Upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on Friday and been using it all weekend… WOW!. I know that does seem like a very long time for a test drive but for a Geek who had a very busy weekend sorting out friends WiFi networks, migrating them to newer machines and troubleshooting various Windows nasties this is was a true test of robustness.
First the upgrade went very smoothly. I have never seen such a simple and clean upgrade path in all the years I have been using personal computers (Windows, Linux and Apple). Just pop in the disk, answer a question and bang 25 minutes later you’re using Quickview to play movies.
Which brings me to the way they have pimped out Finder. Coverflow and the way that is moves between pages on the highlighted document. Quickview that you can access just by hitting the space bar. Guess What? Spotlight is actually useful again. It’s still no Quicksilver and you can’t really do any kind of file manipulation in Spotlight nor can you control iTunes with it, but it’s indexing just got a whole lot smarter and quite a bit faster.
And it’s FAST!!! I mean real fast, I have never had a new OS run faster on an older machine before so this is all new to me (I know this has been for the par with Macs). Fact is: I am truly impressed.
As for the feature enhancements like Photobooth effects in iChat, Spaces, desktop sharing and Time Machine. They are cool and fun but I will let some better reviewers talk them up:
David Pogue: More Goodies in Apple’s New Operating System
Leo Laporte: First Look at Leopard
John Siracusa, Ars Technica: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review
Scott McNulty, TUAW: Liveblogging the Leopard install
Walt Mossberg: Leopard: Faster, Easier Than Vista
Ryan Bloc, Engadget: We’ve got Leopard, what do you want to know?
BTW Amazon, I am still rather annoyed that I can not link to Leopard in order to capitalise on my affiliate account. The Canadian selection of Amazon is no where near as strong as the US selection not to mention that it is not updated that often either. I should at least be able to link to a US product and let the customer decide if he wants to pay shipping and duties. Reality is that the Loonie is well above the Greenback and now more than ever cross border shopping actually makes sense.
Get Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard from Amazon.ca HERE. You’ll save $10 CDN and help encourage of couple of Fat Dads. Cheers!
