Well… Leopard arrived this morning, and I have to admit it felt a bit like Christmas had came early! Having absolutely no self control, I just had to install it straight away.

The install process was totally painless, taking around half an hour to upgrade the existing installation of Tiger on my MacBook. Once complete, the machine rebooted and that was it. Totally painless, no problems whatsoever, and I was left on my new desktop.

Now my new desktop was very much the same as my old desktop, with a few notable differences - the menu bar no longer had rounded corners and was now semi-transparent and my dock was now a bit more 3D, with a few extra icons. Nothing too major.

In fact, one can be forgiven for being a bit underwhelmed by the upgrade - unlike upgrading versions of Windows, things still looked and functioned in what appeared to be the same way. Its not until I started poking around that I began to see the extent of the changes within Leopard.

than anything large, it is the little things which make Leopard worthwhile - Stacks in the dock make it easier to keep your desktop tidy, the many enhancements to Finder (notably CoverFlow and QuickLook) greatly enhance the experience of browsing and managing files and Spaces helps you to manage virtual desktops. You can now also create ad-hoc widgets from within Safari - which is quite neat, and which I will be blogging about later this week.

As of yet, I haven’t had a chance to try out the Time Machine, though I am hoping it will get me into the habit of backing up files.

Other enhancements seem a bit more superficial - stationary in Mail, for when you have that urge to send HTML emails, and visual effects in iChat - probably not the kind of features I will find myself using.

So, is there anything which annoys me? I will probably add to this list over the next few days, but at the moment the main annoyances seem to be visual for me - the new window chrome seems a tad dark, and I’m not too keen on the ridiculously huge drop shadows and translucent menu’s - wether they will grow on my still remains to be seen.

Is there anything which is incompatible? So far I have only found a single application which doesn’t seem to work - Aventail Connect VPN Client - which is slightly annoying. If anyone has a solution, please leave a comment!

Worthwhile? For all of the UI/UX experiences, probably. As many reviewers have said, Leopard is not revolutionary, however it is evolutionary and provides some welcome new features - most of which may not be immediately obvious, but which hopefully make the day to day experience of using a Mac more enjoyable.

Some interesting news at the WWDC today - Apple is releasing Safari 3 for Windows XP/Vista, alongside OS X. In fact, you can now download a public beta.

What does this mean? In my opinion this changes everything.

For many years, web developers have focused on supporting a wide variety of browsers, but in practice, this has often been interpreted as supporting Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Firefox. Very few developers go out of the way to support Safari, for the simple fact that it has been limited to the Mac OS platform and it is used by likely only around 3-4% of user’s, however this figure has been growing quite significantly in the past year. (Opera is another story, it accounts for around 0.2% of users and this never seems to change! Opera users also seem used to switching browsers in the event a site doens’t work for them!).

Now, Safari has a chance to get into the mainstream, and this will force developers to pay attention to it. With Mac gaining market share, there was some additional pressure to support Safari, but now that it is becoming cross-platform, this becomes essential.

It also makes it easier for developers - the three major browser rendering engines; Trident (IE), Gecko (Firefox) and WebKit (Safari) are now easily available on Windows and Mac OS, leaving no excuse for lack of testing or consideration.

Do I see Safari gaining market share? It is a difficult one to judge - on one hand Firefox has been around for ages, and still see’s only 15-20% usage on your average non-geek commercial website, on the other, Apple have twice as many people downloading iTunes downloads than Firefox on Windows - if they can use this as a launching platform then perhaps there is hope.

If nothing else, it will serve to give Microsoft and the Mozilla platform an incentive to focus on supporting web standards, alleviating any kind of development hell that may await; whilst at the same time, increasing developer awareness and ushering in a compatible, cross-platform, web, which can be enjoyed by anyone - wether the computer be white, brushed metal or beige!

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Well, I’m just giving the new Flock beta a go (hence the quick blog post!). Unlike the alpha version, the setup was totally painless, all driven by a setup wizard which served as a guide through the process.First impressions are definately good, and I’m impressed with the Flickr integration that I have seen so far. We shall see if it can get me away from Safari and Firefox - I know one of the things that put me off the last version was the fact that my Firefox extensions didn’t work, this still seems like it will be a problem, but as Flock evolves as a platform then hopefully that will go away.In other news, I’ve very pleased with the MacBook so far, in fact when I get the chance I will probably post a comprehensive write-up. (more…)