My encounter with Apple’s latest Mac OS X 10.5 has been more than pleasant. The upgrade was smoother than any UNIX upgrade I’ve ever seen. My past experiences with UNIX upgrades has always been one filled with dependency hells after the installation, where binaries suddenly throw up ‘Segmentation Fault’ errors which cannot be easily fixed. Primary reason that caused such an error from my understanding was due to linked libraries being modified, resulting in binaries writing to memory locations which aren’t pre-allocated.
Apart from the smooth upgrade, the new features certainly are a great enhancement to productivity, without any impact on system stability nor performance. In fact, possibly psychologically, the operating system feels snappier and less prone to lags due to I/O blocking with its multi-threading improvements in various system components.
Live preview in the icons and quick look is indeed a rather impressive yet small enhancement. Quick look opens and closes at the speed of the tap of the spacebar, providing really quick and almost instant preview of any file you have selected. Certainly, Cover Flow can be used for that, but in my opinion, it takes up too much Finder space.
Time machine is another marvellous engineering. Although the ground concepts are nothing new, the tying up of the various system mechanisms, bundling it into a system level, easy to use, and highly automated backup application is brilliant. It simply trashes any backup mechanism I’ve tried. As Steve Jobs implied, the restore-backup interface, Time Machine, is both a visually appeasing interface and a revolutionary metaphor. Really, user-interface planners and designers should get all the kudos for such an intuitive interface.
Safari is now much more robust under heavy JavaScript and Flash Player loads. Memory usage too has slightly improved.
Although it is pointless mentioning 300 over new features to you as you can read them up from the Apple Mac OS X website, I find it important to highlight some important points worth noting before you upgrade to Leopard from Tiger.
Users of The Application Enhancer are highly recommended to upgrade to version 2.0.3 to prevent system freeze upon Leopard boot-up. Version 2.0.3 automatically disables itself when loaded in Leopard; a new updated compatibility release will arrive in a couple of days. However, do note the implication of having Application Enhancer disabled during this interim period.
Good news about InputManagers for Safari is that the components need to be owned by root and placed in the ‘/Library/InputManager/’ folder for it to function. I found Inquisitor to be working fine. Sogudi, unfortunately, isn’t.
Adobe has announced minor compatibility updates required for selected products; refer to AppleInsider article for more details.
Microsoft Office 2004 Mac functions normally, with no reported compatibility issues. Crossover Mac 6.2 works fine. Leopard requires Little Snitch version 2 beta; version 1 will not work and might freeze the OS.
In all, Leopard is an extremely worthy upgrade, bring greater speed and usability to its users, while being lean on memory.
As a side note, here’s an article on how to install Mac OS X from an external harddisk starting with a disk image file. You might find it profitable to ‘restore’ an Installation disk image onto your Time Machine backup drive so that you have your system cloned and a bootable installer image ready.
Edited: Note on Crossover Mac and Little Snitch.
