Leopard Opinion

saxamaphone

General:
Well, I have installed the Leopard Developer Preview. I played around for about a half hour and was actually impressed with its stability. I remember previews/early versions of Tiger and they were far from stable and pretty slow. Leopard seemed to like memory thats for sure, the OS gobbled up 512 on boot and proceeded to slowly gobble up the rest, of course releasing it to applications as I ran the various built-ins (mail, safari, etc). you cant really judge a preview in this respect though.

OS:
Finder looks the same. boooooo! A few apps and windows had a new dressing that looked pretty slick. kinda like a new generation of the itunes plating but much more palatable. I would love it if they ditched metal and went with this as the replacement accross the board.

Time machine is pretty neat, but I didnt have time to set up any scenarios for testing retrieval.

Spotlight seems more useful. the thing i am looking for is now closer to the top of the list more often. Indexing seems to be very fast but then again I am working off a clean install so there isn't so much to index.

Spaces is a god-send. I know, i know... virtual desktops have been around forever. but as soon as you use leopard spaces you will never use another virtual desktop manager again. ever. and if you do, you will bitch and complain the whole time and then kiss your mac when you get back to leopard. it could not be easier or more intuitive, it is freaking sweet. the knock on expose is that it shoots windows all over the place with little care. spaces has the virtue of being based on an even number of positionally static objects, so the spacial relation of seeing them pop up to the same location each time makes it better than expose. Of course when looking at the spaces you can arrange them as you like or move windows between spaces. the usage and performance are top notch. As soon as I booted into Tiger after playing around I was already instinctively reaching for the F8 key to trigger spaces... then there was that sad moment of realization that it was leopard only. habit forming after 1 short session! I cant wait for a reasonable stable beta so I can move over.

Mail:
Mail probably has some neat things that i would use day to day. I send mesages to myself all the time and the new notes feature seems to legitmize the practice and give a few more easy-access features. I like the idea of generating to-dos from messages or notes as well, another handy feature. I played around in a limited fashion as i had no internet access, leopard DP would not see my airport card. Not unexpected for a developer preview.

iChat:
I didnt use iChat because Leopard didnt recognize my airport card so I did not have network access.

iCal:
Didnt really play with it. will get to it another day.

iTunes:
still version 6.

I was really left with 2 big question marks and they probably both relate to what steve said at WWDC. The first being that the Finder is essentially unchanged, obviously that has to change. Second being that front row was not present on the DP, I assume that will be getting a full makeover as well. Possibly to sync up with iTv or vice versa.

I guess I dont have anything to add that Steve didnt demonstrate but just to let you know a first hand usage from one of us.

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CubaMark

Thanks for the first-hand experiences. But... Question: Are you skirting the edge of your NDA by writing about this?


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sheamusj

Really appreciate learning of your experiences and an advance peep regarding Leopard. In particular, your observation regarding RAM usage. Sounds like 2 GB RAM is a good idea under Leopard.

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saxamaphone

well, i read articles and reviews just like this one on many other websites including CNET so i think im ok.

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saxamaphone

Even with Tiger that makes a lot of sense. OSX can use all the ram you throw at it. with a developer preview often these are highly UN-optimized versions so this may not be an accurate representation of the final product.

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Tiranis

I think it's pretty certain that updates to Finder are coming, considering Apple was hiring Finder UI designers and programmers in Objective-C specifically for the Finder team. They just didn't unveil them yet, besides we've got at least half a year until Leopard comes out.

Might not be much time in MS standards, but seems like more than enough time for Apple.

Chealion

FWIW, Spaces is what convinced me to install VirtueDesktops in Tiger.

The NDA only covers anything not already made public by Apple. That said, sharing the developer preview, talking about features not included in the Keynote or Apple's Sneak Peek, etc. are all against the NDA.

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saxamaphone

Well said. I certainly dont plan to "out" any features not already out there. but I can play around with and give feedback on the implementation. Its one thing to watch Steve move through a polished presentation and another to "click-around" and try to figure stuff out (and often break things!). As I said earlier, so far I am very impressed. It still feels like the same OSX but there are more useful resources at your fingertips. I cant wait for some finder enhancements...

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