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Mac OS X Leopard: First Impressions
- Thread starter arn
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jellomizer
macrumors 6502
First Impressions...
Problems with update install... My FileVault got corrupted (after the install then I logged out), also during my first install every app was running choppy and poorly. Being that it was now useless I reformatting and reinstalled everything....
So first impressions pretty bad..
Second Install... After clean install things seem to run much snappier then before (it may be the OS, without the file system problems, or perhaps without 3 years worth of configurations) It really speeds along quite well. Photoshop CS3 works fine, so does Office X rosetta.
Parallels seems to run quicker but when I did reload of my system I also decided to wipe out my boot camp and go with Parallels straight. And a year old Version of windows was reinstalled. While doing work with Photoshop I got some minor glitches... For example after a while I was taking small images, flipping them vertically, transparancy 50 and sizing them 1/3 the size, after a while the textbox for shrinking the size seemed to get messed up...
The Semi-Transparent Menu Bar... I looks nice with no windows but with applications running it seems out of place especially when photoshop is running.
The Dock its Ok I normally have it set for Auto Hide (Also makes sure when you run Parallels in Coherence mode the full screen is used not a floating menu bar above the dock... (I don't know if it did the same thing in tiger because I normally had the dock hidden)
Stacks I kinda like them I hid my Harddrive and replace it with a stack. I like it it keeps my desktop really clean.
Spaces this is a much improved version of what Linux and Unix has to offer. You can even run expose in the stacks to find all your apps. I would still like an icon preview of the spaces though like most Linux Distributions have.
iCal icon changing to fit the date... I like that a lot.
Time Machine... I am still backing up... The thing that bothered me was the fact I needed to reformat it.... I was using it for a backup before so I had to move the data to my system reformat it then run backup again... Once it is done Ill remove my Backup Data (after checking to see if it works) because it barely fits in my drive... Babylon 5 all episodes take up a lot of space. I hoped it would create an HFS imagefile on the Fat 32 drive so it will work fine without having to clear its current contents.
The new finder. Cover Flow and Quick View is nice It is a help sorting thew a lot of jumbled information. As for all the time use probably not I like to see files the old fashion way... But it is a nice tool in my arsenal.
The New Icons they are high resolution like you can see what they are showing very clearly.. The embossed look looks nice but I liked the color versions better it is easier to eyeball.
Clipping websites for the dashboard, I found it to be somewhat useful... The trick I found is to use Google Widgets for iGoogle then they fit nicely and look good too. I have a nice email checker that actually works behind a stupid content blocker firewall that stops mail.google.com
After the inital problems it seemed to work fairly good. But I see more room for improvements.
Problems with update install... My FileVault got corrupted (after the install then I logged out), also during my first install every app was running choppy and poorly. Being that it was now useless I reformatting and reinstalled everything....
So first impressions pretty bad..
Second Install... After clean install things seem to run much snappier then before (it may be the OS, without the file system problems, or perhaps without 3 years worth of configurations) It really speeds along quite well. Photoshop CS3 works fine, so does Office X rosetta.
Parallels seems to run quicker but when I did reload of my system I also decided to wipe out my boot camp and go with Parallels straight. And a year old Version of windows was reinstalled. While doing work with Photoshop I got some minor glitches... For example after a while I was taking small images, flipping them vertically, transparancy 50 and sizing them 1/3 the size, after a while the textbox for shrinking the size seemed to get messed up...
The Semi-Transparent Menu Bar... I looks nice with no windows but with applications running it seems out of place especially when photoshop is running.
The Dock its Ok I normally have it set for Auto Hide (Also makes sure when you run Parallels in Coherence mode the full screen is used not a floating menu bar above the dock... (I don't know if it did the same thing in tiger because I normally had the dock hidden)
Stacks I kinda like them I hid my Harddrive and replace it with a stack. I like it it keeps my desktop really clean.
Spaces this is a much improved version of what Linux and Unix has to offer. You can even run expose in the stacks to find all your apps. I would still like an icon preview of the spaces though like most Linux Distributions have.
iCal icon changing to fit the date... I like that a lot.
Time Machine... I am still backing up... The thing that bothered me was the fact I needed to reformat it.... I was using it for a backup before so I had to move the data to my system reformat it then run backup again... Once it is done Ill remove my Backup Data (after checking to see if it works) because it barely fits in my drive... Babylon 5 all episodes take up a lot of space. I hoped it would create an HFS imagefile on the Fat 32 drive so it will work fine without having to clear its current contents.
The new finder. Cover Flow and Quick View is nice It is a help sorting thew a lot of jumbled information. As for all the time use probably not I like to see files the old fashion way... But it is a nice tool in my arsenal.
