Leopard vs. Vista
October 28, 2008 at 01:10:55 AM, by Daniel Shain
Both operating systems make significant leaps over their predecessors...this article will try and tell you about some of the more interesting features and how they stack up.
Leopard VS Vista – The War Rages On
Today we address the question that seems to have no answer – unless you ask someone. When discussing Windows’ Vista versus Apple’s Leopard, everyone seems to have an opinion. But if you’re one of the millions who have not yet upgraded (over six times as many users use XP than Vista [http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp], and according to Steve Jobs at the beginning of this year [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.5 ] only 20% of macs ran Leopard), it might be time to make a choice. Both operating systems make significant leaps over their predecessors, and each has unique features that make the OS more useful for certain audiences. This article will try and tell you about some of the more interesting features and how they stack up, but it’s up to you to decide which OS is right for you.
Look and Feel
What’s the first thing you see when you turn on a computer loaded with either Vista or Leopard? Shiny, 3D graphics. Apple’s Aqua has long had an advantage over the windows XP UI Luna, but Aero does a good job to make up the ground. Complete with glassy transparencies and animations, it’s clear the folks at Microsoft are starting to take aesthetics seriously. This is no knock against the water themed Aqua, which Apple spiced up with a more 3D looking dock and prettier icons (Leopard’s icons are viewable in a high resolution 512x512 size, surpassing Vista’s upgrade to 256x256). The most important thing to say here is that both are beautiful operating systems. Vista’s Aero represents a bigger upgrade over its predecessor only because it had to in order to compete with the already gorgeous Aqua. Aqua and Aero both provide a few more specific features which I’ll discuss a little later, but for now this category is a wash (although Microsoft does lose a few points for not including Aero in its Vista Home Basic edition).
Window Management
For a multitasker like myself, this is perhaps the most important category of any OS. I’m not even doing anything special at the moment and I can tell you that I have a chat client open with three windows, several Word documents, several notepad documents (call me old fashioned, I still use those to jot notes-to-self), several folders, a music player, a web browser and the task manager all running at the same time right now. Your needs might be simpler (or maybe you’re even worse than I am), but the important question here is: when dealing with multiple open windows, how do these two operating systems stack up?
Leopard’s answer is in the question itself. Leopard’s newest management feature and its most unique, the Stacks feature allows the user to group folders or files together on the dock in a single stack. Click on the stack icon and its contents fan out in a slight arc, or else in a grid if there are ten or more items in it. As of 10.5.2 Stacks also has the ability to let the contents of a folder in the stack display in a pop-out side menu. Vista has no real equivalent to this interesting feature.
Another convenient feature that comes standard in Leopard is Spaces. Spaces allow the user to create virtual desktops so that one may have, for example, one desktop for work related applications and another for your recreational ones. You can switch between spaces with hot keys or you can use Expose, another Mac feature which has been expanded in Leopard. When you move your mouse to the corner or press a key, you’ll not only see thumbs of all your open applications but of all your spaces as well. You can drag and drop applications between spaces this way, and Leopard allows you to organize your Expose window into rows and columns as you please. It’s hard to capture all of this in a picture, so see an example of using expose and spaces together here [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1254656550190215821]. In comparison, Vista’s Flip and Flip3D seem rather weak. Flip is a revamped version of the old alt-tab function, which now includes a thumbnail preview of the apps you can flip between rather than just their icons. Flip 3D is a cool looking feature which takes all the running apps and organizes them in a 3D diagonal row on the screen which you can scroll between with the mouse wheel, but it’s better looking than it is useful. As far as virtual desktops go, there’s nothing by default, although third party software to set that sort of thing up is out there.
While Flip 3D looks nice, it’s clear that Apple has far more (and better) features in this category.
Searching
Computers have become so big that an efficient search tool is essential for finding files on even the most organized machine. If you couldn’t tell from my multitasking description, sometimes I try to do a few too many things at the same time and lose track of a file, making effective search software a must for me. Fortunately both Vista and Leopard have excellent search engines, and even if you know where everything is, it’s often faster to use search than to pore through a folder hierarchy.
