put out just one more major release for Tiger before starting to add some of these new features. 

Google Importer 

Bad news (Sorta)! Google Importer 1.0.1 does not work on Leopard. The way things were set up in Tiger required that it use a pretty ugly hack, so it is no surprise it is broken in Leopard.

Google Importer used an Input Manager to “plug in” to Spotlight, get the search terms, and add the Google results to the list. Apple has decided to stop supporting Input Managers in Leopard, so Google Importer never runs for a search.Input managers were a really easy, powerful tool for developers to extend applications without special plugin support. Applications that add features to iChat and Safari, for example, used input managers. The problem is that someone can just as easily build one to take control of an application, without the user ever knowing what is going on. This poses a big potential security threat, so it is no surprise Apple decided to get rid of them all together. (UPDATE: Oops, I guess they are still loaded in Leopard, but with a bunch of added restrictions. Also, there is a release not saying they are not supported, and might not be loaded in the future)

I am confident that there will be another, better way to get Google Importer to work in Leopard. I am so busy with school and college apps that it is unlikely you will see an update soon, but I will try to get to it eventually. 

So, congrats to all the Apple developers who worked on Leopard. While it does still have some problems, I really encourage everyone to consider upgrading.