The New Icons they are high resolution like you can see what they are showing very clearly.. The embossed look looks nice but I liked the color versions better it is easier to eyeball.
Clipping websites for the dashboard, I found it to be somewhat useful... The trick I found is to use Google Widgets for iGoogle then they fit nicely and look good too. I have a nice email checker that actually works behind a stupid content blocker firewall that stops mail.google.com
After the inital problems it seemed to work fairly good. But I see more room for improvements.
vi2867
macrumors 6502a
My machine has been freezing up with all applications. I have had Leopard installed since last Saturday morning. I am thinking of doing a complete re-install again.
It has frozen with Parallels, Safari, iCal, iTunes, and Mail. I am able to use other applications, but the frozen application will stay frozen until I do hard reboot.
I have a MacBook 2.0gHz, 2GB, 120HD. I just don't understand why it is doing this.😕
It has frozen with Parallels, Safari, iCal, iTunes, and Mail. I am able to use other applications, but the frozen application will stay frozen until I do hard reboot.
I have a MacBook 2.0gHz, 2GB, 120HD. I just don't understand why it is doing this.😕
boooo
Apple rushed this OS out, clearly. I've been having nothing but problems, freezes and slowdowns on 2 machines I installed it on. This is to atypical of Apple, it scares me to think that they're headed down the same path as Windows. This is the whole reason I switched back in 2001, to avoid the very kind of poor development of Windows. Sure, this is still better than Vista, but its nowhere near as good as the last several OS releases over the past few years.
Apple rushed this OS out, clearly. I've been having nothing but problems, freezes and slowdowns on 2 machines I installed it on. This is to atypical of Apple, it scares me to think that they're headed down the same path as Windows. This is the whole reason I switched back in 2001, to avoid the very kind of poor development of Windows. Sure, this is still better than Vista, but its nowhere near as good as the last several OS releases over the past few years.
BilltheCat
macrumors regular
I have had a 100% trouble free install. I did delete DivX first however. I did notice that my Neo Office wouldnt start right up like it used to. So I went to the web site and found I had quite an older version. I updated it to 2.22 and it's golden now.
I really like spaces. Its really cool! I did a time machine backup onto an ext drive also. very nice. iTunes worked fine for me. All my apps seems ok except for Google earth it will not run. It starts and then quits with an 'unexpected error' note.
Bummer. I shall try a reinstall
I really like spaces. Its really cool! I did a time machine backup onto an ext drive also. very nice. iTunes worked fine for me. All my apps seems ok except for Google earth it will not run. It starts and then quits with an 'unexpected error' note.
Bummer. I shall try a reinstall
Leopard - Hear me roar on a G4 1.5 GHz
I took the plunge to be part of the 9% (or so they say at the time of writing this) of Mac OS X early adopters. With Tiger I waited a while. I figured with Leopard, why not. Check here for some of my experiences of running on a PowerBook G4 with 1.5 Ghz processor.
I have to confess, I was a bit worried about that being on an older 1.5 GHz powerPC they old Leopard may run more like a slow dog than a sleek cat...
The Install - I had read that this should take a few hours. I was surprised when I thought It was going to take about 30 mins.... but that must have been the first step of copying/unzipping the files. The next step took a couple of hours. I am not exactly sure as I walked away. That said, when I cam back Roarrrrrrr... I was ready to go!
I am going to try and keep this article up to date with my experiences.
I'd be interested on other folks impression of it running on a Power PC.
I took the plunge to be part of the 9% (or so they say at the time of writing this) of Mac OS X early adopters. With Tiger I waited a while. I figured with Leopard, why not. Check here for some of my experiences of running on a PowerBook G4 with 1.5 Ghz processor.
I have to confess, I was a bit worried about that being on an older 1.5 GHz powerPC they old Leopard may run more like a slow dog than a sleek cat...
The Install - I had read that this should take a few hours. I was surprised when I thought It was going to take about 30 mins.... but that must have been the first step of copying/unzipping the files. The next step took a couple of hours. I am not exactly sure as I walked away. That said, when I cam back Roarrrrrrr... I was ready to go!
I am going to try and keep this article up to date with my experiences.
I'd be interested on other folks impression of it running on a Power PC.
goodtimes5
macrumors 6502a
I don't know what's wrong with the computers people are getting freezes on. My MBP with pretty typical applications installed on it did the simple upgrade to Leopard just fine. Everything is running the same, if not better and faster.
DaBrain
macrumors 65816
Well here's how my update went:
Received Leopard today!--))) Cloned Tiger in the meantime to my new mini-stack V3 750 Gig drive via firewire! Sweet and worked like a charm using the Free Carbon Copy Cloner software! Awesome!
