GET NEW POSTS VIA FEED
OR EMAILApple OS X Leopard: Still Thumbs Up
Now that OS X Leopard has been out for about a week, there’s an ever growing list of issues, bugs, and complaints. Blue screens of death, unstable machines, Time Machine issues, firewall questions, and even Dave Winer and Fake Steve Jobs have gripes.
My two cents to toss in is personally: I’ve only had a few minor issues - my keychain problem (which has been resolved) and Front Row not working ideally on the MacBook when viewing the Mac Mini library.
Yesterday, I did I have had one very severe freeze up - I had Word, Photoshop, and Flash open, and everything locked up in the middle of a “save for web” to the point where I got the infinite beach ball, couldn’t force quit, and had to hold down the power button and restart. That’s no fun.
But over all, I’m getting regular benefit from using Quick Look and Spaces. The OS feels faster than Tiger on both my Macs. So I’m still giving this upgrade a big thumbs up.
I’m eagerly anticipating 10.5.1 which has just been released to developers for testing. If you haven’t installed Leopard yet and are feeling a little squeamish, it might be worth waiting a few weeks for that first update.
For those of you that have installed Leopard, what’s your experience?
Disclosure: I own a tiny amount of Apple stock.
Categories: Apple :: Tags: ::
Trackback URL
Front Page
Previous Post: Facebook Ads: You Will Be Monetized
Next Post: Webomaticast #2: Leopard Finder
Related Posts: Mac OS X Delayed Past April? :: OS X Leopard Release Date: October 26 :: Apple: What I’m Looking Forward To In Leopard :: OS X Leopard Will Exclude 800 MHz G4 And Slower ::
I concur with you on this one. There’s a lot of FUD being spread around by the usual suspects who feed off the fanboys whining that Leopard can’t launch the Space Shuttle or run non-stop Star Trek marathons in the background.
“Leopard doesn’t work with Photoshop 7.” (which was released in 2002)
“Back to my Mac isn’t secure because if someone had your password they could log into your system.” (How is this any different from any other password on any other system?)
“Steve jobs lied about the ‘top secret’ features.” (Let’s see. He demoed 10 features that day. Leopard shipped with over 300. 290+ are not enough?)
But that’s all par for the course whenever Apple releases anything. Apple sets expectations so high that it can only disappoint the dreamers. Microsoft sets the expectations so low that anything it does looks like a massive improvement.
Leopard is a massive leap forward from Tiger, which already made Vista look ridiculous in comparison. My experience has been 99.999% positive; the few little quirks I’ve seen will most likely be fixed in a matter of weeks.
Seems like it’s working well for me. My only issue is I haven’t really researched the new features, so I’m not making use of any of the nifty new tools yet (like spaces). I should find a good online primer for unleashing Leopard. If anyone knows of one, let me know.
I’ve only a few very minor issues as well - almost all of which were due to 3rd party apps just needing an upgrade. I thought Dave Winer calling it no good and then likening it to Windows was rather absurd - it seems almost like he’s using a completely different product than me. Overall I love Leopard - true it’s not a huge leap forward, but its perfected so many of the little subtle things that you do on a day to day basis that I think I actually prefer this route over drastic changes that require leaning a whole new way of doing things - if it ain’t broke, just perfect it.
Settled in with it well. Real well.
Installed on 4 Macs. Only one glitch with an old PowerBook G4. It hung on the reboot, before (yes, before) the blue screen. Took a restore to Tiger before I knew I needed a knife to pry out the DVD. That’s okay, being my secondary development box I’m more than happy to keep it at 10.4.
From a user standpoint it’s… alright. I’m used to the semi-transparent menu. Found somebody who developed a sweet update to the glassy dock… mine is now a much darker surface. But I’m afraid I’m not using any of the highly touted Leopard-only things… TimeMachine, Stacks, or Spaces.
That’s okay, Stacks was about the only one I thought I’d use anyway. But the Finder? It sees any and all of the Macs, and best yet, my NAS.
It’s really the developer stuff I’m starting to sink into. Everything about XCode seems like they really - finally? - paid attention to making some great developer tools. Just about everything seems to have been poked and prodded from top to bottom.
JC - I did try running four episodes of The Prisoner, one in each space, and then switched between them to see what would happen. Was a little slow, but it worked, and the audio shifted from one to the other flawlessly.
Dave - maybe I should write something up… actually I did spend probably too much time checking out the Apple website and going over the features one by one. There are also some good videos there.
MG - in general computer problems lead to pretty extreme behavior. And yeah although there is not much that is paradigm shifting (except in my case, Quick Look) there are tons of tiny touches I keep discovering that shows the polish - changing “Archive” to “Compress” in the contextual menu or double clicking or dragging files to the Path Bar icons.
DaveD - I wonder if it’s the pre-Intel machines that are having the most troubles? And I’m not a developer but for web design, am finding Quick Look and cover flow view to be awesome for sorting through folders full of image and HTML files. Something for everyone, perhaps.
I guess I should have mentioned what Macs I did update to Leopard… two MacBooks, one iBook G4, and one PowerMac G5. The two PPC Macs that did upgrade went very easily, except for the very final step where the install said there was “less than one minute left” - that took some 10 minutes.