Leopard’s Finer Points
With every Jean, Claude, Van and Damn on the internet giving their first impressions on Leopard, I thought I’d add my voice to the crowd, with a focus on some of the finer tweaks that I certainly get a kick out of in updates like this.
Dan and I journeyed to our local Australian Apple Store this evening and were nearly met with a rousing applause.
The install went smoothly, thought the damn thing seemed to take longer ‘verifying the disc’ than actually installing the thing. If you’re in a rush, I certainly see no harm in skipping the verify step. If you are installing a family pack on multiple computers and are cool like me, then I would definitely recommend skipping this lengthy time-waster.
My first impressions are thus:
- The whole install process is so breezy, it really has been perfected.
- Spotlight flies like an absolute bitch! Amazing! On my MacBook Pro it took about half an hour to build the library and was off and racing. It automatically highlights the top entry now, a nice change.
- Sleep/wake times on the MacBooks are the same
- There’s no ‘Loading OS’ screen per-say, it just gets it straight on! Sexy.
- The Airport menu loads instantly, at last!
- Time Machine most certainly backs up over the Airport Extreme Base Station, providing you perform your initial backup with your external HDD connected to your mac, and then when connected to your Airport, manually logon to it once through Finder and set it to remember the password.
- The new side-panel of Finder is brilliant. .Mac is enabled by default, but that can be pissed off through the settings pretty easily.
- Safari feels snappier. Really.
It’s out of BETA finally, too. I’m going to try and make the switch over from Firefox one last time. Firefox runs like an absolute dog for some reason, too. All the more reason to go Safari. - I’m not entirely sure what to think of the new translucent menus, or gratuitous use of drop-shadow. I’ll sleep on that one.
- All the Help menus have been rehashed, to better serve the kind of people who click on them.
- Screen capture gives feedback for the exact pixel that you are hovering over. Awww.
- Time Machine is a handsome bitch.
I’ll certainly add more as it comes up. But on the whole, this is one of those upgrades that doesn’t smack you in the face with joy straight away, but instead gently flicks marbles at you until you realise that all-in-all, it is actually freaking awesome. I think I might sleep in my free Leopard tshirt.
