Your impressions on Leopard Several Months Later

I remember threads like this one popping out everywhere when Leopard was just released. I thought it's been several months now, and time for a reevaluation.

So, if you've been using Leopard for more than a month, what are your thoughts and impressions?

I guess it would help if the pros and cons were structured in some fashion, just so it becomes an easier read. e.g. dedicate a paragraph to the interface, a paragraph to bugs, etc.

I'll just throw in one thing that bugs me: when i do a quick search in Finder and the results come in, it's always arranged by "last opened," which sometimes means I have to either scroll down and find the application i want (i usually search for applications), or I have to arrange by type and applications come on top. I want it to be arranged by application every time i do a search, but leopard can't remember my preference.

Now, ignore my nagging and let's have some serious conversation...

 

After using Leopard since November, my opinion is this:

Just like Linux, only less programs, less options and not as geeky.

 

I still have yet to use Mac OS X Leopard seriously .

 

It's not bad. It's hard to say it's worth the upgrade since most of the updates were under the hood. The Stacks and transparent menu bard are pretty slick though. It's a tad bit faster.

The entire Quartz developer thing is BADASS! I played with it and found it to be a lot of fun, and I don't remember that stuff being in Tiger (at least to this extent).

But it really is hard for me to say it's worth $120 upgrade.

 

Ok, I'll go first (I type slow so I'm no longer first but here goes)...

So far, I like everything in Leopard better. I like the way screen sharing allows me to keep track of what the kids are doing. I like back to my mac, when it works. A sleeping machine doesn't work Dropping stuffit and integrating the app into the OS without including a preferences page was not a good thing.

Archive (zip) Handling
I went and found a workaround to let me change the way archives are handled and I have enabled the undocumented preferences page for handling archives. Also it's a minor annoyance that by default an "extra" folder is created for OSX specific **** data. This confuses my PeeCee friends

Time Machine
I have a love/hate relationship with time machine. It seems to be always churning. It doesn't "like" normal network drives. I downloaded a couple of different hacks to make time machine use network drives but decided not to use them. This is my data after all and I want to only use procedures Apple is willing to stand behind. For this reason, I purchased a 500 gig time capsule and a 500 gig Mybook (to use as a network drive). For now, the Mybook is being used for timemachine on my macbook as a local drive, but once I install the time capsule, I will switch the usb drive to handle data like music, photos and files manually backed up.

IE is gone
Hooray! On my older pre-Leopard Mini, I had to drag IE to the trash bin. On Leopard I don't have to.(and for all I know this may have been true already on Tiger)

MS Office (trial) is still around
I still have to drag some M$ chaff to the trash bin. Double clicking an office file causes a dialog to come up asking whether I want a "trial" of Office. No thanks. This is bloat, pure and simple. Generally, nothing should be in the OS load that wasn't paid for at time of purchase. I grabbed neooffice and installed it and dragged M$ office to the trash.

iWork (trial) is still around
An exception can be made for iWork. I purchased the iWork family pack and it was nice to be able to avoid taking a cd around to install it. I could install it from my machine using screen sharing simply by typing in my registration code to activate the copy that shipped with Leopard. I guess this would be nice for M$ Office but it's not nice to have associations to things which I don't already own. I guess if I received a .pages file and double-clicked it, I would have been faced with a "trial" for iWork, but getting a .doc file is a much more frequent thing.

