Thread: Leopard Review

Spaces, and Time Machine
These are two of the biggest upgrades from Tiger. Time Machine works beautifully. It takes a while to do that initial backup, but after than it runs extremely fast and takes up a surprisingly small amount of disk space. It saves all changes hourly for twenty-four hours, then daily for a week, then weekly until disk space runs low.

Spaces is nice, but visually disappointing. Apple invented that rotating cube a while back for switching users, I was hoping to see them use that for spaces the way that most Linux systems do, but they decided to have them just slide instead.

One feature that sets spaces apart from the Linux equivalents is that you can make programs open in specific spaces all the time and opening one will automatically take you to that space.

Another feature is that you can assign programs to all spaces. I like having my iChat window visible all the time. Whenever I switch spaces, Leopard drags the iChat window with it.

Moving windows around spaces is simply drag and drop, and you can even expose within spaces to see every window in every space.

Misc Features
OSX programs (including iWork) have been missing a grammar checker. I was surprised when iWork '08 arrived and it had a grammar checker built in. It thought that it meant that they were going to do that on a program by program basis.

iWork was an exception. Being true to form, Apple has built grammar checking into its core. All text boxes in any program support it. Of course in chat windows those green underlines can be annoying so they can be turned off on a program by program basis.

For some reason, Coverflow doesn't seem to cache icons and it runs slowly from time to time. The animation uses Core Animation so it runs at full speed, but the icons appear blank if you scroll to fast.

Stacks has changed since Steve Jobs demoed them. You can not create stacks anymore, Stacks are nothing but folders. That kind of bugs me since I wanted to create stacks for work and play without moving programs.

It's possible: you can create aliases and put them in folders, but it's annoying.

Note
Apple's claim that 'everything is kinda thought out,' is true. During the initial backup for Time Machine, my apartment had a poweroutage, shutting off the external hard drive. The battery left the computer on, Time Machine stopped the backup and restarted when the hard drive came back online.

Conclusion
Despite some of the minor bugs and annoyances in Leopard it is still a huge jump from Tiger and well worth the $119 for serious computer people. It keeps Apple's standards of quality and it still five years ahead of Windows Vista.

Never really been tempted to try OS X
dunno, may have a go at some point

just had a browse over the feature list in wikipedia, and to be honest there's little (for me, anyway) in the way of features that I can't do on linux. Certainly not $119 worth.

Btw, Can you run OS X on AMD-64 systems?

No, it will only run on a Mac. Macs are so stable because the coders don't have to worry about thousands of configurations.

you can run OS X on x86 tho?

Macs have Intel processors now, but they still have lots of Mac specific hardware that the operating system needs in order to run.

http://dailyapps.net/2007/10/hack-at...-3-easy-steps/

I was wrong. It's difficult, but possible to put Leopard on a PC. It's not designed for it, but with some patching these guys got it to work.

'nother review here (17 pages of review, as well)

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars

I run Mac OS X Tiger / Darwin 8.10.1 on my laptop (a MacBook) and FreeBSD on my desktop (an old iMac G4). If I had an x86 or amd64 system, I would probably run Arch Linux, which beats Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD (for the most part), and almost every other GNU/Linux distro (not counting distros with a special purpose like Knoppix) I've ever seen.

ninja9578, I don't see myself upgrading my MacBook from Tiger anytime soon. Leopard doesn't seem to have any revolutionary features, and it appears to offer very few improvements over Tiger. As you said, Time Machine and Spaces are probably the only new features worth mentioning, and neither is a reason for me to upgrade. Time Machine requires a spare hard drive which I don't have, and Spaces isn't necessary for a number of reasons. First of all, I don't think Spaces would actually improve my productivity beyond what Quicksilver affords me. Second, if I cared so much about productivity that I wanted to use virtual desktops, I wouldn't be using Mac OS X in the first place (Arch Linux with this X setup seems likely). Lastly, Tiger already has a couple of virtual desktop implementations available online, so why upgrade to Leopard just for Spaces?