Installed Leopard via the default upgrade option. I by passed verifying the DVD and install took approximately 1 hour. I did this on my original Intel Core Duo iMac.
I don't see what all the complaining is about the dock, transparency bla bla bla!
Im very happy and content so far. I like the new stationary in mail, imported a few pics and sent off a test email with the greatest of ease!
Time machine could not be any easier to set up.
Played just a wee bit so far with Spaces!
Now verifying my applications function ok.
Only one so far and I knew in advance didn't work was Pith Helmet.
This is a helluva lot easier and smoother than when I use to update windows!
Apple did a Great Job for a 10.5."0" release!
I hope all of you that upgrade find the same experience that I have! 😀
Check and see if you have a Movies widget in your user ~/Library/Widgets folder, that you installed before Leopard. If so delete it, and Dashboard will use the newly installed on at /Library/Widgets., which will work.
-mpm
daneoni
macrumors G5
Just installed two days ago on another partition (didn't want to mess up my perfect Tiger installation) and installation took about 24 minutes. Thus far its running smooth but some caveats with the stacks thing. For example why can't you clear/trash the download lists from the dock but rather have to go in finder and do that.
Also i'm not the hugest fan of the dock...i think Apple could have done better. Also think the new grey theme could have been a little lighter in shade instead of the dark grey as it takes time for my eyes to adjust
Overall the system runs smooth (although i haven't really pushed it) and has pep. Also seems to manage system resources more efficiently and most of my apps work seamlessly thus far.
Overall its pretty good but needs some getting used to
Also i'm not the hugest fan of the dock...i think Apple could have done better. Also think the new grey theme could have been a little lighter in shade instead of the dark grey as it takes time for my eyes to adjust
Overall the system runs smooth (although i haven't really pushed it) and has pep. Also seems to manage system resources more efficiently and most of my apps work seamlessly thus far.
Overall its pretty good but needs some getting used to
Foxglove9
macrumors 68000
Ok, so I finally got to install Leopard yesterday morning. This is on a mid-2007 MacBook w/ 2GB Ram and a brand new 200GB 7200RPM Hard Drive. So it's a clean install.
Installation went fine. Though I did have to reformat my drive to GUID partition, which I never had to do before on a new hard drive. But it was easy enough.
Now about the OS... Definitely needs more work. On my MacBook things are sluggish. Most noticeably my mouse cursor with my Bluetooth mouse is very choppy. That reason alone almost makes this OS unuseable for me if my mouse can't move smoothly across the screen. There are no apps running, Spotlight is finished, RAM is okay, CPU usage is normal, and Time Machine is turned off. I changed my dock to the right side and that improved overall performance but not the choppy mouse.
Next major gripe is similar what everyone else is saying. The overall appearance. The menu bars on all the windows are way too dark and difficult to almost impossible to read. Most noticeable in Safari, I can barely read the tabs. By the end of the day yesterday my eyes were hurting badly from strain. What it seems like the foreground window menu bar gets dark while the background windows stay light. That doesn't make sense, and hopefully will be fixed because I definitely can't have headaches all day from eye strain.
The new Finder window, left hand column text is very hard to read and way too small. I don't mind the format but need to make the text bigger.
The translucency on pull down windows is terrible. Also very difficult to easily see what I'm looking at. Should be such a struggle to read something.
My fans definitely kick in A LOT more now. I'm guessing this OS really uses more resources than Tiger did because I never heard the fans on Tiger unless I was watching video clips.
Safari is about the same as it was in Tiger. I don't notice any speed increase at all in any application.
Coverflow, Quicklook, Preview, Spaces, Expose, Widgets, all animate pretty smooth still. Sometimes I get a little stutter, on occassion.
The 3D dock was cooler than I thought it would be but I prefer the side bar dock. I don't understand why it now has a darker background and white border. Very ugly and takes up more space than before. I also miss the ability to right click folders in the dock. And Stacks maybe has potential but everyone has already covered all the issues with that.
I love that I can take movie clips with Photobooth. Could I do that in Tiger, I had no idea! The backdrop overlay doesn't work at all without good lighting, but I'm okay with that.
Front Row is definitely better.
-Now the weird things.
In Safari, after a few hours usage, my tabs got chopped in half and couldn't fix it without restarting.
I got a Malware ad pop-up in Safari. Something I never got in all the time I've used Tiger (see pic)
After waking from sleep my bluetooth mouse stopped working. The computer said I don't have bluetooth equiped. WTF? A restart brought it back. (see pic)
There are some other things I don't like, and there are other things I do like (like iCal and Mail especially). Overall things feel more sluggish than before, I was hoping for a little more zip out of things on a 3 month old computer but for an initial release I guess things aren't so bad. The biggest issues I have are the visual changes that Apple made. To me it's a big step down.
Just hope updates come fast and furious 🙂
Installation went fine. Though I did have to reformat my drive to GUID partition, which I never had to do before on a new hard drive. But it was easy enough.
Now about the OS... Definitely needs more work. On my MacBook things are sluggish. Most noticeably my mouse cursor with my Bluetooth mouse is very choppy. That reason alone almost makes this OS unuseable for me if my mouse can't move smoothly across the screen. There are no apps running, Spotlight is finished, RAM is okay, CPU usage is normal, and Time Machine is turned off. I changed my dock to the right side and that improved overall performance but not the choppy mouse.
Next major gripe is similar what everyone else is saying. The overall appearance. The menu bars on all the windows are way too dark and difficult to almost impossible to read. Most noticeable in Safari, I can barely read the tabs. By the end of the day yesterday my eyes were hurting badly from strain. What it seems like the foreground window menu bar gets dark while the background windows stay light. That doesn't make sense, and hopefully will be fixed because I definitely can't have headaches all day from eye strain.
The new Finder window, left hand column text is very hard to read and way too small. I don't mind the format but need to make the text bigger.
The translucency on pull down windows is terrible. Also very difficult to easily see what I'm looking at. Should be such a struggle to read something.
My fans definitely kick in A LOT more now. I'm guessing this OS really uses more resources than Tiger did because I never heard the fans on Tiger unless I was watching video clips.
Safari is about the same as it was in Tiger. I don't notice any speed increase at all in any application.
Coverflow, Quicklook, Preview, Spaces, Expose, Widgets, all animate pretty smooth still. Sometimes I get a little stutter, on occassion.
The 3D dock was cooler than I thought it would be but I prefer the side bar dock. I don't understand why it now has a darker background and white border. Very ugly and takes up more space than before. I also miss the ability to right click folders in the dock. And Stacks maybe has potential but everyone has already covered all the issues with that.
I love that I can take movie clips with Photobooth. Could I do that in Tiger, I had no idea! The backdrop overlay doesn't work at all without good lighting, but I'm okay with that.
Front Row is definitely better.
-Now the weird things.
In Safari, after a few hours usage, my tabs got chopped in half and couldn't fix it without restarting.
I got a Malware ad pop-up in Safari. Something I never got in all the time I've used Tiger (see pic)
After waking from sleep my bluetooth mouse stopped working. The computer said I don't have bluetooth equiped. WTF? A restart brought it back. (see pic)
There are some other things I don't like, and there are other things I do like (like iCal and Mail especially). Overall things feel more sluggish than before, I was hoping for a little more zip out of things on a 3 month old computer but for an initial release I guess things aren't so bad. The biggest issues I have are the visual changes that Apple made. To me it's a big step down.
Just hope updates come fast and furious 🙂
Attachments
Finally Up an running.
I ended up doing a archive and install and deleting the 'previous system' folder straight away after an upgrade failed.
But its all running very smoothly now, i have to say the clear menu thing isnt an issue for me, i hardly notice the change tbh. The dock is ok not so much of an improvement but not a down point. I dont mind the little blue dots under the dock, although i only have 15 icons stretched across the bottom om my macbook so the dock might be alot bigger than other ppls.
Time machine is almost flawless - apart from the fact it takes SOOOOO long to back up the first time.
Stacks are ok, nice addition for someone who never used to really have folders in the dock so didnt lose any functionality. BUT YOU CANT TURN OFF ICON PREVIEW IN A STACK!!! I hope i just haven't found the tick box, if not someone please let me know. (ive already turned it off in folders)
Spotlight is the real winner for me- so fast, and built in dictionary and calculator saves me many a F12 press.
Spaces- itd be nice if they separated the cmd-tab menu's its pointless otherwise, you might as well stick with cmd-tab and cmd-H...same thing really...
Quick look is ok, but it needs to have better full-screen management, ie alt-space should start fullscreen, and the horizontal arrows should change file even in filescreen, while the up and down can flip pages/slides.
Overall- pretty good, not great though.
I ended up doing a archive and install and deleting the 'previous system' folder straight away after an upgrade failed.
But its all running very smoothly now, i have to say the clear menu thing isnt an issue for me, i hardly notice the change tbh. The dock is ok not so much of an improvement but not a down point. I dont mind the little blue dots under the dock, although i only have 15 icons stretched across the bottom om my macbook so the dock might be alot bigger than other ppls.
Time machine is almost flawless - apart from the fact it takes SOOOOO long to back up the first time.