What remains to be done:
1 - remote graphical applications similar to Linux. export display, start an app via ssh and have it's pixels show up on a remote machine. no, not vnc or screen sharing, just a process running on machine a whose pixels are rendered to machine b. this way i can do admin remotely (like on Linux) without dealing with inadequate hooey like "curtain mode". what admin in their right mind wants to lock a user out of his own machine to tweak a few settings? come on already.
2 - parental controls needs additional work. these have improved greatly but still leave room for improvement. i want to be able to blacklist sites without being forced to come up with an exhaustive whitelist. i have had parental controls quit unexpectedly and i've even had a kernel panic connected with parental controls. this still needs work.
3 - force quit needs to be a default sudo. i have had an app hang that i could not kill as me and i'm the admin. when i kill something from the apple or from the terminal, it should simply die. kill -9 should be kill -9.
4 - turn on php by default. it was nice to be able to get it up and running by simply deleting a leading # sign in httpd.conf, but wait a minute. isn't the ability to avoid editing httpd.conf the reason i bought a mac in the first place?
5 - turn on php at .mac. i'm paying handsomely for that web space and actually paying more for it than for some services that would include php, forum software, blog software, etc etc etc.
6 - dump the iweb blog feature and integrate with blogspot or wordpress. nobody wants to edit blog pages one by one. come on already. it looks like a blog and even quacks like a blog but it admins and edits like old time html.
7 - make iphoto gallery flash widgets available without forcing upload to .mac. those mouseover widgets are sweet. why can't i just as easily use them with my free flickr account? i've got no objection whatsoever to leaving the made on a mac graphic on all my pages, just don't chain me to a mere 10 gig of $10 a month space when i can get virtually unlimited $3 a month space.

 

Hrm? What was the last version of OS X you used? My tiger install did not have IE included.

 

I had to go dig up my pre-leopard screen shot to figure this out, but I went from 10.3.9 to Leopard.

 

My impression about leopard is very good, sometime some program does not always work out, but most of them are fine. I usually do not use time machine, I just drag everything that I want to back up into my external hard drive and in less than 1 minute, everything is done.
Really, there is no complain about leopard, maybe the reason about that is that I do not play game on my mac and I am using it just for my academic thing.

 

I enjoy Time Machine (just because I'm horrible at backing up otherwise), but besides that, there isn't a whole lot in Leopard that I really notice much. Works just fine though, no complaints. Since I got the upgrade for only $25, it was worth it to me.

 

Ive been 100% happy with it (been using it since january) except for one thing. Bakc when I went to upgrade to 10.5.2, my entire system crashed and I had to re-install everything. Luckily, I had the Time Machine backup and restored off that. So the OS kina saved itself there.

 

Sorry to hear about your crash. I said this somewhere before but when I went from 10.3.9 to Leopard, I clicked on a dialog to allow a reboot and came back an hour or so later and the screen looked just like it did when I left. From my M$ experiences, I assumed the process had failed and I needed to start it over. No. It had finished normally and the system came right back to the screen I was looking at before I started the upgrade. Nice.

 

Hello all,

I have mixed feelings about Leopard. For the most part I like it, but every day, I consider going back to Tiger.

Likes:

QuickLook - I find I use this feature quite a bit, mostly to preview audio loops (for audio production activities) and zip files (thanks to a zip file QuickLook viewer I happened upon. The inability of OS X to browse zip files is one of my biggest gripes since switching from PC).

Spaces - Though a little quirky at times, this feature is very helpful when using my MacBook's small screen.

Ruby on Rails support out of the box - Glad to know it's there when I am ready to start learning this environment.

Dislikes:

Stacks - I hated this feature initially since Apple took away folder navigation in the context menu. Since Apple took the hint and put some form of this functionality back, I still dislike it, but I am slowly coming around.

3D-Dock - This was interesting for about a day. It wasn't long before I was looking for a replacement. Luckily, I found out how to go back to a 2D dock.

Intangibles - i.e. whatever internal changes that has degraded the performance of Logic Studio under Leopard. This is the one item that often has me considering the move back to Tiger.

Finder Option Management - This is a somewhat minor nit, but I find the management of Finder defaults a bit easier to work with in Tiger than in Leopard.

Other:

I rarely use any of the other new features/changed features, so my feelings are fairly neutral in regards to them.


cycloptic

 

I like it overall. The m$ office trial software is on there. I like the menu bar. Keeps things nice and simple on the desktop. The download stack that i have is also great. The only thing now is sometime i have no sound coming from the speakers. But that is resolved with a restart.