After reading Matt Woodward's update on his Leopard experience, I thought I'd share a bit of mine.
The Good
I really like Spaces (virtual desktop), and I love the screen sharing. In the past I used an OS VNC clone to connect to my desktop from my laptop. The resolution wasn't great and the speed was so so. The new built-in screen sharing performs much better and the overall quality is just incredible. The main feature I haven't had a chance to play with yet is Time Machine, but as I use Mozy, I don't see a big need for it. As others have mentioned - the ability to do tabs in terminal is a small thing, but darn convenient.
The Bad
I've run into two programs that are flakey/unusable. Cord, an OS RDP clone, has redraw issues. The developer is aware of it though - and in the meantime I've just switched to Microsoft's RDP client.
Connect360, a program that lets your XBox 360 talk to your Mac like it was a Windows box, is dead in the water. I don't see any mention of it on the developer's web site. I've sent in a support request. In the meantime, I'm just going to hook up my IPod to the 360.
The Ugly
My laptop is having issues. Before I installed Leopard, I was having battery issues. The health was a meager 30-ish percent, which gave me like 30 minutes on battery. I've already got one replacement battery from Apple about 5 or so months ago. I guess I need to call them again, but I never got the darn support plan for the laptop, so I may be SOL. That's not the scary issue. Since Leopard, the laptop will reboot. No BSOD mind you - just a sudden and instance reboot. So far it has only happened when idle. I'm not entirely convinced it is Leopard though since the battery issues could possibly be involved as well, although the reboots happen on AC power.
Archived Comments
Ray,
About the ugly part, it pretty much seems like an hardware problem. I too installed Leopard on a 17" Mackbook Pro in the hours after the launch and the machine has been rock solid so far.
My Macbook Pro has been through all possible states (on, off, sleep, reboots, AC, battery, etc.) many time without an itch..
Good luck having your machine repaired.
Yves
Sounds like a Windows OS... "Works great here" ... "My machine reboots without warning here"...
about connect 360: stop the service and reinstall it works fine. I had the same issue.
I've been posting my own thoughts over the last few days (I just upgraded Friday night) and some are similar, so I'll piggyback on your post to see if your (much larger :-) readership has seen a problem I've noticed with Spaces.
First, though, terminal. Tabs are great, but still no bookmarks. For that reason alone, I'm sticking with iTerm. I can't remember all of those passwords...
Like you, I've never monkeyed with Time Machine. The fact that it can't backup to a network server kind of kills it. I don't want to go out and buy a new device that I have to tether to my laptop when I have a perfectly good (and beefy) server sitting 10' away from me.
Now, back to spaces. If I have Firefox open in one space and anything else open in another, I can't Command+Tab from the other app to Firefox and have the FF window accept the focus. The application is focused, but not the window. In the same space, I can Command+Tab, F5 after making a change to refresh my page. In different spaces, I have to click on the window before F5 does anything.
Anyone else seen this?
No one has mentioned the new screen saver that takes all your photo collection and makes Mosaic's out of them. Amazing stuff.
Heh, that's pretty cool. I hadn't tried that one.
So far I'm liking Leopard. I'm finding that it runs faster on my lowly Aluminum PB4. Safari is better than before (although there are still some sites that work better in FireFox). I really like the Web Inspector that you can get via Debug menu (any way ColdFire can hook into Web Inspector?). I can even have several browser windows open with several tabs without getting the beach ball all the time.
Time Machine is good, although I don't like having to go over and plug it into the drive so Time Machine can do its thing. I still am going to be backing up on a second drive once in a while, in case the Time Machine drive goes south.
Another thing I like is the enhanced Print menu. Wow. I can even preview what I'm going to be printing right there and then.
@Lola - Find out if the Web Inspector has any type of plugin API. If it does - I'll look into it.
Ray,
If your laptop is less than one year old, I believe you can still purchase the extended warranty for it. Thats what I did with mine.
Nope, it is over. I got it right when they came out. I still haven't called Apple. I need to find time.
I'm using Spaces quite a bit. I found that when running VMware with Unity, I could move a Windows app anywhere in Spaces just like I can with any OS X app. Thats pretty cool.
You can also use Expose inside of Spaces.
Spotlight is 100 times better than it was in Tiger.
And I initially thought Cover Flow in the Finder was nothing but eye candy, but it can really come in handy when sorting through images and even documents.
I have a Windows HP ZD7000 (since abandoned) that has a motherboard/videocard issue that caused similar behavior when using Photoshop CS x.x. Not directly applicable to a Mac, but seems similar. Best of luck.
@Rob--you can backup using Time Machine to another machine, so long as it's running Leopard. ;-) Granted, this is a pain. I'd love to be able to backup to the hard drive I have plugged into my Airport, and apparently this support is coming soon. Rumor is that it was in there until the last minute and they pulled it our right before the release. At this point I'm backing my MacBook up to the MiniStack I have plugged into my Mac Mini and it's working great.
@Matt -
I didn't realize that, but in the end it doesn't matter. I don't have another Mac (unfortunately). For my purposes, I won't use Time Machine until it can backup to any mountable volume. SuperDuper can do it. I expect Time Machine to do it as well before it will be useful to me.
Maybe this is a good excuse to buy an inexpensive Mac... :-)
@Rob,
The reason Time Machine won't back up to any network drive is because Time Machine currently requires HFS+ for the file system. Hooks were added in in order to get Time Machine to work. I'm waiting for Time Machine to support ZFS myself. I'd love to get some network storage that was using ZFS.
@Jeff -
Um, yeah. That just went right over my head. And it did so at blazing speed. :-) I recognized that the "FS" part probably stands for File System. Everything else...not even close.
Would love a remedial explanation if you have a minute.
@Rob,
HFS+ is Apple's file system. Its getting long in the tooth and they plan on replacing it at some point. They've made major updates to it in Tiger and Leopard. They added the features to it to allow Spotlight to work in Tiger. And now they've added features to get Time Machine to work. There is a very thorough explanation of how it all works in this awesome review of Leopard by John Siracusa:
http://arstechnica.com/revi...