I finally received my copy of Leopard last night. I started the installation process just before going to bed.
Leopard installed flawlessly and was waiting for me this morning when I awoke. I've only had a short while to play with it, but I have several impressions I'd like to pass on:
General
I have an iMac G5 2.1 20", so I can't take advantage of Boot Camp. I haven't configured Time Machine yet.
Overall I'm very impressed with Leopard, though it obviously needs a little trimming around the edges, so to speak.
The Good
Start up seems to be about as fast as Tiger.
I like the appearance and backgrounds.
Operations such as opening folders, starting applications and general responsiveness is noticeably improved - quicker.
Most of my settings in Tiger were retained in Leopard which was very convenient.
Safari really is snappier! It displays and renders pages much more quickly. I finally feel the power of the machine and of the broadband connection. Also, some little annoyances have been removed. One annoyance in particular in Tiger, if I accidently placed my cursor over the Bookmarks menu item, I would be stuck for 1-2 minutes watching the spinning beachball while Safari pulled up hundreds of bookmarks ever so slowly. It was like a quicksand trap that I couldn't help but fall into ocassionally. Now, selecting the Bookmarks menu item barely registers a blip - 1 second if that.
I feel as though I have a new computer - almost. Everything is refreshed and new looking with better performance.
The Bad
Leopard will not remember the View settings for individual folders. For instance, I like my Hard Drive folder to view as icons, but my document folder to view as a name list. When I set my documents folder to view as list, Leopard resets all the other folders as list. Come on Apple - this is a basic Finder feature, how could you forget to include it?
There is a Downloads folder at the far right of the Dock. I tried to move the contents of my existing downloads folder into this one, but it wouldn't work - it just created a stack of my former downloads folder on the Dock.
iTunes starts just as slowly as it did in Tiger - it loads ridiculously slowly, and I get the progress bar waiting for it to start up.
The Ugly
Safari doesn't render some web pages correctly. For instance, the text and selection items of my Seller Account page in Amazon.com look like unreadable, tiny blobs. I can't increase the font size on them. This worked fine in Tiger, but is broken in Leopard.
The Dock is a little buggy. For instance I ran a pinball game, then quit. When I looked at the dock, some of the icons were overlaid with green blotches. If I moved the Dock to the side then back to the bottom, the icons were restored.
Conclusion
I really like Leopard - I'm happy that I bought it. I've just begun to discover it's secrets, but I like what I see so far. There are a few annoying bugs which Apple should fix immediately. Nonetheless I think that Apple has done a fantastic job!
