Leopard initial impressions
By this time, I have 3 of four machines upgraded to Leopard, the latest iteration of the Mac OS X.
Here are some cursory observations, in bullet form.
- Comic Life only ships with new macs, if you do a clean install of Leopard you’ll lose it. You can always download the 30-day trial or buy it.
- Same goes for iLife. If you do a clean install of Leopard, you’ll lose it.
(the advice here is to “upgrade” leopard instead of a fresh install. If you want a “fresh” install then you could always do a fresh install of Tiger from your original disks and then upgrade to Leopard. Comic Life and iLife should be intact)
- I could not upgrade one machine that had a pre-release of Leopard. I had to clean the machine off. In another case, Leopard was able to suck up my previous pre-release Leopard Time Machine backups and completely restore my machine. The latter was for my main desktop so I’m thankful since I have tons of apps I use installed and some have limited activations (Adobe CS3, for instance).
- I had the clever idea to use my 60GB iPod as a Time Machine backup device but could not get this to work. I tried formatting the device to what I thought was the required file system (Mac OS Extended Journaled) but still no worky. Perhaps using iPods as Time Machine backup devices is in poor taste since the little bastards get kicked around so much. So, I merely used it as a dumb drive to copy off my user folder before I installed Leopard clean.
- When Time Machine is backing up 300+GB of data, it’s amazingly low-impact on your system.
- I experienced very few faults in apps. PhotoShop gave me one relatively benign error about not being able to convert my color profile. BitRocket crashes every now and then. iChat crashed a few times.
The improved networking (screen sharing, file sharing, overall presence) is a welcome addition with Leopard. Search folders are pretty awesome and I find that I actually use Stacks and Spaces.
One note about screen sharing is that I believe it uses vnc or a vnc-like engine, which is a dumb remote image transfer. While I think the implementation is superb, it’s just not in the same league as Remote Desktop on Windows.
If your client OS is Vista and your remote system is also Vista, Remote Desktop actually hardware accelerates some things… including desktop transparencies, animations, fades, etc. I hope Apple gets up to speed in this area since remote desktop (on a Mac or a PC is a huge part of my workflow).
It’s been a few days now and things are still running very smoothly. I’d say I’m waiting for the inevitable patches but…. not really.