I tend to be an early adopter of new technology (when I can afford to be!). When the ship date for the version 10.5 of Mac OS X a.k.a. “Leopard” was announced earlier this month, I placed my order right away.I received the DVD on Friday, October 26th, the day of the official release and proceeded to install it on my MacBook Pro as well as my older G5 tower.

My first impressions are emphatically positive. As far as overall system upgrades go, this is more an upgrade of “tweaks” and enhancements then a paradigm shift for the operating system. Not only are many welcome new features both major and minor added, there are are also a plethora of “fixes” that add to the overall consistency of the OS. The upgrade performs well on both the Intel-based MacBook Pro as well as the older PPC G5 (a dual 2.3 GHz processor). Finder performance seems zippier than previous iterations of the Mac OS.

Here’s a short list of what I like (in no particular order):

  • Consistent views in every app, modeled after the iTune look and feel. The graphite color scheme has infected every part of the OS, and though it may be an acquired taste for some, it is consistent and easy to get a handy on what to look for in every program.
  • iChat adds some eye candy in the form of funky effects and backgrounds, but the real power comes in the form of iChat Theatre, which allows users to share screens, media files and images in the chat window. Also new in Leopard is the ability to be logged into multiple .Mac/AIM accounts simultaneously. The look of the chat window can also be customized to fit various screen sizes.
  • Spotlight now has real boolean search capabilities, and many of the performance issues of Tiger’s version of Spotlight seem to have been resolved.
  • Mail is much more of a full-featured program, incorporating task lists and notes into the mix.
  • Time Machine: backups without thinking!
  • Safari’s web clips feature allows you to save a page or a portion of a page as a Dashboard widget (great for RSS content).
  • Networking in Leopard is much simpler. Most connections can be made aith a minimum of fuss and managing networked printers has been a snap so far.
  • System preferences make a lot more sense, and many of the options have been simplified (and the geeky stuff hidden behind an “Advanced…” button.

Of course, there are always some rough edges or annoyances to any OS, especially a new one. Here’s my list of beefs:

  • The new dock makes for attractive eye candy, but it is sometimes hard to tell which apps are running with a quick glance.
  • It would be great to be able to change the size of the font in a Finder Window’s sidebar.
  • The downloads icon in the Dock assumes the icon of the last thing you downloaded, so it’s always in flux and it screams to your colleagues that you use Bittorrent!
  • It’s great that we can have so many connections open in iChat, but why do they all have to be in their own window? I much prefer Adium’s integration of all my Buddy lists into a single window.

I am sure that I will find more stuff to love and to dislike as I get deeper into using this OS on a regular basis, but so far, the impression is good.

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