Brain Drippings

Mac OS 10.5, codename Leoaprd, has finally shipped. Apple delayed the release for 6 months because of the impending release of the iPhone back in June, so we’ve all been waiting a little longer than usual
for this release.

The question is, is the new release worth it? The short answer is a slightly qualified yes. The new OS is tighter, feels faster, and overall it feels like a more mature OS than Tiger. The new Finder will take a little bit of getting used to and I’m not sure that I like all the changes, but I don’t really dislike them much either.

The only things in Leopard that I really dislike is the new Dock and the stack metaphor, which is annoying because I’ve wanted stack (neé piles) for a long time. The trouble is, the implementation of stacks is exclusive to the dock and it is a bad implementation. It also disables the previous behavior of a folder in the dock, so it is impossible to navigate a hierarchy from a stack. The biggest gripe for me though, is the transparent menu bar which I think is just a horrible UI.

Otherwise, the changes are welcome. Networking is tighter and much easier to keep managed. The new system preferences make more sense (firewall settings are in the Security pane, for example, instead of the Sharing pane). As far as problems, I’ve had none.

There are some little issues that are annoying that I hope will be fixed in 10.5.1. For example, as much as I love Spaces, the mechanism for permanently adding an app to a specific page is very clumsy. Instead of having some option in the spaces menu like ‘bind all apps n this space to this space permanently” you have to go to the system prefs, click a ‘+’, navigate to the application, select it, and then choose a space to have it tied to. It’s not even smart enough to show you which space the app is currently on. You can’t set custom desktops for each space, and you can’t name the spaces, all of which would be nice additions. However,working with spaces is brilliant. My favorite little extra in spaces is that Exposé buttons work in spaces; so hit F8 to activate spaces and then hit F9 (or hit F9 and then hit F8, works the same).

Certainly there are no show stoppers. I’ve not installed Boot Camp yet, but all my apps are working just fine after and archive & install preserving users and settings.

Now, to figure out how to convince it to install on my G4 (2.0Ghz upgraded processor, but Leopard says it’s under 867 and won’t install).