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.