I can has Leopard upgrade?
I'm sure it'll come as no shock to regular visitors here to learn that I've upgraded to Leopard today. Will it last as long as my Vista install? Place your bets now!
The Leopard install took about 30 or 40 mins with the "archive" install option, which tells OS X to archive away your old OS install and app folders, create a clean install and then import your applications, documents, and user settings into the new OS. Based on my experiences with the Panther -> Tiger upgrades at home and at work, this is often the best way to upgrade OS X. It certainly was a smooth process, asking me very little and simply getting on with things.
Leopard itself... A little early to give many thoughts on it. If you've got any interest in Apple's OS at all you'll already know that it's a refinement of their previous OS release rather than a revolution, so think in terms of lots of small improvements and little touches and you'll get the idea. It seems to be at least as fast and responsive on the same hardware as my previous Tiger install, and while I'm having to upgrade various apps in order to get things working properly, this really doesn't appear to be a bad upgrade at all, so far.
Some of the stylings might take a while to get used to. A lot of people are not at all keen on the new "faux-3D" dock style (see screenshot above), and it certainly does look a little odd. I plan to give it a chance before trying to fiddle with it myself.
Finder (Does the job of Explorer, for Windows people out there) has had a style update, and the sidebar and brushed-metal finish is obviously based on the iTunes look and feel. I quite like it, but then I quite like iTunes. The transparent menu bar at the top of the screen does have me wondering; I found the transparent "Aero" interface in Vista made reading menu options harder, and despite seeing a few people say the same about Leopard this has not been my experience, in fact I made a point of trying it just now with a page of text open underneath the menu area and had no trouble at all reading menu items. Still, it's a bit of a "lipstick on a chicken" option, it doesn't seem to add much.
What I like:
Well we'll start with the upgrade process. As ever, before upgrading any OS on any platform from any manufacturer, you should take a full backup first. Good advice from John Gruber right here.
My install took a while, mostly because I chose the archive and install option, where the installer archives your old OS install and app folders (maybe there's a clue in the name of the function here?), and then effectively performs a clean install and then imports your old applications, settings and user folder into the new install. Despite what some people say, this is almost certainly overkill for the majority of users, unless you are a computer geek like me, who likes to poke around under the hood and change the settings on everything you can, the normal upgrade process should be just fine. I had to upgrade a few apps after my install, I had to re-install my printer (like searching for it in bonjour, selecting the only printer on my home network from the list of one printers and waiting 30 seconds was so tough), and I freely admit I've not been playing with the new install long enough to find all the real nasties, but all in all things seem to be just fine so far.
The Product Activation Process. Or rather, the lack of one. Apple actually don't treat me like a criminal out on probation to my face by way of saying thanks for buying their software. Fancy that!
Much to my surprise, I'm finding myself turning on the Coverflow option in Finder (screenshot above). We'll see if it remains on, but I am quite enjoying 'flicking' through my documents with it, and overall this may turn out to be a much more useful feature than I originally thought. When combined with Time Machine (below) it really starts to make sense; what better way to quickly look through old versions of a file or directory to recover old data?
Time Machine looks pretty good too. Let's be clear here, it's very similar in concept to Volume Shadow Copies on Windows. The devil is in the details however, and where Volume Shadow Copies is difficult for "normal" users to understand, time machine is very simple indeed.
This is a key point because it doesn't matter how good your technology is, if your target users can't figure out how to use it, then it might as well not exist at all. As a techie computer person I find VSS quite easy to use, to be honest, but I shudder to think of talking some people I know through using VSS over the phone. As for Time Machine, if you can use Mac OS X's Finder with any degree of competence then you'll be able to use Time Machine quite happily.
I quite like Spaces too. On Tiger I was a big fan of VirtueDesktops for a while (it plays especially well with Virtual Machines) but when Leopard and Spaces became known the author of Virtue Desktop quite understandably decided to stop developing the product. I haven't tried Spaces out with a VM just yet, but it seems to be fast and easy to use, with the sort of smooth integration you've come to expect of an Apple OS component when compared to a 3rd party plugin; not that I'm hating on Virtue Desktops, it's just at a disadvantage compared to Spaces. In reality this is the sort of utility that's been available for most other Unix type GUIs for ages, so while it's a welcome addition, it's also playing catch-up.
Mail has a few improvements that I think are noteworthy. I'm not going to burble on about stationery, I'm sure most of you can guess my opinon of HTML email is generally unrepeatable. Rather, the addition of notes and to-do options seems to be quite interesting; these are not just random bits of text that are kept in mail.app for want of a better place to put them, but rather can be stored on your email account if you're using something like IMAP. This opens up the possibility of being able to share these between computers in different places, which might just be the start of something interesting.
What I don't like:
So far, I'm not a big fan of Stacks. The idea is nice and well enough implemented but it doesn't go far enough; I have to keep using Overflow to 'stack' applications in the application part of the dock because either stacks won't do it for me or I can't figure it out, even after reading the help. Either way, a bit of a let-down. Not that I mind using Overflow, it's very nice software that I'm awfully glad I purchased, but leaving that sort of functionality out of stacks seems rather odd to me. I know you can create a folder full of aliases and dump it into the documents part of the dock to work with Stacks, in fact I used to do this with spring-loaded folders before I found Overflow, but it just isn't the same.
Remote Desktop seems a little buggy to me at the moment. Perhaps it's just a settings tweak when you consider I'm going from WinVNC on an XP machine, but either way this works less well in Leopard right now than it did in Tiger yesterday. Yes this is nitpicking, which should actually tell you how good the new OS actually is, let's face it, I'm not shy of ranting and complaining when I think I have reason to!
Overall
Evolution rather than revolution. That's Leopard. It was also Tiger when that was first released too, so this is nothing new from Apple. By doing "smaller, more regular releasese" Apple have deftly avoided a lot of the pain that Microsoft courted with the release of Vista and its massive shift in how it reacted to users when compared to their previous OS releases. There are arguably very few obvious "must halt everything and go out and buy this right now" features in this OS release, but the sum total of all the features combined adds up to a very smooth, powerful and compelling upgrade for any OS X, Windows XP or Windows Vista user.
There's a lot more going on "under the hood" here as always with any OS release, major improvements to the OS kernel, security and future proofing (improved 64-bit support) are all here; the UI differences and fancy features are the tip of an iceberg that stretches all the way down into the core of the system and I expect to see new applications and features build on top of all the improvements in Leopard as time goes by.
It's still a good time to own a Mac. Be nice to a Vista owner today and don't show him your new operating system!