Category: Mac
I am thoroughly impressed. Installing Leopard made my G4 run faster, and fixed quite a few small things that were bugging me about OS X. Not only that, it made all my most used applications look nice – now this is an upgrade.
Installation I opted to wipe the whole drive and install from scratch. All of the projects I work on are in SVN on remote servers, and I keep my documents in the cloud so it is just a matter of reinstalling a hand full of programs for me (and reloading my music library from backup – which took the longest).
The installation took about an hour. 20 minutes of which was the “verify the DVD doesn’t have errors” process. After that my .mac account automatically re-setup all my email accounts, address book, and bookmarks. I was up and running in an hour and a half (save my development tools).
The only thing that could have made the instal better was if Apple streamed some media during the install. Maybe some how to videos, or some songs, or even movie trailers.
Software This is a list of all my software and how it works on Leopard. You likely are using some of these so this may help if you are wondering about compatibility:
| Program | Works | Problem |
|---|---|---|
| Spanning Sync | No – Data Loss! |
• After upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, some users have reported that the first sync deletes all events on their Google Calendars. To avoid this, v1.1.1 now forces a “refresh” sync on the first sync after any OS upgrade
• Fixes a problem where the sync could end unexpectedly if it took too long
|
| Quicksilver | Yes | |
| Textmate | Yes | |
| Merlin | No | *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInvalidArgumentException’, reason: ‘*** -[PWEditController splitView:shouldHideDividerAtIndex:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0×8d1ae0′ |
| Tables | Yes | |
| iWork 08 | Yes | |
| iLife 08 | Mostly | iMovie doesn’t work on my system :( I need to find a copy of the old version. |
| OnTheJob | Yes | |
| Pixelmator | Yes | |
| MAMP | Yes | |
| FireFox | Yes | |
| MacFUSE / ssfhs | Yes | |
| CocoaMySQL | Yes | |
| ecto | Yes | |
| SnapZPro | Yes | |
| OmniGraffle 4 | Seems OK | Leopard support is beta |
| Fetch | Yes | |
| Q | Yes | |
| VLC | Yes | |
| CoRD | Yes | |
| iFlash | Yes | |
| Free Ruler (v1.7b5) | Yes | |
| iphoney | Yes | |
| Airport Utility | Yes | |
| Airport Disk Utility | No | It doesn’t see the disk hooked up to the airport extreme; however I can browse to it on the network so no loss for me. |
| HP Business Inkjet 1200 | Yes | |
| Bamboo Pen Tablet | Yes |
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Quicktime Pro keys do work after update (still quicktime 7).
There are a lot of little touches like SVN (1.4.4), PHP (5.2.4) and ruby (1.8.6) are installed already (or they got installed with the developer tools), and a few other bits.
Spaces Spaces is pretty good. There are a few workflow oddities for me with it. For example, if I have a terminal open in a different space then I am currently in, there is no way to open a terminal without going to the other space. …if that makes any sense. You’ll have to try it to understand what I mean. If you’re in Leopord do this:
That’s the only hiccup with spaces I hit.
Quick Movie Here is a brief movie of me showing off some random stuff.
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Interesting Bits * When you open a downloaded app for the first time it asks are you sure you want to run it.
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You can scroll windows without bringing them into focus (kinda focus follows mouse).
As long as you don’t use images, TextEdit can open and save to ODF, as well as a few other formats:
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Conclusion Even if none of the more obvious features seem interesting to you, the speed boost (at least on my older system) seems to be worth the upgrade – oh and the developer tools look nice too. Interface Builder looks shiny ^_^.
It’s hard to point out one thing and say this makes it cool – it’s a lot of little things. The OS feels really polished and snappy.
I won’t know for about a week if there are any bad quirks for me and my workflow, but everything I need to do actual work works even better in Leopard than it did in Tiger.
Note: my dad upgraded his x86 Mac, and it seems the system didn’t restart into the installer properly. It went to the loading screen, but didn’t get any further (I am guessing the installer had a kernel panic?) – apparently it was even “blue” hehehe. To be clear the order was – put in the CD, double click the install now, click the reboot button, then on that reboot is where it got stuck. If you hit this, just power down the Mac and turn it back on – I think you might have to hold the “c” key while it boots to boot off the CD. However he didn’t mention having to do that (he talked to apple support before we talked). It installed fine after that.