I've been using Leopard since the GM was released on Usenet. I don't want to debate the legality of it, basically it came down to timing: I had three days off this week (Wednesday-Friday), I had pre-ordered Leopard from Apple but since it was scheduled to arrive on Friday, I figured my time off would be much better spent installing Leopard on Wednesday and having a few days to play around with it, rather than waiting until today. I had already purchased Leopard from Apple so I basically just got two days early. Is that ethical? Whatever - I certainly didn't lose any sleep over it. 
Anyway I started off by completely wiping my drive and doing a clean install. But now that I've had a few days to use Leopard, I'm sorry to say that I'm more than a little disappointed - in fact I kind of wish I could go back to Tiger.
The biggest problem I've had is not actually Apple's fault, but it's still a problem that started only after installing Leopard: Lightroom 1.2's performance in Leopard is absolutely ABYSMAL when using the "Automatically write changes to XMP" function; it worked just fine in Tiger. I had installed LR in Tiger when my iMac first arrived, and I was blown out by how fast it was - light years ahead of my old Windows rig. After installing again in Leopard and re-importing the same image library, it just crawls. iStat Nano shows it using 100% of one of my cores, even still it it unusably slow. Bringing up a folder in LR which contains 11 .PSDs, it takes about three minutes for LR to display the 11 thumbnails clearly. Three minutes!! Obviously a big problem, hopefully one that Adobe will fix soon. I don't know how they could've let this happen in the first place, it's not like they haven't had access to all of the developer builds so far, and I can't image Apple changing things so drastically in the GM version - whatever. Big disappointment.
Now on to Leopard itself. Please bear in mind that this is my first Mac, and that I only had about two weeks of experience with Tiger before installing Leopard. In those two weeks I didn't have a single problem with OSX or any of my apps, so maybe I was just lucky. Unfortunately I've had numerous app crashes in Leopard (mainly Finder) so hopefully Apple will take care of it soon.
CoverFlow/QuickView: I love these features, they're probably the two features in Leopard I was looking forward to the most. The good news is that they work really well, most of the time. Unfortunately they also hang/crash Finder quite a bit (this behavior is very easy to duplicate) and so I have to say that they have really been a let down. QuickView seems to randomly choke on PSD documents ... It appears to be random but the same files crash Finder every time. Nothing special about the files, some were made on my WindowsXP machine, others on the iMac - I always keep "Maximize Compatibility" turned on in Photoshop, so that's not it. I don't know. There is no error message of any kind, but activating QuickView on any of these documents cause Finder to crash, every time. Preview also crashes when trying to open the 'bad' documents as well, although Photoshop can open them just fine. It's very odd - I've got dozens of PSDs in a folder, half of them show thumbnail previews, the others don't, half of them can be QuickView'd and the other half can't. All of them are from the same shoot, all of them were processed at the same time and on the same computer. So, what's the problem? BTW, if anyone wants to try this out for themselves, I've uploaded one 'problem' PSD to my site, you can download it here: Finder crasher (2MB ZIP)
Stacks: I am terribly disappointed with Apple on this one; sacrificing usability for the sake of eye-candy (that doesn't even work that well!) is pretty pathetic, IMO. There are three things I absolutely hate about Stacks.
First, the Stacks icon in the dock shows not only the folder, but the first item in the folder as well. For example, if you place your Utilities folder in the dock, you'll see a blue folder icon and on top of that, the Activity Monitor icon. Well, maybe that's ok for most people, but I can't stand it!! I like to be able to customize my icons, and since the Stacks icon in the dock always shows one icon overlayed on top of another, customization is not possible.
Second: In Tiger, right-clicking a folder in the dock showed a list of the folder's contents; mousing over a subfolder automatically expanded it to the right - a proper, hierarchal view. So if you had your Applications folder in the dock (for example) you could launch any application in two clicks, even if that application was buried in a subfolder somewhere. Kind of like how Adobe insists on installing Photoshop in a folder called 'Adobe Photoshop' in the Applications folder, instead of putting Photoshop.app directly in the Applications folder with everything else.
That was Tiger, where folders in the dock were easy to navigate, the list view popping up instantly with a right-click. Now on to Leopard, where Stacks has made the same tasks a major PITA. Opening a stack in grid view is pretty smooth on my machine (the animation, I mean) but once it's open, I'm only able to see some of the items in the folder (if there are too many) and if any of the items are folders, clicking on them simply opens the folder in Finder. What's the point of that? So back to my Photoshop example: if I have my Applications folder in the dock and I want to launch Photoshop, I have to click on the stack, find the Adobe Photoshop folder and click on it, at which point the stack window closes and a new Finder window appears showing the contents of the Adobe Photoshop folder, where I can then click on Photoshop.app to launch it. Oh, and then I have to close the new Finder window. What a convoluted PITA!! In Tiger, the same process was a two-click affair - simple and quick. Now it takes twice as many clicks and a heck of a lot more time. Maybe Stacks are nice for some situations, but at least give people the option to revert to the old, efficient method of using folders in the dock.
The new menu bar: I've disabled this new "feature" by adding a window title bar strip (from a screenshot) to the top of my favorite wallpaper, because straight out-of-the-box, I found it annoying as hell. The problem isn't that it doesn't look cool when your wallpaper is visible, it's that when you open a window fullscreen, the menu bar looks terrible next to the smooth metal window title bar directly underneath it. Maybe a minor thing for most people, and it's relatively easy to fix - I just shouldn't have to fix it.
