I’ve picked up my copy of Leopard today, and got it installed after a couple of hours. It’s good, and OS X continues to beat Windows into the ground.
Leopard, for those who don’t know, is Apple’s latest version of OS X (10.5), the operating system which powers all modern Macs. It’s touted as having over 300 new features, but you’ll be hard pushed to find most of them. Let’s start with the headliners.
Time Machine is arguably the biggest feature, but I need an external disk to use it. I’ll be picking one up soon though as I need a better backup solution, so I’ll go over this in a few days. The Coverflow and Quick Look features are nice, as they allow you to see if you’ve got the right file without actually opening it. As I’ve already got a mountain of PDFs, lecture notes and reports hanging around in various folders, this has proven quite useful in not wasting bounces opening Pages only to discover I actually wanted OcTeX.
Visually it’s nice - the unified window appearance is a welcome improvement on Tiger’s mix of styles, although there are still a couple of different ones out there. Apple’s Pro Tools (Aperture, Final Cut, Pro Logic) spring to mind, as does GarageBand. I’m not sure the transparent title bar does much though, since I seldom sit looking at my desktop. My laptop is for doing things, so being able to always see the top 1cm of my desktop image isn’t the most amazing of features. The new Dock isn’t earth-shattering either. It’s a place for applications to live, and shouldn’t feel the need to reflect all my windows. There is a tweak you can use in the Terminal to change it to a more robust translucent black (Similar to when you move the dock to the left or right of the screen) which I’ve used. Far nicer, and icons are much more visible over applications.
Behind the scenes, a lot has changed. It’s 64-bit throughout (With noticeable performance boosts), there’s Core Animation (Which is very nice indeed, and may be used later in the year when I’m doing some application development work), apparently big pieces of Core APIs have been improved as well. The whole OS somehow feels more… bright and responsive. However, there seems to have been an increase of Marble of Doom occurrences in various apps, most noticeably Safari.
Other minor tweaks include the new Mail and iCal, some .Mac improvements, much better network options and user interfaces (Finally, search domain in the GUI!), screensavers and iTunes visualisers. There’s a full list on apple.com for the curious.
Recommended upgrade? Definately. Worth the money? On the outside, no, but developers will love working in Leopard, so expect a lot of Leopard only apps in the future.