Mac users: What do you think of OS 10.5 (Leopard) so far?

[Absolute]

So, Leopard has been out for over 24 hours now, and I’ve noted several people in other threads mentioned that they have upgraded.

I pre-ordered mine and got it around 2 PM on Friday, so I’ve been using it for a while. Here are some my thoughts:

0. I did an upgrade install, and it worked flawlessly. I haven’t encountered any compatibility problems.

1. Spaces is the best virtual desktop implementation I’ve seen far, by far. Which is no surprise, really. The mechanism for binding applications to desktops could be a little easier (there should be a shortcut that doesn’t involve opening System Preferences - right-click on the menubar or something) - but other than that, it is all very slick and polished.

2. Time Machine is also great. I used to use SuperDuper to make a nightly clone my hard drive, but Time Machine does a much better job - primarily because it keeps backups from multiple days. It is extremely simple to set up, and completely transparent.

As usual, Apple has done a great job of simplifying a concept by simply deciding on the best behavior themselves, and leaving little to the user’s choice. Time Machine backs up your entire hard drive, keeping hourly backups of the past day, daily backups of the past month, and weekly backups as far back as your drive has space for. Other than choosing what hard drive to use for backing up, and optionally excluding files and folders you wish it to skip, there is absolutely nothing to configure.

Because the OS keeps track of what files you’ve added and deleted, it doesn’t have to rescan the entire hard drive on every hourly backup looking for what’s changed - it knows it already, and can immediately transfer what’s different. I never noticed a slowdown during the hourly backup, as the transfers occurred in the background, and with only minimal hard drive activity.

Restoring from backups works well - you click the Time Machine icon in the Dock while looking at a certain folder, and all your previous backups of that folder spring into view. You can manually browse, or search through them.

Even cooler, if you have an application like Mail or Address Book open when you click Time Machine, you can search through your backups within those applications! For instance, if I click Time Machine while Mail is open, and then select my backup from yesterday at 12:38 AM, I will see my Inbox as it looked when that backup was run. It really is very cool - and I’m not aware of any other backup system that is so well-integrated into applications.

3. I am also finding the web clipping functionality in Safari very useful - you can take any part of a webpage and turn it into a Dashboard widget. It works very well (for example, the widgets resize if the corresponding content element on the page resizes), and makes it simple to keep track of things that there is no corresponding Dashboard widget for.

4. Everything is much, much faster, particularly Spotlight and Mail.

While Time Machine is probably the best feature, I find myself enjoying the visual improvements more than anything else. The unified color scheme, the new icons, the translucent menubar, the new Dock, the white, translucent menus - it all fits together very well, and looks very elegant, and makes the OS surprisingly more pleasant to use.

All in all, definitely worth the cost, in my opinion. What are your thoughts?

[Absolute]

Nudge, nudge.

[Johnny_L.A]

I wonder if it would be useful to me. My PowerBook G4 was made a year before they went to the Intel chip.

[Least_Original_User_Name_Ever]

I would have got a Mac this time around if they weren’t abnormally expensive.
Instead I got a Dell with Vista. I may be interested in Leopard down the line, though.

[rbroome]

@Absolute

So, Leopard has been out for over 24 hours now, and I’ve noted several people in other threads mentioned that they have upgraded.

I pre-ordered mine and got it around 2 PM on Friday, so I’ve been using it for a while. Here are some my thoughts:

0. I did an upgrade install, and it worked flawlessly. I haven’t encountered any compatibility problems.

1. Spaces is the best virtual desktop implementation I’ve seen far, by far. Which is no surprise, really. The mechanism for binding applications to desktops could be a little easier (there should be a shortcut that doesn’t involve opening System Preferences - right-click on the menubar or something) - but other than that, it is all very slick and polished.

2. Time Machine is also great. I used to use SuperDuper to make a nightly clone my hard drive, but Time Machine does a much better job - primarily because it keeps backups from multiple days. It is extremely simple to set up, and completely transparent.

As usual, Apple has done a great job of simplifying a concept by simply deciding on the best behavior themselves, and leaving little to the user’s choice. Time Machine backs up your entire hard drive, keeping hourly backups of the past day, daily backups of the past month, and weekly backups as far back as your drive has space for. Other than choosing what hard drive to use for backing up, and optionally excluding files and folders you wish it to skip, there is absolutely nothing to configure.

Because the OS keeps track of what files you’ve added and deleted, it doesn’t have to rescan the entire hard drive on every hourly backup looking for what’s changed - it knows it already, and can immediately transfer what’s different. I never noticed a slowdown during the hourly backup, as the transfers occurred in the background, and with only minimal hard drive activity.

Restoring from backups works well - you click the Time Machine icon in the Dock while looking at a certain folder, and all your previous backups of that folder spring into view. You can manually browse, or search through them.

Even cooler, if you have an application like Mail or Address Book open when you click Time Machine, you can search through your backups within those applications! For instance, if I click Time Machine while Mail is open, and then select my backup from yesterday at 12:38 AM, I will see my Inbox as it looked when that backup was run. It really is very cool - and I’m not aware of any other backup system that is so well-integrated into applications.

3. I am also finding the web clipping functionality in Safari very useful - you can take any part of a webpage and turn it into a Dashboard widget. It works very well (for example, the widgets resize if the corresponding content element on the page resizes), and makes it simple to keep track of things that there is no corresponding Dashboard widget for.

4. Everything is much, much faster, particularly Spotlight and Mail.

While Time Machine is probably the best feature, I find myself enjoying the visual improvements more than anything else. The unified color scheme, the new icons, the translucent menubar, the new Dock, the white, translucent menus - it all fits together very well, and looks very elegant, and makes the OS surprisingly more pleasant to use.

All in all, definitely worth the cost, in my opinion. What are your thoughts?

sounds great. I am impressed. I typically wait until the first couple of patches come out before installing the new OS, so I haven’t gotten it yet. Perhaps this is the excuse I need to get an intel mac. (this is a G5 IMac).

[Paul_in_Qatar]

I will pick it up early in the new year. Always better to let a few bugs get fixed first.

[minor7flat5]

After my unknown error (-54) today, I am slightly less pleased.
Nevertheless, I am very happy with Leopard.

I’ll to put together something more useful tomorrow.

[qubed]

I’ve been very annoyed.

I did an upgrade, and it’s been buggy as hell. I had the BSOD (which i fixed). I’ve had a few startups and shutdowns that failed. My system preferences has a bug where the plus button (add an item) effectively doesn’t work and crashes it. This currently makes Time machine useless to me. I also can’t add items to the login menu.

Firefox had a few issues, but those went away when i upgraded. A few of my mail.app plugins don’t work.

I do like that Spotlight is a lot faster.

Most definitely not worth the $140 bucks.