Leopard’s Spotlight and Vista’s Instant Search both require initial indexing of your drive, after which they are both lightning fast. Both can search the content of some files (with the proper handlers) in addition to their names. Both are also “word-wheeling” and begin to show search results as soon as you type the first letter. Both even have search boxes integrated into just about every window for easy searching. So what’s the difference? Vista’s Instant Search is contextualized, which means it optimizes the search results according to your current activity. It was a nice touch that Apple added more Boolean functionality to Spotlight by recognizing AND, OR and NOT (this was also available in earlier versions of Spotlight but it was much harder), but I’ll take Vista’s more intelligent searching over Boolean operators any day. Still, both of these search tools should be considered very effective.
File Previews
Have you ever forgotten the contents of an individual file, but dreaded the thirty seconds of boot time it would take to load the software necessary to view it? Vista and Leopard both come with time saving features which allow you to preview files without actually opening them.
Remember how cool it looked when iTunes first unveiled Cover Flow, allowing you to flip through your CDs visually in a manner resembling a jukebox? Cover Flow has now been integrated into the Finder itself, so you can scroll through thumbnails of every file like that. It’s a nice feature, but perhaps a little heavy on the resources, and not quite as descriptive as one might hope (all folders look the same, for example, regardless of content). That’s ok though, because Leopard also comes with Quick Look. All you have to do is highlight an icon and press the Quick Look button (or the space bar) and you get a full sized, multipage preview of anything from PDF files to Quicktime files.
Vista also comes packed with two different ways of previewing files. You can now set folders to display in Large (or even Extra Large) icon mode. This mode displays icons that are large previews of files, and even gives a clue as to what’s inside a folder by displaying a series of stacked previews of the items inside. When that’s not enough detail, Explorer comes with what is called the Windows Preview Pane, which allows the user to preview Office files, photos and more without actually opening them.
Cover Flow looks a little cooler, but being able to see inside folders without opening them is also nice. Quick Look and Windows Preview Pane are both useful and probably too close to call.
Widgets vs Gadgets
Apple’s widgets (and Microsoft’s answer to widgets, called gadgets) are small programs that perform a simple task quickly and efficiently. Common examples include a widget to display the weather, or a calendar, or a clock.
With Leopard, Apple improves what was already excellent widget software with the new Dashboard. Pressing a button or going to a screen corner calls up the display of all your favorite widgets. The newest and perhaps the nicest thing about the new Dashboard is the ability to create Web Clippings. Just click the little scissors icon in the new Safari toolbar and then highlight the section of the website that you want to turn into a self-updating widget. Just like that, it’s on your Dashboard and updates automatically. Vista’s new Sidebar allows the user to access their gadgets, which operate similarly to widgets. There are a number of preinstalled widgets/gadgets for each OS, and a number of additional ones available for download.
Although you can use IE7 to create RSS feeds that will display in a gadget or on the sidebar, Web Clippings is such an easy to use feature that Leopard gets the points in this category.
Multimedia
Apple’s iLife 08 suite has long been touted as one of the better multimedia suites currently out there. But if we’re talking strictly Leopard, we shouldn’t count that, since it’s been out for a while and is available to Tiger users too. So on a strictly Leopard vs Vista scale, which OS wins?
Front Row is Apple’s answer to Windows Media Center, and it’s a good one. It makes it easy to look at your photos, listen to your music, or watch DVDs. With the advent of AppleTV Take Two you can now buy music/video straight from the iTunes store directly from Front Row, and you can also browse online photos from Flickr or MobileMe as well as listen to streaming audio from AirTunes. Photo Booth also comes back with even more features which you can use with the integrated iSight camera, such as dropping a photo/video into the background of a frame and Burst, which takes four rapid fire pictures which can be viewed individually or grouped for an animation Vista’s Windows Media Center has many of the same features. In addition to being able to handle photos, music and videos, it can also record TV and is optimized for widescreen HD. Windows Photo Gallery allows you to organize pictures with custom metadata tags and create slideshows in addition to providing simple editing tools like red eye removal and cropping. Windows Movie Maker allows you to drag and drop video clips into a digital reel, but is more or less similar to the XP version with a few extra effects.
