I have a few initial observations about the new Mac OS X release 10.5 “Leopard”:
It takes an unbelievably long time to “validate the install DVD”. In my case it was over 45 minutes on a dual processor Intel box. Overall the install took over two hours to complete.
It takes a long time to boot up after the install and with no status messages or displays. Be patient, it will eventually boot up. And don’t panic that the dock doesn’t show up for a few minutes after your desktop.
So far, I haven’t found anything that Leopard has broken. I tried to be diligent about installing all of the application updates before running the apps for the first time. That seems to have worked.
Sherlock is gone. It apparently gets deleted as part of the installation. I don’t recall reading anything about this ‘feature’. If you have the developer documentation installed and perform a Spotlight search for Sherlock there is “Legacy Document” notice plastered on the top of the Sherlock index.html doc that proclaims “Important: Sherlock is unsupported in Mac OS X v10.5 and later”. Most all references to it have been removed from the apple.com web site. It’s a shame, I found that utility very useful.
Cosmetically, I am not wild about the color gradient on the title bar and the cheesy 3D effect on the dock makes it difficult to see what applications are active if you have a lot of applications on the doc. I think it would have made more sense to give the doc icon a contrasting ‘halo’ to show that it was active rather than a low contrast tiny pip of a ‘reflection’ in front of a running app. It is also difficult to determine where dock apps stop and where minimized apps begin — the lane marker takes more time than it should to pick out in a crowded dock.
I like the spaces implementation as I am one to open piles of windows when I am working. Spaces makes it much easier to manage than Expose. Cover View in finder is still a ‘meh’ gratuitous eye candy thing for me at the moment.
My cheap Logitech 3 button USB mouse glitched after the system went to sleep. That is when woke the Mac up, moving the mouse actually caused Dashboard to activate while the mouse pointer remained solidly fixed in place. Unplugging and re-plugging the mouse’s USB connector revived it, though.
So far, so good.
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