Here are my experiences with Leopard (I just installed it yesterday).
Overall, my opinion of it is very high. However, there are some things that I do not like about it at all, and things that irked me during installation and set up. I'll write this article in a "pros" and "cons" format, starting with the "cons."
The Cons:
Installation Process: The general installation process is as you'd expect - nothing really new here. However, I actually had to manually mount my hard drives in the first step of installation via the Terminal (for those that don't know and might need to know, the command for your primary hard drive is "diskutil list disk0," followed by "diskutil mount disk0."). After that, I had to open up Disk Utility and wait for Disk Utility to recognize Macintosh HD. After that, I was able to select my drive, and everything went smoothly. I chose to erase the drive and install fresh because I had a lot of input managers that would break, and I didn't want to deal with cleaning them all out. Ultimately, the installer should have simply recognized the hard drives right off the bat; a quick search in the Apple discussion board reveals that this is in fact a common problem. I couldn't imagine myself trying to explain to my mother, for instance, how to mount a hard drive through the Terminal in order to install Leopard. That's pretty unacceptable.
Stacks:
Stacks are a great concept, but they need some work. I'm sure you've all heard the complains, so I'll keep it brief. They just need to allow you to choose whatever permanent icon you want for each stack, and allow it to browse through sub-folders. After that, stacks would be awesome.
Transparent Menu Bar & 3D Dock:
The menu bar
really needs an on/off switch for the transparency. I mean, really; on 90% of my wallpapers, the transparency looks hideous. I got the menu bar to a nice gray to match the overall GUI by resizing all of my wallpapers to 1280x778 (to batch resize at specific dimensions, I used
this app - hold down the Return key to get past the nags) and then running them through
this workflow (alt host
here). My native resolution is 1280x800; I put 778 because the menu bar is 22px high; the workflow adds a 22px high black or white border to the top of the image, making it 1280x800, and matching that border up nicely with the menu bar, making it a solid gray or white. I was able to do this for all of my wallpapers (approx. 550 of them) in roughly 20 minutes.
As for the Dock, there are solutions out there. Just do a quick Google search and I promise you that you'll find dozens of solutions to make it 2D, and even a few solutions to change the appearance of the 3D Dock; I made my Dock 3D, but with a black shiny surface. It looks really nice.
My Dock solution:
Picture |
Download & Instructions
Misc.:
The only thing left really is that the Finder treats my Windows partition in a strange manner. It categorizes it with CDs/DVDs/iPods, so unless I set Finder not to show these devices, it always shows my Windows partition on the desktop, and I have to eject it to get rid of it. That's pretty strange, as it should recognize it as a hard drive.
The Pros:
Safari:
Safari 3 flat-out rules, even if it's incompatible with a lot of input managers. It's blazing fast, zips through even Digg's comments pages (which are notoriously slow on all browsers), and has far better reliability & general site compatibility so far than Safari 2. And the new features are excellent, like prompting you when quitting with multiple windows/tabs/downloads open, or restoring the last session in the event of a crash, and reordering tabs.
Mail:
Finally I have RSS support in Mail. I also like the notes/to do features; I just wish it didn't break my HTTPmail plugin.
Spaces & Time Machine:
Spaces & Time Machine I feel are what really makes Leopard better than Tiger. I have no complaints about either one, and I can confidently say that I am not sad to see Carbon Copy Cloner & Virtue Desktops go in lieu of these apps.
QuickLook & CoverFlow:
File browsing has never been so fast or pretty. I'm really happy with these features.
So there you have it: my impressions of Leopard. Overall, I would say that it's definitely worth upgrading to, despite its quirks. Remember that there are workarounds for just about everything.
