Leopard

[stevekenson]

So, for the Mac-savvy on my friends-list, do you have Leopard? How is it? Is it worth considering for someone like me, who has a non-Intel machine (G5 PowerPC iMac, the generation right before the Intel Macs). Give me the scoop.

Comments

[adamjury.livejournal.com]

Have it. I have not yet installed it on my G5, just on my MacBook Pro and the older G4 Powerbook. Performance is fine on the G4; certainly no worse than Tiger. It should be fine on your iMac.

I am enjoying it, but there is no amazing "one killer feature" for me; just a lot of small improvements. I suspect that Time Machine -- the new backup application/process -- would be useful for you. Some of the new graphical stuff like QuickLook [hit the space bar to simply preview almost any common file type] and CoverFlow are pretty cool for digging through the piles of stuff you've downloaded and processing them quickly.

Networking/file sharing is a bit cleaner and Screen Sharing is very nice. The new version of Mail has some good solid improvements. The Finder has been revamped and I think it's a lot better.

Apple has a preview video at http://www.apple.com/macosx/guidedtour/ which demonstrates a lot of the new features. It has the usual overblown Appleness to it, but I think it's useful to see the features demonstrated.

I think it's buggier than it should be, though; not so much from personal experience, but from overall perception. You may want to hold off for a month or so until the first patch is released.

[adamjury.livejournal.com]

Oh, and:

* Preview now allows you to add Notes and other annotations to PDFs, which you may find useful.
* I think Spaces as a virtual desktop is a little bit half-baked. It made me happy at first, but I have yet to be able to organize it in a way that helps me work better.

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

10.5.1 went live on Thursday I think.

[jeffinthebox.livejournal.com]

We like it!

[hackard.livejournal.com]

I just installed it yesterday. Apart from some non-Apple software that choked hard (Eudora, notably, which prompted me to make the switch to Mac Mail that I should have done three years ago), it's running fine. I skipped Tiger completely, so a lot of this stuff is new to me. I'll probably be learning about Leopard for weeks to come.

I've got a G4 Mac mini and it's running fine, so your G5 shouldn't have any problems as long as you have enough RAM.

[nvdaydreamer.livejournal.com]

I prescribe a For Dummies book, or the latest iteration of "OS X: The Missing Manual". These were what I used as research /before/ I made The Switch, and they were pretty useful.

[lucki-dog.livejournal.com]

Hmm.. maybe I should think about the upgrade for my TiBook then. Need to double the ram first probably (512 currently) I think it maxes at 1gig.

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

*Disclaimer: While I work for Apple, I speak as an end user*


I think it's buggier than it should be, though; not so much from personal experience, but from overall perception. You may want to hold off for a month or so until the first patch is released.


I don't feel that it's any buggier than I'd expect any dot zero to be. In general I tell my friends to wait for the first update with any operating system. Leopard is no different in this respect.

Time Machine is nice. For me, that and Boot Camp justify the upgrade but you're not using an Intel Mac yet so Boot Camp does you no good. Caveat for Time Machine; if you work daily with large monolithic files (for example -virtual machines, large video or graphics files, or a large MS Entourage mail database), Time Machine will be forced to back those files up every time you touch them and you may find yourself quickly runing out of space on your backup volume.

I am very fond of Stacks, despite it being mostly a gimmick. I find I can navigate a folder to find the file I'm looking for much faster this way than through the Finder. It's right up there with the old trick of being able to navigate to your files from the Apple menu in Classic.

I also like Spaces, but it's easy to fall into the trap of reorganizing your desktop all of the time to find something that works better. My daily work flow uses four separate programs but I work on a MacBook. I put each of those programs on a separate screen to reduce clutter mostly. I put my chat programs onto a screen by themselves... and they distract me far less now.

[lucki-dog.livejournal.com]

Boo! I do like my virtual machines... in general anyway. I do more with them on the PC though... before it died. .... Anyway... There's no way to disable versioning for particular files?

Don't have it yet

[kenmarable.livejournal.com]

But I have read around that you can exclude certain files. Sounds pretty straightforward, too:

From http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14
"[I]t is possible to exclude individual files from Time Machine backups by dragging them into the "Do not back up" list available in the Time Machine preference pane."

Re: Don't have it yet

[lucki-dog.livejournal.com]

Awesome, thanks for the link.

[ocean-star.livejournal.com]

Totally unrelated -

You may want to check your MySpace. I got spam from you. :-(

[wordwill.livejournal.com]

I've been waiting for Leopard to age a little more in the hopes that a) it's interaction with third-party software will be a little smoother and b) I'll get it when I finally buy one of the shiny new iMac. One day.