Stacks are ok, nice addition for someone who never used to really have folders in the dock so didnt lose any functionality. BUT YOU CANT TURN OFF ICON PREVIEW IN A STACK!!! I hope i just haven't found the tick box, if not someone please let me know. (ive already turned it off in folders)
Spotlight is the real winner for me- so fast, and built in dictionary and calculator saves me many a F12 press.
Spaces- itd be nice if they separated the cmd-tab menu's its pointless otherwise, you might as well stick with cmd-tab and cmd-H...same thing really...
Quick look is ok, but it needs to have better full-screen management, ie alt-space should start fullscreen, and the horizontal arrows should change file even in filescreen, while the up and down can flip pages/slides.
Overall- pretty good, not great though.
dukebound85
macrumors Core
to those with stacks and the preview.....just make an alias of the folder and it will then work like tiger (except in regard to rightclicking and showing everything in a list)
yeah but no
But then id lose the stacks functionality and tidiness..oh well.
And also can safari please ad ctrl tab like firefox, its the only thing holding me back from making the switch.
EDIT: I may have misread you earlier post, it works all i did was create a new folder and cmd-alt drag the contents of the original one into this one, to create alias' of all the movies, then put this in the dock. then run
$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources
$ sudo mv AliasBadgeIcon.icns AliasBadgeIcon_OFF.icns
$ killall Finder
$ killall Dock
To get rid of those annoying alias arrows.
But then id lose the stacks functionality and tidiness..oh well.
And also can safari please ad ctrl tab like firefox, its the only thing holding me back from making the switch.
EDIT: I may have misread you earlier post, it works all i did was create a new folder and cmd-alt drag the contents of the original one into this one, to create alias' of all the movies, then put this in the dock. then run
$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources
$ sudo mv AliasBadgeIcon.icns AliasBadgeIcon_OFF.icns
$ killall Finder
$ killall Dock
To get rid of those annoying alias arrows.
shift-command-[ & shift-command-]
These two commands do the same thing in Safari. Try it for a few days, you might like it!
ah- thought there might be a way. but still requires 2 hands... And is there a way to add multiple search engines to the search bar?
stcanard
macrumors 65816
Okay my general impressions:
Install was flawless on both my Intel and PowerPC systems. I started the intel install, had a nap, woke up to the "bing" of the system restarting and had a working Leopard system. Not much better than that!
TimeMachine is slick -- I was already doing rsync / hardlink backups to a remote server but this is better since it will handle a shutdown or interruption mid-backup (basically I just don't have to think about it) and restore interface is worth it.
Spaces ... are kind of meh. But that's because I have never been a fan of virtual desktops. The implementation is among the nicest I've seen, it will probably be useful for Aperture / Gimp work, but I can really take or leave it.
Screen sharing ... great idea using VNC, a bit of a sloppy execution. It works great on a local network, but I can't get the server to accept a request for 8 bit colour depth, so its useless across the internet. I will have to turn it off and go back to OSX VNC
Quick look / Cover flow -- I love quick look, that's great. Cover flow, we'll have to see. I could see it being useful, but most of the time I'm looking for a file I use spotlight. (Spotlight seems much more responsive)
The new dock -- meh. I keep mine on the left side, pinned to the bottom, so I don't get the glass look. I'm not crazy about the new, flat look I liked the old one better.
Stacks -- meh. I've never been one to put folders in the dock, so the behaviour change doesn't bug me much. I have a tiny dock with magnification, so scrubbing with tool tips doesn't lose me anything on icons I can't see. Plus on the side I don't get true stacks anyway.
I had thought it would be incredibly useful to put something like the desktop in there so I could pop up the list of items and quicklook through to find what I was looking for, but stupidly quick look doesn't work on the popup. So I give that a double-meh. Essentially I'm not using a new feature that I didn't have before (yeah, walk through that double negative!)
I was disturbed that Archive and Install caused Aperture to lose its registration, and I had to put the serial number back in again. Surely Apple can handle that better?
So on the surface not a huge gain for me -- Time Machine is a better implementation of something I was already doing. The rest of the visible stuff I really don't care about.
I have to admit to being a bit underwhelmed on this one -- Panther / Tiger seemed like bigger jumps. I am curious to see how some of the under-the-hood changes affect applications in the near future.
Install was flawless on both my Intel and PowerPC systems. I started the intel install, had a nap, woke up to the "bing" of the system restarting and had a working Leopard system. Not much better than that!
TimeMachine is slick -- I was already doing rsync / hardlink backups to a remote server but this is better since it will handle a shutdown or interruption mid-backup (basically I just don't have to think about it) and restore interface is worth it.
