Macworld has a new feature story called Picking Our Favorite Leopard Features, wherein various staff rate their favorite new stuff in 10.5. Among the selection are the commonly-touted features like iChat screen sharing, Cover Flow in Finder, Spaces and Time Machine, but Rob Griffiths chose something no one else mentioned, and a feature I'm particularly thrilled with: AutoFS.
There hasn't been a lot said about AutoFS, but I consider it to be one of my most-requested features for OS X: Putting network mounting on separate threads. Griffiths defends his decision to include it in his list (at number two no less) and describes it thusly:
Why give up such a high draft pick for this seemingly obscure technology related to networked volumes? Because AutoFS in OS X 10.5 is, quite simply, a revolution. AutoFS is responsible for the mounting and dismounting of network shares, and in Leopard, it will uses separate “threads” for these tasks. What does that mean in English? It means the end of the spinning rainbow of doom you see when you, for instance, click on a network share in the Finder, only to remember that you put the shared computer to sleep earlier.
One of the most irritating issues with OS X is the Finder's inability to deal with network-mounted disks gracefully. I need an abacus to count how many times in the last week alone the Finder has hung for two minutes because my Airdisk became unavailable or Katia's iMac was sleeping when I tried to access it.
Since switching to the Mac in 2002, this has been one of my biggest (and most common) complaints with OS X and I'm absolutely thrilled it has finally been solved. While it's nice to have lots of shiny new GUI features in 10.5, I can't help but be even more excited by the simple core functionality updates like AutoFS.