These are both extremely functional multimedia packages. It’s important to stress that we’re not reviewing iLife 08 here, but without it, Media Center probably has a slight edge over Front Row. It’s only fair to note that not all of the features above are available for Vista Home Basic users, however.
Backup and Recovery of Data
With more and more important information being stored only electronically, being able to quickly and easily back up your hard disk is extremely important.
Leopard comes packaged with some wonderful software called Time Machine. Just plug in an external drive, and you will be asked if you want to use it with Time Machine. Say yes, and Leopard automatically begins making immediate backups of every file on your hard drive. It updates in real time, updating individual files on the fly as they change so that you never lose a moment’s work. Like most Mac products it comes with a slick 3D interface, and it can also be encrypted for security and managed to make the most of your external hard drive’s free space. Vista’s Backup and Restore is a little more… shall we say, average? There’s no real time updating and no fancy interface. You can schedule backups to take place daily, weekly or monthly. Vista’s Shadow Copies features is a nice touch if you discover it, as it preserves ‘shadow copies’ of files you changed and allows you to roll back your deletes and edits with a simple right click. However, if you use Vista Home edition (including Home Premium), you are never going to discover it, because it doesn’t exist for you. It’s not quite a backup feature since it’s not stored on a separate drive, but it’s worth mentioning.
Time Machine is both slick and effective. Even if you can use Shadow Copies on your version of Vista, Leopard has a clear edge in this category.
Gaming
Windows has long had the edge on OS X here, with better graphics and more games. Along with Leopard a slew of new games for Mac have arrived, including a number of brand new games from EA. The ability to run 32bit and 64bit applications side by side matches up well with Vista too. However, Vista’s DirectX10 creates stunning graphics the likes of which a Mac just can’t produce, and the integration with Xbox Live Anywhere makes networked play much simpler. Although Leopard has made up some ground here, if you are really a serious gamer, Vista still ought to be your choice.
Conclusion
While I was scanning the internet for news and opinions on the subject at length here discussed, I stumbled upon an analogy I liked. It compares Macs to Windows to Linux, and I’ve included the Mac/Windows sections here:
“Using a Mac is like living in a downtown penthouse. You have everything done for you and it all looks very slick, but you pay a high price. You have a doorman to pamper you and somebody else takes care of the maintenance, but you can't make a lot of changes to the property.
Using Windows is like living in the suburbs. You get more square footage for your dollar but you have to mow your own lawn and when something goes wrong, you have to fix it yourself or pay someone extra to do it. You can make changes to your property but you might have to deal with deed restrictions or city ordinances or homeowner association rules.”
http://www.vistanews.com/?id=32
Needless to say Linux was like living out in the boonies in this analogy, but my point is, I think this guy is right on. A few odd features aside (although I must admit Leopard has a few more of these than Vista), choosing the right OS is largely about choosing what kind of computer lifestyle is most suited to you. What an unbiased Vista vs Leopard discussion shows more than anything else is just how similar these two operating systems have become. In many ways they are almost the same, and in the categories where they used to be furthest apart each has made up a lot of ground on the other. Of course there are still many differences, and hopefully this article has helped you discover some that you might not otherwise have noticed. Personally I love the idea of Spaces to help me stay organized, but I’ve also seen what DirectX10 can do when I play games. The right choice for you is going to depend on your needs. Seem like too hard of a choice? If you can deal with your current OS for another year, help may be on the way with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, due out in approximately one year’s time.
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Comments
noname at 07:59, May 08, 2009
Okay this artical does give a few key pointers that make leopard and vista both different. vista is sometimes a pain so i perfer xp better but i dont have a leopard so i cant jugde that for now. but from what i here leopard hase less problems but not that great gamming. if only mac had better and more games like windows. then it would be perfect
Andrew at 09:26, November 04, 2008
Leopard for life.
goatfacekillah at 15:50, November 04, 2008
Awesome article.. I vote for Leopard