Spaces ... are kind of meh. But that's because I have never been a fan of virtual desktops. The implementation is among the nicest I've seen, it will probably be useful for Aperture / Gimp work, but I can really take or leave it.
Screen sharing ... great idea using VNC, a bit of a sloppy execution. It works great on a local network, but I can't get the server to accept a request for 8 bit colour depth, so its useless across the internet. I will have to turn it off and go back to OSX VNC
Quick look / Cover flow -- I love quick look, that's great. Cover flow, we'll have to see. I could see it being useful, but most of the time I'm looking for a file I use spotlight. (Spotlight seems much more responsive)
The new dock -- meh. I keep mine on the left side, pinned to the bottom, so I don't get the glass look. I'm not crazy about the new, flat look I liked the old one better.
Stacks -- meh. I've never been one to put folders in the dock, so the behaviour change doesn't bug me much. I have a tiny dock with magnification, so scrubbing with tool tips doesn't lose me anything on icons I can't see. Plus on the side I don't get true stacks anyway.
I had thought it would be incredibly useful to put something like the desktop in there so I could pop up the list of items and quicklook through to find what I was looking for, but stupidly quick look doesn't work on the popup. So I give that a double-meh. Essentially I'm not using a new feature that I didn't have before (yeah, walk through that double negative!)
I was disturbed that Archive and Install caused Aperture to lose its registration, and I had to put the serial number back in again. Surely Apple can handle that better?
So on the surface not a huge gain for me -- Time Machine is a better implementation of something I was already doing. The rest of the visible stuff I really don't care about.
I have to admit to being a bit underwhelmed on this one -- Panther / Tiger seemed like bigger jumps. I am curious to see how some of the under-the-hood changes affect applications in the near future.
ntrigue
macrumors 68040
Leopard OSX: Don't be sad, be glad!
It always kills me to see the 'internet effect' on reviews. Most users are only going to take the time on a forum to express the broken, lost, or failed.
My hobby this evening has solidified my love for Leopard! I was downloading new songs, videos, and movies. I utilized Pixelmator, Handbrake, Quicktime, Spaces, Stacks, Quickview, iTunes, and Grab. Essentially, I froze the videos in order to create new Artwork in iTunes and the process went wonderfully!
As indicated above Quickview was likely the most powerful tool here. But, Stacks was also a critical piece.
For the first time I felt a terrific increase in productivity using Leopard's functionality.
Apple User (1992-1999) > XP User (1999-2006) > Apple User (2006-INFINITY)
It always kills me to see the 'internet effect' on reviews. Most users are only going to take the time on a forum to express the broken, lost, or failed.
My hobby this evening has solidified my love for Leopard! I was downloading new songs, videos, and movies. I utilized Pixelmator, Handbrake, Quicktime, Spaces, Stacks, Quickview, iTunes, and Grab. Essentially, I froze the videos in order to create new Artwork in iTunes and the process went wonderfully!
As indicated above Quickview was likely the most powerful tool here. But, Stacks was also a critical piece.
For the first time I felt a terrific increase in productivity using Leopard's functionality.
Apple User (1992-1999) > XP User (1999-2006) > Apple User (2006-INFINITY)
Hmmm ... so far I love Leopard ... including the new translucent menus ... don't have any problems whatsoever in reading them.
Leopard installation worked perfectly ... all apps are working ... no problems with Adobe CS3 ... can indeed make pdf's.
Hey, what's not to like ... just try Vista for a comparison.
Cheers
Doug
After a few weeks:
Generally I love it. The things that everyone have pointed out, like QuickLook, CoverFlow, the new Xcode and Interface Builder, Spaces - awesome.
I have some gripes though. I've listed some before, but this is definitely my biggest one:
Since the upgrade to Leopard, I seem to be faster than my keyboard in a number of cases. When typing 'iTunes' in Spotlight, it takes up to 15 seconds for the full text to appear.
Xcode 3 is great, but I'd love to input text at a faster pace than 3 characters per second. It's frustrating at times.
All this on a PowerBook 12" G4 1.5 GHz btw.
Generally I love it. The things that everyone have pointed out, like QuickLook, CoverFlow, the new Xcode and Interface Builder, Spaces - awesome.
I have some gripes though. I've listed some before, but this is definitely my biggest one:
Since the upgrade to Leopard, I seem to be faster than my keyboard in a number of cases. When typing 'iTunes' in Spotlight, it takes up to 15 seconds for the full text to appear.
Xcode 3 is great, but I'd love to input text at a faster pace than 3 characters per second. It's frustrating at times.
All this on a PowerBook 12" G4 1.5 GHz btw.
I just did an 'Archive & Install' from a dmg restored to an external USB drive.
