Thread: Leopard Review

I got Leopard today so I thought I'd review it like I did with Vista.

Looks
Apple continues is reputation of creating gorgeous products. The box it came it was shiny and colourful and the OS itself looks great. I changed my background to the Nebula that's you've all undoubtably seen and it looks great. At first I was a little disheartened that the graphics seemed choppy. Then I noticed that Spotlight was still doing it's indexing thing. Once that was finished it ran as fast as ever.

I noticed a bug when I hit the desktop key, however. The "transparent" menu bar isn't dynamic. When the window's hide behind it, it doesn't show up. I also dislike the new black apple, I thought the blue one was better looking.

It also seems that Leopard has removed support for transparent windows. Program windows can choose to be transparent, but Ctrl + Command + Scrolling does nothing.

Apple also seemed to have gone back on their promise to go resolution independent. The OS still supports it in the back end, but none of the programs do.

Something that's very nice is that all of the windows now have a uniform border. Even non-apple program are forced to be uniform.

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?