Leopard Experience 4--Our General Experience So Far
1. The GUI is the first thing that meets the eye. Some don't like it, or parts of it, but we do. Overall, we like the fact that it is more unified than Tiger and that it shows off the graphics capabilities of Macs.
The shading contrast between the active window and the inactive windows is very helpful. One can pick out the active window quite easily in Leopard.
We think the dock is the coolest ever and, since we keep the dock on the right side, we're very disappointed that Apple yielded at the last minute to the gripers among developers. Apple changed the dock when on the sides to a shaded strip reminiscent of Windows Vista when the graphics card is not up to snuff--that sucks. We hope that someone will post a way to get the real Leopard dock back on the sides.
We also like the transparent menu bar but that is a very minor change. The transparent dropdown menus are back. Remember they (and other transparencies) were in the original release of Mac OS X 10.0 as part of the aqua theme. Apple killed them in 10.1 or 10.2 to increase the slow performance of Mac OS X that everyone complained about.
Finally, we like the iTunes design theme for the Finder and Mail. It's efficient and attractive.
2. Our favorite upgrade is Apple Mail. We haven't used its new stationery, notes and to-do features yet and may not ever but the speed increase in opening mailboxes and messages is terrific. Tiger Mail always bogged down to a crawl, requiring re-launching and rebuilding of mailboxes frequently to maintain a reasonable usage speed. Of course, we have numerous email accounts and mailboxes and get hundreds of messages a day, much more than an average user. Leopard Mail is quick and efficient and saving us a lot of time. Also, it does not choke on non-standard security certificates the way that Tiger Mail did, forcing us to use Thunderbird for one account's LDAP directory. We now just use Leopard Mail.
3. Our favorite new feature is Time Machine. Previously, we used the simple Apple Backup application, free for .Mac members. Time Machine is very simple, works automatically in the background and is really cool to use. We don't often need to recover a file but Time Machine will make it a pleasure when we do.
Time Machine is not without its issues. For example, unless the drive that Time Machine backs up to is excluded from Spotlight, it gets re-indexed very frequently, slowing down your Mac significantly. Another is that Time Machine backs up all volumes/drives attached to and open on your Mac and Parallels' virtual machines unless they are excluded. We had to make all of these exclusions to keep Time Machine from filling our 570GB external dual drive with just a days worth of data.
4. On the down side, stability is still somewhat of an issue with Leopard. Despite the apparent high software compatibility that we noted yesterday, we've had more application quits and kernel panics in the past three days with Leopard than we've had in the past year with Tiger. It doesn't happen incessantly and they haven't caused us any real problems, they are just annoying and it's time consuming to save more frequently and to have to reboot and re-launch occasionally. If this is a significant problem for you, we'd suggest you wait until your principal applications have been updated explicitly for Leopard and Apple releases 10.5.1.
Our other Leopard Experience articles:
1. Time Machine needs 2X Disk Space? Nope [Updated]
2. Older Mac Installations, 450MHz and 1.4GHz PowerMac G4 Cube
3. Amazing Software Compatibility, Only a Few Snags [Updated]
[Bill Fox]
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