Apple’s new OS, Leopard, is here and I’ve finally gotten around to installing it on my MacBook. There’s some things I like, and some things I hate. I was originally going to write a detailed review, but there’s plenty of insanely detailed reviews on the IntarWebs. So, this will just be a quick list of how I feel about each feature.
Terminal – Terminal now supports tabs, anti-aliased text, and a bunch of different color schemes. Yea!
Finder – Some people may love the new changes, or hate the new changes. I like them; ESPECIALLY how easy it is to access networked drives and computers. You don’t have to worry about mounting the drive anymore; you just browse to it, enter the proper password, and you can navigate the drive’s contents in Finder.
Spaces – This is an elegant implementation of virtual desktops.
Safari 3 – Nothing revolutionary here, but it now has spell checking and the new “show webpage in widget” function which is pretty cool.
Stacks – Stacks is a mixed bag. The actual functionality of Stacks is pretty cool. I like the fan and grid view of each stack. (I actually prefer the grid view as it looks like a widget.) What I HATE is the icon stacking in the Dock. Basically, the icon for whatever you dragged into the Stack area of the Dock is a “stack” of all the icons in the folder. So for example, if you dragged the Application folder to the Stacks area of the Dock, the icon you see on top is the icon for the Address Book. (If you’re sorting the Application folder by name anyway.) They really should have added a Dock option to turn that off. In order to get around it, I created a folder called “0” (zero) in my Applications folder, and gave it the same icon as the Applications folder. So now in my Dock there’s a Stack with the Applications icon on top.
Time Machine – I haven’t bought a new external drive for Time Machine yet, so I haven’t used it. Everyone says it’s cool though. 😉
OS X 10.5 Performance – Even with all the flash, 10.5 runs just as fast as 10.4 if not faster due to Spotlight using filesystem metadata more efficiently, and more importantly – kernel tweaks.
General Gripes – I don’t really dig the new Dock look, or the menu bar look. For some reason they made the menu bar transparent which I think is pointless, and the reflections in the Dock background is just a waste of computer resources. What’s interesting is that when the Dock is set to be on the left or right of the desktop, it’s appearance is totally different. It looks more like the old Dock. If you type the following command in Terminal, you can make the Dock look that way set to the bottom of the screen as well :
“defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES”
“killall Dock” (this will restart the Dock with the new settings.)
Well, that’s it. Mac OS X 10.5. Mostly good, some bad.