I'm working from home today, so I waited until lunch to let the installation run. I had been tempted to go through the pain of a clean install, but opted instead to do an upgrade. The whole process took a little over an hour and went very smoothly.
After booting it up, I was presented with the new desktop I had seen before in so many screenshots. I moved the Dock to the bottom of the screen to enjoy the 3-D look (I usually have it positioned on the side where it effectively takes up less space, but in Leopard the Dock only does the 3-D thing on the bottom).
The feature that I was most excited about was Spaces, and it doesn't disappoint. I used to be a heavy Linux user and was a fan of virtual desktops. Spaces is a big step forward from what I've used before in that it seems well integrated with the OS and is very Mac-like (switching between spaces slides you from one desktop to the next). Spaces partially obsoletes the need for one of my favorite Mac features, Expose. When you open a bunch of windows (something I do often), Expose is an awesome way to switch between them, but with Spaces I doubt I'll ever have too many open in a single space at once. I replaced the "All Windows" Expose with Spaces as my upper left hot corner and my Mighty Mouse squeeze button, though I imagine I'll still get some use out of the "Application Windows" Expose feature which is my upper right hot corner.
For the first hour or so of using Leopard, I was concerned that it was causing my system to run much slower than it did with Tiger, but I believe the source of the sluggishness was the Spotlight indexing. After it completed everything seem to work at a normal pace.
Speaking of Spotlight, the improvements made here may stop me from using Quicksilver. After I started using it I immediately became a fan of how easy Quicksilver makes launching applications, but now Spotlight quickly brings matching applications to the top of my search results and highlights the top one by default. It still isn't quite as slick as Quicksilver, which will learn from your search patterns to bring the best match to the top and has all sorts of plugins, but the new Spotlight will do the trick 90% of the time for me and eliminates an application that used to run constantly.
I still haven't used Leopard marquee feature, Time Machine. I think I'll need to get a new external hard drive so that I can have one dedicated to Time Machine and one dedicated to additional storage, because my 250 GB drive is already filling up fast.
One of my few disappointments is that I was hoping I could now set birthday reminders in my birthday calendar (which automatically shows birthdays from your Address Book). Also Mail's new To-Do lists and Notes do not sync with the iPhone, but I'm willing to bet that that feature is on its way soon.
I'm looking forward to finding other cool changes have been made. So far, Leopard seems to be worth the wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment