10.5 First impressions - post yours

Giaguara

Giaguara

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Time for it now that it'll go public ...
Your first thoughts and impressions using it - post your.

1. iTunesque look all over ...
So how do I get rid of the blue left pane and the stripes in Finder and everywhere else? Shouldn't "Graphite" appearance do this logically?
I guess time to wait for Uno to update to fix this...
(I don't like that light blue)

2. How do I get the dock usable?
3D of which the +1D adds no data, and the black triangles replaced with dots aren't clear when using the dock in small scale.
Of course, could always get the dock back to 2D
Code: 
$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock
but that will still leave the white dots there.
Using it on the left pane works a bit better...
I guess the 10.5 dock looks better, when you have a 30" cinema display, and want to closely observe the dock. But I want it small, without magnifying effects, with any background, and to not pay too much attention to the tiny dots or the lack of them.
Perhaps would be time to get a setting for Universal Access to make an easy to see dock...
 
Do people who pre-ordered Leopard have it yet? I have the developer build but I'm not sure I can really say much yet even though it's only about 1 day away until the official "launch".
 
I'm not talking to anyone about Leopard. My macbook had to go into the Apple store today for a little warranty work doing - I was back home and it was too late to ask for it back when I realised why the date was so familiar...

:mad:
 
Captain Code said:
Do people who pre-ordered Leopard have it yet? I have the developer build but I'm not sure I can really say much yet even though it's only about 1 day away until the official "launch".
Click to expand...

I saw on macosxhints.com they reported the NDA limits had been lifted or something... ahh here it is. Can anyone confirm?

Not that we have to wait much longer anyway, so a bit of a moot point I guess.
 
Non-disclosure agreement: in a nutshell, developers get advanced releases of Leopard, but they sign a contract that prohibits them from disclosing features of the release.
 
All kinds of people have already received their copies in the mail, and many sites are already talking about it, so I'm sure you're in the clear!
 
Ok, well now it's Friday, it's gotta be ok for sure ;) First a mini rant.
Time Machine doesn't work with network drives over AFP. It worked as far back as WWDC07 preview build, but they pulled it. It worked, but had many bugs back then.

The way it was supposed to work over a network is that Time Machine creates a sparse disk image on the network drive. Then that disk image acts as the backup drive. However, in the beta builds, it kept getting corrupted and Time Machine wouldn't work for a few days. Then it would seem to reset the image and start working again.

I'm sure they pulled the network backup because of this, but I hope it comes back soon with 10.5.1 or 10.5.2

There's still a few problems with hanging network shares. If I forget to unmount a network share when I leave the house, when I get to where ever I'm going and open the computer, the login window takes a long time to show up. The time out is not as bad as it was with Tiger, ie. it doesn't take as long for the computer to recognize that network shares aren't there anymore. Indeed, the Finder is a lot better with this but the login widow is a little buggy still.

Specifically, yesterday I forgot to unmount 2 shares and when I tried to login, I got the spinning beach ball of death and had to do a hard shutdown by holding the power button on my MBP.

Pros:
Installing was fast. I did an archive and install from 9a559(couldn't do any upgrade, but I didn't want to). All my applications were copied over from the previous system folder to the new /Applications automatically by the installer. It also copied over /Library/Application Support so pretty much every application worked without reinstalling. I haven't come across anything that needs reinstalling yet, unlike in the previous builds of Leopard.

Mail.app is much faster. It seems each account's network access is in a separate thread. I'm not sure if this was the case with Tiger but in any case, Mail is more multithreaded than before. The windows and menus seem to be in separate threads because back at the WWDC 07 build there were some issues with not loading parts of the windows but other parts would still function.

Applications seem less buggy to me than with Tiger. I can't recall Safari ever crashing.

Spotlight is blazingly fast. No more waiting around for it to find your search results. Works great as a program launcher. Works as a rudimentary 4 function calculator. No square root or anything that I've found, but +,-,*,/ work. It has more powerful searches which I've not used yet.
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.

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

Captain Code said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
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.

 
Captain Code said:
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.
Click to expand...

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. :(
 
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.
 
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"?
 
@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.
 
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.
 
Wow. Got it in just before noon today. Fired it up and installed it, took about 40 minutes or so, doing the Archive and install option. But, by the time I actually got the thing booted up and logged in, it was probably closer to 55-60 minutes.

It is whopping fast. Love it. Still installing things like XCode right now and trying to play around with a few of the various features and it is a speed demon. More info as it I use it more.
 
Thank The Cheese said:
- 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.
Click to expand...

1.4 Boot Camp Beta already have that feature. but it was less reponsive than in OSX. hopefully it more reponsive in Leopard.

I wonder do they fix when you make the brightness all the way to zero, the backlit went off like in OSX?
 
I wonder how any of us have a PowerPC and Leopard.

Leopard is working great on PowerPC or something? i see great news about Intel Macs, but what about PowerPC
 
I have a PPC G5 tower but I have to make sure nothing(software) will break because it's my dad's computer that he uses for work.
 
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