So, I received Leopard on Friday evening and we then headed out camping with the 'Stream. After Carrie and Sadie hunkered down I proceeded to install the new laptop hard drive and Leopard. Installation was uneventful and took about 40 minutes. If you're still reading this far you've already read at least a few reviews about Leopard so I likely won't have anything new to report on but I can tell you what i like and don't like.
Likes
Time Machine--who doesn't like it? It's a great idea with brilliant execution--I've never seen a more elegant backup solution that an end-user can do and understand
Spaces--I've tried several virtual desktop solutions and I like them for a while but seem to forget about them. Spaces, being built-in at the OS level seems better integrated. I like it so far and seems to do a good job of helping me stay on task.
Stacks--it's not revolutionary since you could do a similar thing with the previous iterations of the Mac OS but it's pretty elegant.
General performance--it's not dramatic but there is definitely a noticeable performance boost--Spotlight seems to actually be responsive now. In Tiger (10.4) it was so slow that I seldom depended on it and even though Google Desktop was considered by the Apple fan-boys to be poorly written, it flat out worked
iChat--I'm a heavy IM user and the new iChat is great. The tabbed conversations and the new special effects are super cool.
Dislikes
honestly, there isn't anything I really dislike, I'm generally quite happy with the upgrade
Other
Menu bar and dock--yeah, they're different and I do wish it was a little more obvious in the dock which programs were running but I'm finding that I'm getting used to it and the menu bar being semi-opaque doesn't bother me, it seems a little better actually than it did in one of the developer versions I checked out
All in all, I'm happy with the upgrade, I'm not overwhelmed but from better performance (on my 2 laptops and 1 desktop), Time Machine, and the new iChat, I'm quite pleased.
2 comments:
I forgot to mention, the new Quick View in the finder with the Coverflow effect is amazing, that might actually be my favorite new feature. With it you can easily preview a legible snapshot of a folder's contents.
It's interesting too because in March when I was at the Microsoft Public Sector CIO Summit Steve Ballmer discussed how up to 30% of a knowledge worker's day was spent simply trying to find information, including locating files. Obviously Apple introduced Spotlight a couple of years ago now, Google brought out its Google Desktop product and Microsoft later came out with its own search utility that actually works well. Now we have the Quick View along with a usable Spotlight that even doubles as an application launcher. This combination might actually be my favorite....
Okay, here's a dislike--Disk Utility is a dog! In Tiger it would take a minute, maybe two. Now it seems to take several, even though I have fewer docs, applications, and a faster hard drive.
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