Finally, a new post

And finally, a new OS to write about. But it's Leopard - Mac OS 10.5.

I purchased it a week ago, and after installing it on two systems thus far (a "Santa Rosa" MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM, and a Core 2 Duo iMac with 2GB RAM) I have discovered some things about it. Most of this is pasted from my personal blog, but I've made more discoveries since then.

- Battery life is about the same overall, but the mete is now more accurate. Initially, it's a power hog, because Spotlight needs to fully reindex post-install.

- It had to recreate my .Mac iDisk. Leopard now stores your content in a .sparseimage DMG file, which grows to match what you are actually using. Previously a image file would be created equal to your storage allocation, regardless of how much you were using.

- The new, informative AirPort menu is spiffy. So is the new Network system preference. However, for people like me who connect to multiple VPNs, there is a glitch. The old Internet Connect application used to manage VPN access, but no longer exists. A new process controls it, and Keychain Access doesn't recognize it, so even though your password is saved you still will have to type it in each time until you recreate the connection. No big deal for one - huge pain for 23 of them.

- The translucent menubar and menu is very visually bleh. It really needs more opacity. Definite 3rd party opportunity!

- Quick View is a nice feature. The live icon previews are a little tough to get used to, but handy.

- The new folder icon look is not good. Very industrial, and not as useful as the old ones (the icons are more difficult to discern the "special" symbols on them for system folders). The small renditions of the icons are particularly bad.

- Mail is spiffy. iCal is fast. No server experience yet for another week or so, so I can't tell you if the iCal server's any good. I just got my copy of Server sent over yesterday.

- Bonus feature: My MS Wireless Laser Mouse 800 now works fine - no hoops necessary. The Mac just pairs with it. Before, I had to repeatedly power-cycle the mouse to get it to work, and go through a weird procedure with BT File Transfer to get it to work at all (it's not Mac-compatible in theory without the special MS dongle, but I'm stubborn and I liked it's ergonomics). I turned the mouse on and it saw it, filled in the info properly and just started working.

- No noticed incompatibilities so far. Office 2004 has been fine. Adobe CS3 applications are mostly fine, though there are reputed to be issues in Acrobat Pro. I have not had any problems using Acrobat Pro for viewing and markup.

- Most major system-level utilities have been updated already for Leopard. Both Parallels and VMware have public previews of their Leopard-ready releases out, and unlike with the move from Panther to Tiger, the move from Tiger to Leopard has been pretty close to glitch-free.

So in using it for a week, I find speed overall to be about the same. Applications launch a little faster on Leopard, and most UI eye candy is faster than it was on Tiger. However, there's a lot more eye candy than there was before. The new Stacks feature is nice to a point, but quickly wears out it's welcome. I think I miss the old Dock. Having remote control built-in is terrific, and I've already made good use of the feature by operating my home Mac from the road. It works well. Server browsing is much simpler, with the Bonjour view as part of standard Finder windows now.

As for applications, I am a Firefox user, so I haven't worked much with the new Safari yet. It is impressively standards-compliant. I pretty much won't use anything without an AdBlock Plus equivalent, though. As mentioned above, iCal is now blazing fast. The new editing interface is (to me) not quite as simple. Address Book has some groupware functionality added but otherwise is similar. The Internet Connect and Printer Setup Utility have been removed and their functionality rolled into their corresponding System Preferences panes. Also an improvement. Netinfo support is gone, replaced by a Directory application and improved Directory Utility that simplify network setup. And Time Machine is worth the hype. It makes backup essentially transparent, and automates virtually all decisions impressively. A little clunky to use with my laptop, mind you, but still remarkable.

Without going any farther in depth, if your Mac is on the speedy side I'd mark Leopard as a worthy upgrade. As is typical, this has a few of the minor annoyances of a .0 release, but Apple has a track record of fixing issues quickly. Expect 10.5.1 within the next couple of weeks and then further stabilization to continue.