With two hours to kill at 30th street station, what else is there to do? This is just a list of off-the-cuff opinions and observations of Leopard on a minspec Powerbook - for a more detailed, more betterer review, plz to check out the Ars Technica in-depth coverage.
In no particular order:
1. So far I've only used it on rjbs's old powerbook, a 12" G4 867 which meets the minimum requirements and not much else. I haven't had the opportunity to use the 10.5 Finder or Preview in conjunction with any data that actually matters, so this is more of a "hm." than a "huh." as it were.
2. The install took just over two hours, and probably would have taken a lot less if I hadn't installed language packs with 10.4. There was no option to not install them in 10.5 - it was Upgrade The Existing Language Packs Or Don't Install At All - this resulted in a twenty minute "about a minute" at the end of the base install.
3. My hardware doesn't seem capable of displaying the translucent menubar that everyone who's installed 10.5 on intel kit has complained about. I've met nobody who thinks this is an improvement over the last 23 years of Apple operating systems. The fact that my kit doesn't display the translucent bar may be due to either its "advanced age" (re: video hardware) the fact that it's a PPC machine, a software glitch, or some combination of the three.
4. The new Finder folders are very low contrast and require some serious squinting to differentiate on a 12" 1024x768 screen. I didn't mind the old icons and I don't mind the new ones - what I do mind is the addition of a "Downloads" folder in the home directory that "can't be modified or deleted because it is required by Mac OS X." The loose upside of that is I can can the "Safari" folder I've used as a downloads dump for the last several years.
5. Just Like Platinum : The new Finder LOAF* is now a balance of Windows widgets and oldschool MacOS 8.0-9.2.2 slatey goodness. No complaints here - every release of OS X brings the overall feel closer to that of 9.2.2. Maybe they'll add windowshading back in with 10.6. By the same token, the addition of ACLs (Access Control Lists) and the revamped Sharing controls handle a lot like they did under the old MacOS - this makes it easier to use Client as a basic file server without additional third party software, such as Sharepoints. Very nice.
6. The new dock is just as annoying and nigh-useless as the old dock, only Now With More Eye Candy. The command line switch to toggle between the Eye Candy and Functional docks works fine, but the Functional dock displays oddly at the bottom of my screen for some reason, so I've been running the Pointless Eye Candy on the assumption that I'd rather have a bloated OS that looks like it works than a streamlined OS that looks like it doesn't. Call it peace of mind, or something. The new "stacks" thing in the Dock does nothing for me, as the only reason I ever had to keep a folder of anything in the Dock was obliterated when Quicksilver was released.
7. Software : Quicksilver needed an update to get its icon out of the dock, and I had to upgrade to a version of SSHKeychain more recent than 2004 to get that to work. For some reason my keychain was "damaged" and required several "repairs" and "verifications" from inside the Keychain Access utility to get everything back. coconutBattery (v.2.5.1) doesn't work under 10.5 - it'll show the charge bar, but none of the battery information it displayed under 10.4. Front Row is only as useful as Quicktime's library of codecs, which is to say that Front Row is useless for almost all recreational TV viewing. The base Quicktime Player still has every useful feature locked out by default.
8. Finder still doesn't cache thumbnails of the previews it generates, which is something Windows has done since the time of the Civil War. Get with it, Apple. This is especially glaring with "cover flow," which isn't just useless eyecandy, it's useless, slow eyecandy on this machine. It's a cute effect and works okay with moderately sized directories of images, but it just kind of sits there and shits its pants in the Applications directory. I hate to see what it would do with a large amount of data, like, say... one of the 15,000+ jpeg directories of timelapse data I've been working with lately. Quicklook is kind of nice, but (much like finder thumbnailing) works best with webscale images. It also handles like the "get info" window does if you activate it on a multiple selection - it'll focus on anything you select until the window is dismissed.
9. "Open this page in Dashboard" in Safari? Thanks for eating up a chunk of Safari's URL bar, Apple. At least you can drag that off from View -> Customize Toolbar. Also on the list of things I'll probably never use - Dashboard is still at the top, Expose is still in second place, and Spaces is now a distant third. Years of ingrained single-screen work habits do not change overnight - and all of the UNIX-bred geeks I've talked to have stated unequivocally that Spaces is practically useless for a variety of reasons. Maybe I'll have a use for it after it's had some time to mature.
10. The networking control panel has been nicely overhauled, and the network "browser" in the Finder is much less brain damaged - though at this point I've only had the opportunity to use it on a small home network of four machines - I have a feeling that work's network will be a different matter.
11. Safari behaves much more like Firefox, which is mostly a good thing. Where it's a bad thing is that the new built-in spellcheck goes for massive totalitarian overkill, underlining things like domain names and email addresses - it's completely oblivious to the context of @ and .org .net .com etceteras. I imagine that'll get fixed at some point - but in the meantime, 'solios' and 'amongthechosen' have been added to my powerbook's spelling dictionary.
12. An exciting new feature : Core dump on sleep! Running on battery, anyway - this machine has always had issues waking from sleep while on battery, but in the case of 10.5, I popped open the lid and was greeted with a stream of panicy unix text instead of the usual dead black. Not sure if that's an improvement or not. Not sure if a reformat will fix it or not, but I'll be in a position to try one in a couple of days.
13. Apple-shift-4, the command to capture a selected area of the screen, now displays screen coordinates in the bottom right quadrant of the crosshair.
14. Preview has the good sense to open all of the (tiny, minimal) datasets I've tried so far in numerical order, instead of the arbitrary anything-but-numerical it's opened them in previously. Select-and-Drag into photoshop CS still opens things in anything-but-numerical order, whereas opening a multiple selection from the application's open/save dialogue. Not sure if this was always the case or not, as this is the first it's occured to me to do that; but if drag-to-app-icon-and-open-in-order works for preview and not photoshop, then doing so must be an application-level thing. As mentioned previously, the base Quicktime Player still comes with everything useful locked out, so I can't test how it opens image sequences at this time (noteworthy in that I've had some divinely serious problems with this over the past couple of weeks). That'll have to wait until I start using Leopard at work.
15. Loss of Classic support doesn't affect me on this machine, as it's too slow and too small to use for serious image manipulation - so there's no point in keeping Photoshop 5.5 around. However, I still use Photoshop 5.5 quite a bit, and Illustrator 9 for a few things here and there, so I'll have to see if Leopard in any way fixes some of the useability issues I've had with type display in PSCS - type has this irritating habit of disappearing or displaying only the first few characters while being edited, which means that I'm effectively typing blind, making CS useless for comics production. I'm not sure if this is still a problem under PSCS2, as I'm one of those assholes who thinks that fast hardware ought to damned well mean fast-loading applications - and the OS boots faster than CS2, CS3, or DVD Studio Pro loads. On my work machine, Classic + 5.5 also loads faster than CS2. This is mildly aggravating when you consider that the only things CS, CS2, and CS3 do that 5.5 doesn't (as far as MY needs are concerned) is run natively.
Then the train came and I spent the next seven and a half hours reading Homicide and trying to ignore the cel phone conversations of the woman next to me. Horseshoe Curve for the win.
* LOok And Feel. |
