Well, let me start off by saying I do like Leopard, despite it screwing up my hard drive on upgrade (I should never have done a pure upgrade given my fairly complex system. Archive and Install is your friend)

At any rate, here are some things I like, and some I don’t.

Things I Like

1. Time Machine - except the fact that I don’t have more say in when the backups should run, especially the very first backup, which is time and CPU intensive. Would have been nice to be able to start it running tonight.
2. Calendar finally allows setting up a default alarm! For someone who uses Calendar a lot, always setting a 15 minute alarm is annoying.
3. All of my applications work (can Vista say that?)
4. I like the new finder UI, including the Quick Look functionality.
5. Mail finally supports RSS Feeds.
6. I think I will like the screen sharing functionality of iChat, but I haven’t tried it out yet. Since I work remotely, this should come in handy.
7. It is finally fairly straightforward to move your users off of the System partition. Why all machines don’t come with at least two partitions is beyond me (and that includes Windows). This has been a best practice in *nix land for a LONG time and it should be the default
8. The new parental controls is a nice feature since I have a son who likes to be on the computer and this gives me more control over his experience.

Things I Don’t Like

1. It is not as good as previous releases of OS X in overall quality, but it is still pretty good. I give it a B+
2. No Java 1.6. Java 1.6 has been released on other machines for a long time, it’s time it is available on the Mac.
3. Spaces doesn’t work all that well in my mind. Sometimes it doesn’t switch to the correct “space” when I select an application via “Command-Tab” and the Preferences only allowed me to setup a few items and their spaces. Perhaps I was missing something, but it wasn’t intuitive to me, and I have used multi-window managers for a number of years on various *nix platforms.
4. XCode wouldn’t install.  Some error about gcc being the wrong version or something like that.

All in all, though, I am happy with Leopard. Had I not just bought a new laptop, I probably would not have upgraded my main machine at this point, however. The fact is, though, building an Operating System is hard and some problems are to be expected.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Apple, Computers, Leopard (10.5). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.