What is wrong with the Finder as it is now? Nothing.
Also, everyone stop moaning about the transparent menu bar! It can be turned off! Dont use that as a reason to do a bit of Leopard bashing! I think Leopards newly announced features are great, but not as big as we all expected.
If people are complaining about the Dock "shelf" and transparent menu bar Apple has done well. Those have to be the most trivial of issues. I'm surprised people are extending such effort.
It has dreadful networking...and image previewing isn't great...
Quick look and improved Autofs
Both those issues are fixed in Leopard, and people are still moaning...
I'm guessing that some people just like to complain. It makes them feel good to release a bit of tension. This isn't always MacRumors it's MacCounseling.
As for Leopard. I'll say this bluntly. I could see not upgrading if you have a fairly slow G4. If you have a G5 and up and more imporantly a good GPU in your computer you are C-R-A-Z-Y not to upgrade.
The UI in Leopard is rendered over a dedicated thread to the GPU. OS X 10.4.x and other other version prior will NEVER be as fast as a Leopard Mac with UI rendering.
I use
Spotlight sparingly because it's a bit slow. That's gone...it's fast and supports boolean searches. Plus I can search shared computers connected via Bonjour. That's a substantial upgrade.
Quick look. I think Preview basically sucks. The only reason why I use it is because it loads faster than Acrobat Reader or any other image viewer I have. With Quick look I don't have to open anything.
1. Choose file
2. Press Spacebar
Done. Come on folks this is a usability homerun.
I want to automate more of my computer and while Jobs didn't give any attention to it Automator 2 now is faster and more flexible and has a recorder that records your "actions" (like the old Applescript recorder but better). I'm definitely going to put it to use.
Finder- It doesn't beachball as much (yay) it doesn't freeze when umounting network volumes (double yay) and it manages my media better. Multithreading should improve so that large file copies don't suck either.
Quicktime- Not shown....new video capturing features based on new 64-bit API. Apple will likely talk about this more when Leopard officially ships.
Mail- forget the HTML emails..that's not what you should be looking at. It's the return of Apple Data Detectors. Being able to make calendar events, add contacts from email is huge to me. The easy way to make notes and To Dos is a productivity bonanza for me.
Now I understand peoples frustration. Steve Jobs said there would be "Top Secret" features and you started thinking about nuclear powered Macs with 42" OLED screens with Bluetooth 4.0. That's not happening. What "is" happening is an impressive sweeting of Mac OS X that easily exceeds the improvements we saw going from 10.3-10.4. I predict Leopard will be with us for 3 years. Apple's going to have to really make 10.6 very good if they want to get people off of a mature Leopard because it has so many features and new frameworks that are going to make app creation and performance keen.
This counseling session is Pro Bono...I may have to charge you guys next time
😉