I had now taken hold of the latest Mac OS X (10.5) tagged as Leopard on my MBP. Though I bought it around 2 days ago, it was only now that I had completed its installation and restoring applications. It took me some time as I had to finish first some tasks I have at work, and then I did a clean install which takes a bit longer than just doing an upgrade. As expected from Mac OS the installation was really easy and I loved the welcome video after the installation.
I know that I had previously posted that I plan to do an upgrade this December or early next year, but then I decided that there’s no point in waiting if there would be some new features on Leopard that would be useful for me. Moreover, I had not seen any serious flaws on Leopard except for the “data loss bug” found by several users who had already upgraded. I don’t think this would really affect me as I don’t usually transfer files between and SMB share or an external storage device. If ever I’ll do this, I usually have another backup somewhere else of the files I wanted to move. I’m a backup savvy I guess especially for those files I can’t afford losing. 
Since I had only used Leopard for a day, I haven’t really played around with it that much an check out all features. As far as I know, there are 300+ new features a stated on Apple’s website, and I plan to check this out once I am done restoring my backups to my MBP’s new OS installation. Right now, I’m still busyrestoring both work related and personal files.
Here’s a list of new features that I had tried or somehow tried:
- Spaces - For the new features I tried, I really love Spaces and this may be one of the reasons that convinced me to upgrade. Being able to have multiple desktops is really cool for a programmer like me. Aside from my MBP’s 17″ LCD screen that already holds a lot of screen real estate, being able to group my windows/applications to different desktops really makes my programming life easier. I usually have different desktops to hold, browsers, IDE’s, terminal windows, and remote connection apps. Now, this is something that has been done by most Linux distros and I’m glad its on Mac OS now.
- Quick Look – Being able to preview photos, documents, movies, PDF files, etc. without having to open an application is really cool. It makes browsing through all my stuffs a lot faster.
- Stacks – Now this is something that I also love. It makes finding documents, downloads, and some important files I have on my notebook a lot faster. Having this useful tool in my dock item and being able to customize what folders I can stack up is really a pleasure to have.
- iChat – I don’t really use iChat but I just find it fun to use to have these cool backgrounds during video conversation. It’s kind cool to chat with someone who can see that you seem to be in some other places such as a park, sky, water, or some famous tourists destinations.
- Java - JDK 1.5.0_13 is by default the version used by Leopard but you can have the option to shift to JDK 1.4.2 through the System Preferences settings. Ant 1.0.7 and Maven 2.0.6 are also installed by default so building my java projects can now be done without the hassles of installing those build tools.
There are some other cool stuffs I need to checkout, such as Safari, Time Machine, Address Book, etc., and most of all stability and peformance. Hopefully, I’ll have a lot of time to do this over the weekend. Fingers crossed though, as I also have a lot of work currently at hand so I’ll just see if would really have the time and enthusiasm to play with Leopard during my rest days.
There’s just one thing that somehow disappointed me with the upgrade and this is not having iLife ’08 included with Leopard. Well, I guess iLife is usually just included when you buy a new Mac, just like in the case of my default Tiger installation on my MBP which includes iLife ’06. At least I can still install iLife ’06 on my Leopard installation from my Tiger disc installers. Oh well, I don’t usually use iLife anyway, so I guess and iLife upgrade won’t be an immediate need for now.
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