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Apart from being nicely faster on the hardware side (World of Warcraft in 1920x1200 pixels at 80fps!), the new iMac came with MacOS X 10.5 "Leopard". Which I have now used for, oh, several hours. So let's mention some first impressions.
Spaces is nice. It doesn't quite work the way I want a virtual desktop manager to work, but the differences are minor, and it does cooperate a lot better with the window system in general than Desktop Manager did for me in 10.4. On the whole, a win.
The "camouflaged" folders in the dock (where they show the icons of the contents instead of the icon of the folder) suck. What the Hell were they thinking? Rumour has it they'll make it optional in 10.5.2. I sure hope that rumour is correct.
Time Machine is brilliant. It's the best interface for a backup program I've seen, ever. By a huge margin. Sure, it's not an enterprise-class backup solution -- but then it's not meant to be. It's meant to be something that makes the 99.9% of computer users who has never backed up a file in their entire lives actually do that. And with a backup process that goes "1) Connect USB drive. 2) Tell Time Machine to use USB drive. 3) Forget about it until you need to restore something, weeks or months later", it's got a far, far better chance of getting things backed up than anything that requires any kind of manual intervention. Also, the interface for doing restores is better than the interfaces of all enterprise-class systems I've ever used (which are a few, since that's been part of my job for many years now), even if you disregard the showiness of it. If you're running MacOS X 10.4 today and are unsure about upgrading, Time Machine alone is more than enough reason to take the plunge.
Spaces is nice. It doesn't quite work the way I want a virtual desktop manager to work, but the differences are minor, and it does cooperate a lot better with the window system in general than Desktop Manager did for me in 10.4. On the whole, a win.
The "camouflaged" folders in the dock (where they show the icons of the contents instead of the icon of the folder) suck. What the Hell were they thinking? Rumour has it they'll make it optional in 10.5.2. I sure hope that rumour is correct.
Time Machine is brilliant. It's the best interface for a backup program I've seen, ever. By a huge margin. Sure, it's not an enterprise-class backup solution -- but then it's not meant to be. It's meant to be something that makes the 99.9% of computer users who has never backed up a file in their entire lives actually do that. And with a backup process that goes "1) Connect USB drive. 2) Tell Time Machine to use USB drive. 3) Forget about it until you need to restore something, weeks or months later", it's got a far, far better chance of getting things backed up than anything that requires any kind of manual intervention. Also, the interface for doing restores is better than the interfaces of all enterprise-class systems I've ever used (which are a few, since that's been part of my job for many years now), even if you disregard the showiness of it. If you're running MacOS X 10.4 today and are unsure about upgrading, Time Machine alone is more than enough reason to take the plunge.
