Some quick thoughts on the new Leopard release, others such as John Siracusa and John Gruber have done such a comprehensive jobs, that these are merely personal observations after 12 hours of use.
The checking DVD consistency from the intstaller seems a bit odd, but I guess there must have been too many problems with scratched DVDs in the past for this to be a necessary step, luckily you can skip it.
I lost all my setup printers and the machine name changed to Macintosh.local as opposed to arctinic, which it retained as a computer name, all a bit odd. I thought Macintosh was deprecated within Apple.
The invisible fsck before letting you install is frustrating, it looks as if the install will not proceed, as there is no indication for you to wait whilst the file system check completes. A simple please wait would be enough.
The menus are weird, loosing the corners and gaining curves on the bottoms of menus after 20 years seems strange. The translucency of the menu bar is an odd decision as many have commented. The dock on the side and hidden is bearable.
Mail is really quick now, as is Spotlight, I'll still update quicksilver, but it will be good to have a quick access to system wide search. Performance is something Apple really do well, that is making things seem fast, I have a story in my head that the Apple development approach is to not let new features slow done the existing system, so if you add something that slows the system down, you need to compensate, sadly I can't find the reference anymore.
It is the dozens of minor changes that make this a nice release like the Bluetooth menu allowing you to change things about the connected gadgets. The redone Sharing control panel which makes more sense. CoverFlow and QuickLook, how have we lived without these tools, they are fab, finding something is so much more easy.
Time Machine looks fabulous, particularly when combined with a remote offsite backup solution like Strongspace and a bootable recovery tool like SuperDuper! Then all the bases are covered theft/fire immediate recovery and careless deletion. Whether I manage to do all of these it a moot point.
I'm looking forward to having fun with the sharing facilities of iChat, but outside our company firewall, as only Adium seems to be able to get through it. Spaces seems excellent if slightly inconsistent, picking up focus seems to not be obvious, particularly when moving to the window with Firefox, but maybe Safari is worth looking at again for general web browsing leaving Firefox for hacking.
On the whole I'm happy with my eighty-five quids worth, the wireless keyboard is better value and more shiny though...
Leave a comment