Leopard
Posted by Daniel Lyons Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:14:00 GMT
The upgrade rocks, overall.
It took about an hour to install. My observations:
- Wow, everything is so translucent and pretty it’s so hard to remember two years ago when we all kissed Steve-o’s feet for removing this feature in Panther.
- Time Machine is really neat. But did we really need an absurd new button for it?
- Tell me this is usable, with a straight face:
- Help now comes with bonus shitlight:
Much has been made of the dock. It’s really ugly. I take that back. It’s really pretty. So pretty I keep on staring at it. Distractedly. Did you ever use a mirror for a desk? How about get a bunch of soft blue LED track lighting for it. I suppose I’ll get used to it eventually. It’s not like we get a choice. And the side dock is glitchy, if you can stand having it on the side in the first place.
I have been playing a lot with Emal. The todo function is nice enough I can probably give up on OmniOutliner with the horrendously ugly icon now (and I have been using org-mode with Emacs for everything more sophisticated anyway). The RSS functionality is nice but without folder hierarchies I may be stuck with NetNewsWire. I’m going to try and live without RSS for a few days and see how much I really care about it.
The new Safari is somewhat nicer. Nice enough for me to give it a shot, foregoing Firefox for a few days. The new iChat is a pleasant surprise. The new Terminal is slightly nicer.
Time Machine seems to be a bastion of weird UI considerations. I can’t take a screenshot within it. Clicking the close icon on the window you’re working with closes Time Machine but keeps the window around. Otherwise it seems to be pretty excellent; it has the kind of completely unobtrusive UI that would frighten and confuse developers of a certain obnoxious, intrusive and unreliable backup program. It looks like the best backup program ever.
You’re going to want a Firewire 2 drive. After a few hours of rearranging my files it’s re-backing up 4.6 GB of stuff, and it has to take a complete snapshot when you first get it running. Fortunately, it’s pretty smart about doing it in the background, but of course it slows things down a bit. Disconnected operation is going to be the key concept here, plugging in whenever you want a snapshot taken.
Apart from the usual BS about the usability and looks, it seems to be great. No troubles so far.
I’m one of those dock-on-the-side users, so I was glad to hear that it won’t have the new look when it’s in my favoured position. Unfortunately, it looks like it will be a while (like, until work decided to get it for us) before I’m able to upgrade. Colour me jealous!
In terms of browsers, I’ve actually switched to gasp Opera everywhere now. At first it was just on the Powerbook (where I grew tired of the new buggy Firefox), but it’s been spreading to my Media Centre PC as well. The “true” zoom is really nice for a large display when the viewing distance is feet rather than inches. IE7 looks great also, but the zoom makes it worth it for me, except for sites that don’t support Opera. (Netflix view-online and NBC Rewind come to mind, but you may not care about those.)
Other than that, I haven’t switched my Powerbook G4 to Leopard. I don’t think it would do too well with only 768MB of RAM. —M