Your overall impressions

[topshot]

Hi, I have been reading these forums over the last few days and some of the interesting posts. What I want to here is what everyone things of Leopard so far and what bugs you have come across.

 

Here are my thoughts so far (on a machine that I found running leopard next door ;-) ):

 

My Rating for Leopard so far: 2.5/5

 

I got it all setup and used the migrate tool which worked as expected, but then I tried to delete an account that i didn't need and it all went a bit pear shaped. Also, the options are missing under accounts page such as parental controls.

 

Every one of my apps worked except for Skype and Pages doesn't seem to want to show me what's on any of the pages properly. Unfortunately, I use pages a lot so I have to stick with Tiger for the moment. I got parallels working by downgrading from the new beta to the released version.

 

Spaces is really really good. I mean Really good. I miss that now that I am back in tiger.

 

Time machine worked for me, and backed up to a second partition but the display was a little slow at showing and hiding on my Intel Mac Mini core duo.

 

The 'To Do' feature in Mail is a good idea but I don't want to see the todo's in my inbox! It just seems stupid to have it intermixed with your e-mail, so I will continue to use Stickies. Plus you can't change the colour of the todo's nor are they highlighted in a different colour in any of the views to differentiate them from e-mails.

 

I don't use iChat because most of my friends are on MSN so I'd rather have a single interface which is Adium. So any new features in iChat are useless to me.

 

Spotlight is sooo much quicker! And I like the way it shows dictionary definitions and most recent items, but it is missing the group by feature on the Opt+CMD+SPACE screen. I didn't spend much time looking though.

 

Safari has some nice little touches and the find feature is a nice addition but the dashboard icon looks out of place on the menu bar.

 

iCal hasn't changed much and infact it wouldnt open my ical items from Mail.

 

Also the Alex voice in voiceover takes up about 128MB of ram! It also isn't as good as they'd have you believe. Selecting some of the text from Apples own leopard preview site proved that to me but it is an improvement of what came before.

 

Overall, Leopard seems a little snappier than tiger but really there is nothing new. I mean really hardly anything new! The usual consumer is not going to care about timemachine that much, probably won't use spaces and doesn't care about the odd little addition/change to existing applications. I think that Apple really needs to pull a rabbit out of the hat because so far, this release is under-whelming. I'm not saying that the changes aren't good because they are, but they should have been in Tiger. This to me is a point release rather than an upgrade. If it where an upgrade, they would have added some new apps, consolidated some other apps, fixed existing gripes and fixed/improved finder!

 

They really could integrate Address book, iCal and Mail better while still keeping them separate apps.

[nigelelliott394]

this is probably the most stable beta i've ever run IMO! no bugs, glitches yet...just seems like tiger (except it's a WEE bit slower) with some enhancements. i like it...i'm glad i have this whole dual boot thing going down, i'll update the leopard one as soon as new builds leak.