I guess that's it for my Leopard rant. I hope Apple takes care of the problem with Finder crashing with QuickView/CoverFlow because they're really useful features that I'd love to use. Has anyone else been having any Leopard problems like these ... ?
Anyway I started off by completely wiping my drive and doing a clean install. But now that I've had a few days to use Leopard, I'm sorry to say that I'm more than a little disappointed - in fact I kind of wish I could go back to Tiger.
The biggest problem I've had is not actually Apple's fault, but it's still a problem that started only after installing Leopard: Lightroom 1.2's performance in Leopard is absolutely ABYSMAL when using the "Automatically write changes to XMP" function; it worked just fine in Tiger. I had installed LR in Tiger when my iMac first arrived, and I was blown out by how fast it was - light years ahead of my old Windows rig. After installing again in Leopard and re-importing the same image library, it just crawls. iStat Nano shows it using 100% of one of my cores, even still it it unusably slow. Bringing up a folder in LR which contains 11 .PSDs, it takes about three minutes for LR to display the 11 thumbnails clearly. Three minutes!! Obviously a big problem, hopefully one that Adobe will fix soon. I don't know how they could've let this happen in the first place, it's not like they haven't had access to all of the developer builds so far, and I can't image Apple changing things so drastically in the GM version - whatever. Big disappointment.
Now on to Leopard itself. Please bear in mind that this is my first Mac, and that I only had about two weeks of experience with Tiger before installing Leopard. In those two weeks I didn't have a single problem with OSX or any of my apps, so maybe I was just lucky. Unfortunately I've had numerous app crashes in Leopard (mainly Finder) so hopefully Apple will take care of it soon.
CoverFlow/QuickView: I love these features, they're probably the two features in Leopard I was looking forward to the most. The good news is that they work really well, most of the time. Unfortunately they also hang/crash Finder quite a bit (this behavior is very easy to duplicate) and so I have to say that they have really been a let down. QuickView seems to randomly choke on PSD documents ... It appears to be random but the same files crash Finder every time. Nothing special about the files, some were made on my WindowsXP machine, others on the iMac - I always keep "Maximize Compatibility" turned on in Photoshop, so that's not it. I don't know. There is no error message of any kind, but activating QuickView on any of these documents cause Finder to crash, every time. Preview also crashes when trying to open the 'bad' documents as well, although Photoshop can open them just fine. It's very odd - I've got dozens of PSDs in a folder, half of them show thumbnail previews, the others don't, half of them can be QuickView'd and the other half can't. All of them are from the same shoot, all of them were processed at the same time and on the same computer. So, what's the problem?
BTW, if anyone wants to try this out for themselves, I've uploaded one 'problem' PSD to my site, you can download it here: Finder crasher (2MB ZIP)Stacks: I am terribly disappointed with Apple on this one; sacrificing usability for the sake of eye-candy (that doesn't even work that well!) is pretty pathetic, IMO. There are three things I absolutely hate about Stacks.
First, the Stacks icon in the dock shows not only the folder, but the first item in the folder as well. For example, if you place your Utilities folder in the dock, you'll see a blue folder icon and on top of that, the Activity Monitor icon. Well, maybe that's ok for most people, but I can't stand it!! I like to be able to customize my icons, and since the Stacks icon in the dock always shows one icon overlayed on top of another, customization is not possible.
Second: In Tiger, right-clicking a folder in the dock showed a list of the folder's contents; mousing over a subfolder automatically expanded it to the right - a proper, hierarchal view. So if you had your Applications folder in the dock (for example) you could launch any application in two clicks, even if that application was buried in a subfolder somewhere. Kind of like how Adobe insists on installing Photoshop in a folder called 'Adobe Photoshop' in the Applications folder, instead of putting Photoshop.app directly in the Applications folder with everything else.
That was Tiger, where folders in the dock were easy to navigate, the list view popping up instantly with a right-click. Now on to Leopard, where Stacks has made the same tasks a major PITA. Opening a stack in grid view is pretty smooth on my machine (the animation, I mean) but once it's open, I'm only able to see some of the items in the folder (if there are too many) and if any of the items are folders, clicking on them simply opens the folder in Finder. What's the point of that? So back to my Photoshop example: if I have my Applications folder in the dock and I want to launch Photoshop, I have to click on the stack, find the Adobe Photoshop folder and click on it, at which point the stack window closes and a new Finder window appears showing the contents of the Adobe Photoshop folder, where I can then click on Photoshop.app to launch it. Oh, and then I have to close the new Finder window. What a convoluted PITA!! In Tiger, the same process was a two-click affair - simple and quick. Now it takes twice as many clicks and a heck of a lot more time. Maybe Stacks are nice for some situations, but at least give people the option to revert to the old, efficient method of using folders in the dock.
The new menu bar: I've disabled this new "feature" by adding a window title bar strip (from a screenshot) to the top of my favorite wallpaper, because straight out-of-the-box, I found it annoying as hell. The problem isn't that it doesn't look cool when your wallpaper is visible, it's that when you open a window fullscreen, the menu bar looks terrible next to the smooth metal window title bar directly underneath it. Maybe a minor thing for most people, and it's relatively easy to fix - I just shouldn't have to fix it.
I guess that's it for my Leopard rant. I hope Apple takes care of the problem with Finder crashing with QuickView/CoverFlow because they're really useful features that I'd love to use. Has anyone else been having any Leopard problems like these ... ?
