Leopard Experience 5--Two Weeks with Mac OS X 10.5
All of our installations, including the hacks, went fine as we previously reported. Our installation success rate may have been aided by our penchant for not using software that modifies or adds extensions/frameworks to the system folder.
Leopard has been running very well but not perfectly on all of the Macs, mostly due to applications that need to be updated for Leopard.
It turns out that Leopard runs too slowly in some functions on the stock 450GHz Cube. The major speed issue on the stock Cube is that re-sizing windows has a large lag. We are not sure if this is due to the relatively slow 450GHz G4 CPU or the stock graphics card, an ATI Radeon 128 Pro with only 16MB of video RAM. Tiger runs fine on the stock Cube and we recommend sticking with Tiger unless the Cube is upgraded with a faster CPU and better graphics card.
The upgraded 1.4GHz Cube and 1.4GHz 12" PowerBook G4 both run Leopard well speedwise and, of course, so do the 1.66GHz Mac mini Core Duo, 2.4GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo and 2.8GHz iMac Core 2 Duo.
The Really Good
We remain very happy with Apple's redesign of the Mac OS X interface in Leopard with only two exceptions noted below. We like the more unified design, the new dock when in its bottom position, the increased contrast of the active window along with its larger shadows. We also like the return of transparency in Mac OS X in the menubar and its menus.
Leopard's Apple Mail remains at the top of our list for the most improved Apple application included with Leopard. Its speed improvement in handling mailboxes and large numbers of emails is huge, saving us a significant amount of time. Mail is not without bugs--occasionally, mail we have replied to does not get marked as such with the curved arrow.
The noticeable improvement in the Finder's speed is welcome. We remain neutral on the Finder's new Cover Flow view, still preferring Column view at the moment. But then it took us awhile to move from Icon and List views to Column view in the first edition of Mac OS X. Somehow, we don't think that's going to happen with Cover Flow view although we enjoy Cover Flow view in iTunes.
Leopard has some good under the hood improvements in local networking. It is more automatic, faster and much more reliable on a Windows network. We haven't used them a lot, only to test them, but Screen Sharing and Back to my Mac are very nice additions.
Time Machine works great and really wows everyone we show it to. Some have knocked Time Machine because it is a recovery system and not an archiving system and because it lacks this or that feature of a full service backup application. We think those critics are missing the point. Time Machine follows the Mac paradigm of elegant simplicity. It makes backing up for most people very simple and fun with its really cool interface.
Still, Time Machine needs some work. Its default setting of backing up everything on one's internal hard drive and on every device attached to one's computer is a bit of an overreach, in our opinion. The default should be only one's home folder with adding or deleting other things being optional. The average user is not going to mess around with the system level folders or applications. Are they going to know what to restore if problems crop up? Those who do know what to do could also easily add the system level and applications folders in preferences. Finally, we agree with others who have noted that the logic of adding things to a do not backup list in Time Machine's preferences should be reversed to deleting things from a backup list. By the way, Time Machine initially used 140GB to back up our internal hard drive and after ten days use (we reset it after four days) it now has consumed 230GB.
Quick Look is nice, saving a significant amount of application launch time if one can shed the habit of immediately double-clicking a file to inspect it. We are getting more used to using Quick Look and think this will eventually be a winner in Leopard as well.
We remain neutral on Spaces. It is an interesting idea but we don't work that way and can't conceive of who may. But, if anyone does, Spaces is a really cool thing for them.
The Not So Good
Our major issue is that we occasionally get kernel panics (crashes) when we wake our MacBook Pro from sleep. It must be caused by one of the external devices we have attached (a huey PRO monitor calibrator, an eSATA drive attached via a FirmTek eSATA Express Card, an iPod, a FW800 Dual drive case) or the software that services them because we do not have this problem with any of the other Macs. It doesn't happen all the time which makes it difficult to discover the culprit.
Another problem is that Dreamweaver CS3 has frequent unexpected quits. Dreamweaver CS3 did not run all that well on Tiger and certainly no better on Leopard. Hopefully, an Adobe software update will fix this.
We have an occasional loss of "custom" icons. For example, the drive dedicated to Time Machine gets assigned a custom blue-green icon with a circular arrow but the Finder window frequently shows it with an orange FireWire Drive icon while still showing it as a Time Machine icon on the desktop.
We don't like the transparent black dock when it is affixed to the right or left side because, in part, it looks like the Windows Vista sidebar when run on a machine with substandard graphics. We'd much prefer the dock on the side to look like it does when on the bottom, perhaps just losing the shelf for the purists, but we like it as it is or was in the earlier developer releases.
We don't particularly like the Stacks function of folders in the dock when the dock is on the bottom of the screen, in part because it is not easy to use and in part because folders are on the right side of the dock and the fan when extended curves to the right disappearing off the screen. The stacks should be straight or curve away from the side of the monitor, not towards it.
Unfortunately, we get too many spinning beachballs, more than we did with Tiger. But this will probably be fixed with updates to both Leopard and application software over time.
In Summary
We are quite happy with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard at this point. The speed increase in Apple Mail alone is worth the cost of Leopard to us. We think most of our issues would be resolved by application updates. Applications should be updated specifically for Leopard in the near future and we expect that Apple will also release a 10.5.1 update in the not to distant future. [Bill Fox]
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