10.5 First impressions - post yours

[Captain Code]

BTW, if you have any specific questions, post them here and I'll answer them if I can.

[bbloke]

Thanks, Captain Code. This is quite useful stuff to know.

Originally Posted by Captain Code

It doesn't search within words in a file name. That is if you have "Adobe Photoshop CS3.app" on your hard drive, typing in "shop" won't find it. Typing in "Pho" is enough to find it on my computer.

Hmm, that could be quite annoying. I hope they fix that, as remembering part of a name or word is very useful when struggling to remember what and where a file was...

Actually, I remember strange issues with Address Book, along those lines. I remember searching for partial phone numbers and it not finding phone numbers that I knew existed. I ended up finding them manually, which was tedious. If my memory is correct, I think I even noticed it was more successful searching for the number backwards! Maybe that was a bug that was resolved at some stage.

[Veljo]

Late this afternoon I received my copy of Leopard. Excited, I install it flawlessly onto my MacBook Pro, and I must say that I am very impressed. It feels very polished, very stable, and I can't wait to see what comes up next.

One thing I noticed that others may not have yet is that when an Installer finishes adding items to your computer, rather than just giving you the expected "This installation is complete, click here to close" message you now get a sound alert and a giant green tick icon letting you know it's ready for dismissal.

I'm sure as America and Europe wake up there will be many happy faces, so post your thoughts here.

[fryke]

Originally Posted by Captain Code

It doesn't search within words in a file name. That is if you have "Adobe Photoshop CS3.app" on your hard drive, typing in "shop" won't find it. Typing in "Pho" is enough to find it on my computer.

Same as in Tiger. It's been my biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig concern with Spotlight since its beginning. Quite obviously, someone at Apple is at war with searching within filenames. :/ It makes me sad that I have to use a 3rd party application (EasyFind) to make the whole OS work for me.

[icemanjc]

Well, it came about 10 min ago, now I have to wait till tonight when I get home to install it, then I can rant.

[fryke]

Apple took at least two features away in a last-minute manner:

1.) No iPhone/Mac notes synching,
2.) no backing up to network harddrives.

Both are really *too* bad. I wonder how many people have already bought new AirPort base stations in hopes of backing up wirelessly and automatically with a harddrive connected to it. I personally have a 1 TB drive that I intended to use for more than one Mac's TimeMachine backup, having it connected on one Mac directly and sharing it to the other. Now it looks like that just won't work either. Now what: Will we have to wait for Mac OS X 10.6's list of 450 features and see whether "TimeMachine on networks" is "in"?

[Thank The Cheese]

@fryke
wow, that's strange -- especially the notes synching. Why would they have done this? Surely it can't be that complicated that it had to be pulled so they could work on it.

so I have finally had a chance to install Leopard (3AM sat morning atm). I've only managed to have a 30minute play so far, as most of the time has been backing up, preparing, etc. I am very impressed so far.

A few things I am noting in my early experiences:

- Very snappy. Even things that are usually slow and cumbersome like coverflow are 'smooth as butter' on my MBP.

- They have fixed the issue many were complaining about where the dock mounted on the left or right does not look right. When dock is not on the bottom, the design changes to a flat semi-transparent box rather than the reflective floor.

- Screen sharing! holy cow, that took me by surprise. I knew iChat has a screen sharing feature, but I didn't realise it was system wide. Now when you connect to a shared computer, you can choose to mount it as a drive or share the screen. My jaw dropped at how easy it was -- have been checking on downloads on my iMac (which is running Tiger) from my MBP in the other room -- works great, though a little laggy.

- the new VoiceOver is fantastic. The best voice synthesis I've heard. WOuld be nice if they offered an English accent option, though.

- Boot camp is HUGELY improved. The Windows drivers can be installed from the Leopard disc itself (no need to burn a driver disc). The new drivers are perfect -- you can ajust brightness, volume, keyboard luminosity, etc just like in OSX -- you even get the familar rounded grey box when you adjust volume/brightness.

That's all I've looked at so far. I need to get some rest.

[Captain Code]

I'm not sure about the notes feature but I think it'll be here soon, maybe next Tuesday we'll see 10.5.1. I think some things from the 300 feature list were still too buggy for the release.