Monday, October 29. 2007
The reviews of the new features of Leopard are everywhere on the Net, so I am not going to regurgitate them here. Instead I am going to list, very briefly, what works and what don't during my third day of using Leopard. NOTE: I was the first customer to pre-book Leopard from machines.
What works:
- Abiword, NeoOffice, Thunderbird and Firefox all work well.
- Finder's coverflow is awesome, and certainly the most advanced file manager out there at the moment, but it uses up to 1Gb of virtual memory
- Safari 3 is fast - I've been using Camino in Tiger. Let's see how long I can be patient with Safari this time
- macports installed just fine - the first package I installed was zsh. At the moment though, compilation of PostgreSQL failed - I'm yet to look into it.
- iterm. Apple's improvement to Terminal.app is laughable - it support tabbing, of course, but I cannot make it to: go full screen and: remember the settings i've configured automatically - you have to go Apple-I, then configure the settings, then "Shell->Use Settings as Defaults". Counter intuitive.
What don't work:
- Onyx and Cocktail, of course
Annoyances:
- The Help windows for each application - when you open "Help", the Help window will hover on the desktop and over the app, Apple-Tab won't make it go away. I want to be able to have full view of my app window, and Apple-Tab to view the Help.
- Bluetooth mouse - some way or another, it seems like Leopard and my Wireless Mighty Mouse fail to pair/detect each other after a short period of separation. Extremely annoying - I have to pair the two everytime.
- Opening app from the command-line fails for the first time for each downloaded application. Well, not that the app is not launched - it is launched, sits nicely in the dock, but unresponsive. So you have to force-quit it, then launch it from Finder.
What I haven't tried:
- Time machine. At the moment, I don't have an extra external hard disk (well, I have 3 actually, one for media, one for backup, one for packet captures). So I am still content with using rdiff-backup for daily incremental backup. Some words about Time Machine: the gooey eye candy will make people (esp. the non-technical ones) want to do backup. This is a good thing about Leopard - Apple is simply enticing people to make backup (a chore! a chore!) a practice by creating stunning eye candy application.
|