I am not impressed.
Installation
Most. Useless. Progress bar. EVAR.
I mean 'Installing' for the entire duration? Could you not at least start off with 'Archiving old system' then move on to 'Installing new system' etc? Multiple times I thought the install had frozen because there were no updates on screen, the bar wasn't moving & of course there is no hard drive access light to see if anything is actually going on. It spent over 10 minutes on 'less than one minute'. I mean people talk about 'Microsoft Minutes' but these Apple ones really take the bacon.
First impressions
Reflective Dock = utterly retarded. Even when hacked into 2D mode it looks like ass.
Translucent menu bar = equally retarded.
New folder icons = euch.
My first look at the new desktop didn't instill confidence either;
Yes, that's a folder half-obscured beneath the new transulcent menu bar.
Also, shadows beneath windows are now stupidly large. It looks like somebody's punched the LCD (if you've never seen an LCD with pressure damage, it looks just like underneath these new windows).
Futher investigation
First of all, it told me it wanted to install some updates & would need to restart once it had done so. Okay, go ahead. Go on. No really. Oh, you've hung instead. Say hello to Mr Hard Reset again!
Trackball driver (Kensington MouseWorks) & Keyboard layout (UK QWERTY) were both missing & had to be re-installed.
MacFUSE had been removed & needed re-installing.
The little menu hack I had going to display hard drive activity lights on the menu have gone (not surprisingly, as a hack) but I can't remember what the program was called to get them bacl 🙁
The installer put all of the new apps in the root of the Applications folder, duplicating them all as I had organised the Applications folder into subsequent directories (such as 'Internet' & 'Media'). So I had to manually move & replace all of the apps.
su had been disabled & needed re-enabling.
I can no longer connect to my Debian fileserver over AFP. Not a clue why.
Anybody tried pulling up Spaces whilst holding [Shift]? It's jerkier than a 486 running Crisis.
Total of 5GB+ of Printers, Languages & PPC code that I had to weed out.
Good points? Well, it now keeps my keyboard choice when I'm in Opera (before, it would revert to Apple's layout every time I changed input field).
Conclusion?
Far from a fast, smooth, 'it just works' upgrade. It's taken me over 4 hours to do the installation, repair most things broke, re-install everything it deleted, & generally get the machine back into a state in which I can actually use it - & there are still things that need repairing further. I suppose I should be glad that the entire upgrade went off without anything drastically bad going wrong & bricking the entire machine.
My experience of Leopard so far certainly doesn't make me think it worth the sticker price of £85. Not even the student price of £75.
I am not impressed.
Installation
Most. Useless. Progress bar. EVAR.
I mean 'Installing' for the entire duration? Could you not at least start off with 'Archiving old system' then move on to 'Installing new system' etc? Multiple times I thought the install had frozen because there were no updates on screen, the bar wasn't moving & of course there is no hard drive access light to see if anything is actually going on. It spent over 10 minutes on 'less than one minute'. I mean people talk about 'Microsoft Minutes' but these Apple ones really take the bacon.
First impressions
Reflective Dock = utterly retarded. Even when hacked into 2D mode it looks like ass.
Translucent menu bar = equally retarded.
New folder icons = euch.
My first look at the new desktop didn't instill confidence either;
Yes, that's a folder half-obscured beneath the new transulcent menu bar.
Also, shadows beneath windows are now stupidly large. It looks like somebody's punched the LCD (if you've never seen an LCD with pressure damage, it looks just like underneath these new windows).
Futher investigation
First of all, it told me it wanted to install some updates & would need to restart once it had done so. Okay, go ahead. Go on. No really. Oh, you've hung instead. Say hello to Mr Hard Reset again!
Trackball driver (Kensington MouseWorks) & Keyboard layout (UK QWERTY) were both missing & had to be re-installed.
MacFUSE had been removed & needed re-installing.
The little menu hack I had going to display hard drive activity lights on the menu have gone (not surprisingly, as a hack) but I can't remember what the program was called to get them bacl 🙁
The installer put all of the new apps in the root of the Applications folder, duplicating them all as I had organised the Applications folder into subsequent directories (such as 'Internet' & 'Media'). So I had to manually move & replace all of the apps.
su had been disabled & needed re-enabling.
I can no longer connect to my Debian fileserver over AFP. Not a clue why.
Anybody tried pulling up Spaces whilst holding [Shift]? It's jerkier than a 486 running Crisis.
Total of 5GB+ of Printers, Languages & PPC code that I had to weed out.
Good points? Well, it now keeps my keyboard choice when I'm in Opera (before, it would revert to Apple's layout every time I changed input field).
Conclusion?
