Microsoft

Leopard Reaction

I was fortunate enough to snag a copy of Leopard on Friday. After a quick (less than 30 minutes if I recall correctly) upgrade I was up and running. My initial thoughts are that this is one bad operating system and by bad I mean really good. Below are just a few of the things that have stuck out to me over the first 24 hours with it.First, boot and shutdown times seem to have halved on my 1.6 Ghz Core2Duo-based Mini. It's very noticeably faster.Almost every application seems to load faster. The Apple apps seem to load a lot faster (read almost instantly) I've heard people say, after every OS X upgrade, that they felt like they had a hardware upgrade. I've never noticed enough improvement in performance in previous upgrades to agree with that sentiment, but Leopard really does feel like a hardware upgrade.The new Mail rocks, especially with my newly IMAP'ed Gmail accounts. The new stationery won't get used by me any time soon, but my wife will be flooding friends' and family's inboxes with HTML mails as soon as she finds out about it. Quite frankly, Apple needs her to find that feature, and features like it, useful more than it does me.Time Machine is very cool and not just because of it's innovative user interface. This feature will save my wife someday and she won't be able to tell enough people about it when it does. Again, not so much useful to me as it is the "average user", but that's a good thing for Apple.System Preferences seem to be much more streamlined. Case in point is the sharing module. Much better grouping of like objects in System Prefs in Leopard.Safari seems to have had its issues ironed out. I've been using the beta of 3 since it's public release and it's always been plenty fast. Now it's plenty fast and stable. I haven't had a chance to use web clippings yet, but I hope to soon. From what I've read, it works just as advertised.Dock stacks work for me more than I thought they would. I especially like it when viewing the Applications folder I keep in my dock.Finder is eleventy billion times better than it's been in previous version of OS X. Network browsing is better and doesn't completely bog down your machine. CoverFlow can come in really handy, especially for designers like me. QuickLook is really nice, too. Those two features alone will save me a ton of time going forward.The thing that's most impressed me is the fact that I have not had a single application fail on me in Leopard. I wish I could have said the same thing after my first experience with Windows XP to Vista upgrade.That's it for now, but I'm sure I'll post more observations as they come. Bottom line is Leopard is definitely worth the price of admission. If you were on the fence about upgrading, get off of it and go the store to pick up your copy.