Leopard On The Mac Mini

October 29th, 2007

On Sunday, I got a little gutsy and installed Leopard on the Mac Mini. No major problems encountered, and I got to play around with some of the features I was curious about but hadn’t gotten to yet.

Screen Sharing

This is cool, but will do no favors for my waistline. The sharing feature is quite simple to access via any Finder window sidebar. I can now control the Mac Mini via the MacBook, or vice-versa — using the desktop to control the MacBook hooked up to the television allows for some pretty cool possibilities.

Mail

Mail is noticeably faster. It now includes a “photo browser” that allows one to add iPhoto photographs to emails quickly with resizing options. There’s now an Activity pane instead of a window. Both Notes and To Dos bring Mail a little closer to Outlook functionality. The RSS reader ability is cool, but I don’t think I’ll switch from Google Reader anytime soon.

Time Machine

This program is eye candy galore (past windows fading back into a galaxy complete with drifting stars) but with a practical purpose — to make backups entertaining and fun. It took a while to perform the first backup.

All in all I already feel Leopard is a worth-while upgrade. I spent an hour or so working on a Flash piece for a freelance client. Using Spaces, I had the Flash file, a PDF mockup, and Word doc containing text to cut and paste from. I think I saved a few minutes, easily.

Some Fun Stuff To Try

Here’s some fun stuff to check out, some of which I found on various websites:

• Three new iTunes visualizers — a lathe, some jelly, and stix. The stix looks a bit like the glow-trails left behind by iPod dancers.
• A few new screen savers — word of the day, shell, arabesque, and a cool “photo mosaic” one (JC demoed this on Friday). Select some iPhotos, and click the Mosaic button under Display Style. It does a pretty crazy zoom out and creates photos made of other photos.
• The screen saver preference pane has a check box for “show with clock” in case you have an obsession with knowing what time it is.
• I still think it’s cool that Expose works while viewing all your Spaces.
• There’s a new “Movies” Dashboard Widget.
• With super-huge icons, you can finally see what some of them really say. The Mail icon has a rubber stamp that says “Hello From Cupertino, California” (Home town of Apple), and the icon for TextEdit has a transcript of the “Think Different” ad (Here’s to the crazy ones…), ending with the attribution of John Appleseed.
• The Leopard login screen background is located at /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg — meaning if you want to change it, replace this file.

So far I have only noticed two strange situations:

• There seems to be a bit of Keychain nonsense that I still haven’t totally resolved.
• When using Front Row on the Mac Book, it doesn’t display the album art on the Mac Mini’s iTunes Library.
• Some of the iconography displayed in Finder Cover Flow view leaves much to be desired. This includes older applications with icons that are of low resolution, applications that have just squares for icons, but also some of the TV shows I downloaded from iTunes have merely a generic movie file icon.
• Definitely not liking the translucent Finder Menu Bar — I really want to turn that off.

Comic Books With Quick Look

Needless to say, I’m enjoying Leopard. And as a last treat, here’s a really great use of the Finder Quick Look feature — reading PDF comic books. After a PDF is selected, the space bar brings up Quick Look and the scroll wheel flips the pages in the PDF.