Leopard

31st January

So I’ve had Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) installed since Tuesday and in summary it’s brilliant, 11/10 I can’t sing it’s praises high enough. Performance has improved, the graphics are better and all the little tweaks that you get from upgrades have so far proven useful and well thought out.

First off the performance thing. Usually the minimum requirements of any OS are kind of an ‘if you must use such lowly software then we can cut a few corners here and there to accomodate you, poor person’ not so with this fast cat. Genuinely the performance is better, a couple of nights ago I had the following open:

  • iPhoto 09, face tagging (which I’ll post about later)
  • iTunes, syncing an iPod (compressing songs on the fly for Kita’s iPod) and importing a CD for said iPod
  • Mail, Firefox (still a bit of a memory hog), Adium

And the machine was good, not blistering but good, not hanging, multi-task handling has clearly been improved and switching between apps with Exposé was all smooth. Don’t get me wrong Tiger was fine but three memory intensive apps open and it would hang on my little old G4 based Mac Mini.

The graphics, again another area where clearly the kernel has been further optimised. As I said earlier Exposé is nice and smooth as is Dashboard and the effects in iPhoto. I still don’t get all the benefits of Core Animation but then I am running on hardware that was dated when it came out 3 years ago on this mini!

The tweaks, the evolution of Finder is pleasing and the network shares in it are an improvement, the only thing I can’t help but wonder is imagine if you were on a large corporate network, that left pane would get very full very quickly but then I’m sure you can change it. As it is it found Ben’s mini instantly with Bonjour (M$ please implement this protocol, please?). Likewise Stacks in the Dock proved useful whilst going through downloading apps and installing them keeping the Desktop clutter free.

In summary, Leopard is faster and better to use. Tiger was a very good friend and I’ll always have a place for it. It’s just Leopard is leaner and faster, did I mention Spotlight is usable as well now?

It was worth every penny.

Dan

9 Responses to “Leopard”

Randall Friesen
31st January 2009
8:24 pm

Spotlight is useable now, as in it used to not be useable?

That’s just another thing I love about my mac, is Spotlight. Its brilliant.

Its good to see the difference between the two, from your experience.

Dan
31st January 2009
8:38 pm

Not entirely unusable but very slow, using it as an app launcher was a real no no. Now my dock is near empty, much to Ben’s (uber-minimalist) delight.

Toni
1st February 2009
2:54 pm

I haven’t tried spotlight yet, but for all my messiness in filing (I bung everything on the desktop on a PC with 20″ monitor) I seldom need search facilities.

Glad it’s good. I wish mail and external monitor function wasn’t broken by the 10.5.6 upgrade. Might well try to get back to the applestore to see what they can do about it.

Dan
2nd February 2009
3:21 pm

I’m not sure they could do much as from what I gather you’re not alone with this problem. I assume a patch is being worked on at the moment, certainly hope so!

Toni
2nd February 2009
6:24 pm

Have you discovered Himmelbar? A freeware aplet that makes the dock unnecessary, and probably what apple should have done in the first place. Having said that, I use the dock for frequently used apps, but HB is great when you just want a lessc ommon app or utility.

Dan
2nd February 2009
6:29 pm

Ditto the dock, it only has the most frequently used apps in, Re Himmelbar, I’ve seen it but really I just use spotlight now, fewer clicks :)

Toni
3rd February 2009
8:23 am

Fewer clicks but more typing. [shrug] It’s your mac.

Dan
3rd February 2009
9:13 am

Yeah I know what you mean, seeing as we near enough only use CLI’s at work I tend to prefer typing. Having said that I’m still very much learning the keyboard shortcuts for many apps.

Toni
4th February 2009
9:02 am

Dead fairy.

Actually it’s the same number of clicks (2 – one to open HB, one to select the app) but no typing needed with himmelbar.

Courtesy of our discussion yesterday I went through the dock yesterday and dumped everything I didn’t use – about half of it – before making it a lot smaller.

We’re down to Finder, firefox, dashboard, OO, sys pref, Word, excel, powerpoint, entourage. If ‘Mail’ wasn’t broken I might have used it but there’s no point giving it a chance now as I’m committed to entourage.

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