Far from a fast, smooth, 'it just works' upgrade. It's taken me over 4 hours to do the installation, repair most things broke, re-install everything it deleted, & generally get the machine back into a state in which I can actually use it - & there are still things that need repairing further. I suppose I should be glad that the entire upgrade went off without anything drastically bad going wrong & bricking the entire machine.
My experience of Leopard so far certainly doesn't make me think it worth the sticker price of £85. Not even the student price of £75.
Cloudane
macrumors 68000
You've never installed Office for Windows then 🙂 I think it was around Office 2000/2002... the joy of watching a progress bar finally reach the end - and then start again! About 6 or 7 times!
Ran into a few glitches at the outset, and an occasional bug will crop up. But, otherwise Leopard has been great for me so far. Most of the basic operations and the bootup in particular seem noticeably faster than with Tiger 10.4.10. I also notice that the CPU and memory usage seems lower when things are idle. While my white Intel iMac avoided a lot of the major installation glitches reported on this and other sites, the installation process had its own share of drama.
- numerous dialog boxes (software update, Time Machine enabling, premature reboot button) coming up simultaneously, and three of the software updates not installing and having to be installed manually later on.
- file system no longer readable after a few hours (doubt that this was Leopard's fault given that it happened once before).
- fixed the file system by restoring the drive volume using Time Machine (Disk Utility could not repair the file system, and the Tech Tool that came with Applecare has not been tested for Leopard)
As far as Time Machine goes, the restoration process was straight forward and took about 2 hours to restore 140 GB. But, once the drive was restored, everything was back to normal. I've had no issues with external drive mounting.
Thus far, I've encountered no major problems (i.e., blue screens, kernel panics, etc.), and in general my iMac seems to run basic operations quicker under Leopard than with Tiger. Also, it seems that as I've used the system more and updated more of my applications (Firefox in particular needed to be updated from 2.0.0.6 to 2.0.0.9), everything runs faster and more reliably than right after the Leopard install.
But, I have observed some other ongoing issues that hopefully future updates will resolve:
- Disk Utility sucks: repairing disk permissions takes forever, and cannot repair certain issues with Apple Remote Desktop; plus the drive info window does not fully display
- Finder still sucks: Some things have improved (like the cover flow view and a network search that no longer locks up the system if it can't find anything), but Finder is still a mess to navigate and will occasionally go into the spinning beachball and try one's patience (should I reboot or wait a few more minutes?)
- random beachballs: Most of the time when the system freezes, it just require patience, but a couple of times I couldn't do anything and had to reboot.
Given that aside from those occasional glitches Leopard is running smoothly for the most part, I wonder if the problems encountered are contingent on the which Mac people are using. I read a lot about problems with the aluminum iMacs, and the MacBooks. Are these problems with Leopard concentrated on some specific models, or is it just hit and miss depending on how people customize their Macs and the software installed?
- numerous dialog boxes (software update, Time Machine enabling, premature reboot button) coming up simultaneously, and three of the software updates not installing and having to be installed manually later on.
- file system no longer readable after a few hours (doubt that this was Leopard's fault given that it happened once before).
- fixed the file system by restoring the drive volume using Time Machine (Disk Utility could not repair the file system, and the Tech Tool that came with Applecare has not been tested for Leopard)
As far as Time Machine goes, the restoration process was straight forward and took about 2 hours to restore 140 GB. But, once the drive was restored, everything was back to normal. I've had no issues with external drive mounting.
Thus far, I've encountered no major problems (i.e., blue screens, kernel panics, etc.), and in general my iMac seems to run basic operations quicker under Leopard than with Tiger. Also, it seems that as I've used the system more and updated more of my applications (Firefox in particular needed to be updated from 2.0.0.6 to 2.0.0.9), everything runs faster and more reliably than right after the Leopard install.
But, I have observed some other ongoing issues that hopefully future updates will resolve:
- Disk Utility sucks: repairing disk permissions takes forever, and cannot repair certain issues with Apple Remote Desktop; plus the drive info window does not fully display
- Finder still sucks: Some things have improved (like the cover flow view and a network search that no longer locks up the system if it can't find anything), but Finder is still a mess to navigate and will occasionally go into the spinning beachball and try one's patience (should I reboot or wait a few more minutes?)
- random beachballs: Most of the time when the system freezes, it just require patience, but a couple of times I couldn't do anything and had to reboot.
Given that aside from those occasional glitches Leopard is running smoothly for the most part, I wonder if the problems encountered are contingent on the which Mac people are using. I read a lot about problems with the aluminum iMacs, and the MacBooks. Are these problems with Leopard concentrated on some specific models, or is it just hit and miss depending on how people customize their Macs and the software installed?