I’m much too busy to publish my initial impressions of Leopard in a timely manner; so, instead, I’m publishing my thoughts after two months of living with the big cat. I’m going to cover a number of different aspects of Leopard, some major and some minor. I’ll start with the upgrade and a litany of issues and then comment on some surprises, both positive and negative.
Upgrade
For the first time ever, I upgraded an existing installing to a new major release of an operating system. Before Leopard, I always performed a clean installation and then painstakingly reapplied all of my customizations. While time consuming, I always found this process therapeutic and cleansing. However, in October, I barely had time to run an upgrade installer yet alone perform a clean install followed by extensive customizations. Regardless, if an upgrade is good enough for Gruber, it’s good enough for me. And, it was.
Postfix
The most annoying side effect of upgrading to Leopard that would probably have been avoided with a clean install, was the frequent postfix error (fatal: file /etc/postfix/main.cf: parameter mail_owner: user postfix has same user ID as _postfix) that would be displayed in system.log. I eventually Googled this error and discovered that if I changed the user ID the errors would stop. Unfortunately, I now have a new recurring postfix message in system.log: postfix/qmgr[83978]: warning: qmgr_move: update active/0759FEE9FED time stamps: No such file or directory. Lovely.
Cron
I was surprised that my cron tables were empty after installing Leopard. As recently published, crontabs live somewhere different in Leopard. Regardless, I would have expected the installer to move them to the new location. Anyway, I took this opportunity to replace my cron jobs with launchd agents.
Printing
The upgrade process also deleted all of my printers. Again, not a big deal, but I had hoped by upgrading, I’d have less stuff to reconfigure. Anyway, one of the bugs in Leopard that is most annoying is that I can’t print a document in landscape orientation to my school’s HP LaserJet via SMB. When I do, it is cropped and printed in portrait orientation. To work around this bug, I have to print the document to Preview, rotate the document, and then print it in portrait mode. I can print a document in landscape mode to a LaserJet 1022 via USB or to an EPSON Stylus Photo R220. Go figure.
Safari and Domain Names
Since I’m on a roll with various aspects of Leopard that don’t work well, I’ll mention that Safari 3.0 appears to have issues with user names that are prefaced by a Windows domain (e.g., MYDOMAIN\user). I need to specify such a user name for a number of web sites such as Outlook Web Access and, while I had no issues with Safari on Tiger, I do haves issues on Leopard. Sometimes, omitting the domain works, but not always. Since Firefox always works, it is running much more often than under Tiger.
iGTD
iGTD had (has?) various Leopard-specific bugs. The one that was a major inconvenience for myself was that under Leopard features involving current and future dates were broken. I relied on iGTD pretty heavily and having it not working quite right was a huge pain. Fortuitously, Omni opened the beta of OmniFocus to the public shortly after the release of Leopard (or was it opened shortly after they learned of all the Leopard-specific issues with iGTD? hmmm…). I’ve been using OmniFocus ever since and bought a couple of licenses today (one as a gift).
Rounded Screen Corners
I’m getting kind of picky now, but I miss rounded screen corners. Not enough, to bring them back, but I still do miss them. I feel that if I touch the sharp corners of the screen on Leopard, I’ll cut my finger.
Folder Icons
Okay, being even more picky, I find the new folder icons distracting. Go ahead, take a moment to go take a close look at a folder icon in the Finder. Yes, it is wonderful that we are now using folders with 100% post-consumer recycled content, but, even after two months, I keep thinking that my screen has picked up dust and needs to be cleaned.
Spaces
Spaces was the feature in Leopard to which I was mostly looking forward. However, it ended up as the most disappointing new feature. It seemed that most of the time it did the opposite of what I expected. I wanted to use Spaces to separate contexts not applications. Maybe this is not what Spaces is designed to do since it seemed to behave in unexpected ways whenever an application was running in multiple spaces. Too often a new window would open in a different space than the active one. Or, clicking on an application in the dock would switch to another space rather than bring all of that application’s windows to the front in the current space. Furthermore, I never did quite figure out the behavior pattern when I switched to an application using command-tab. I really tried to use Spaces. In fact, I used it for a whole month until I just couldn’t take it anymore and turned it off. Sigh.
New Screen Savers
I’m almost embarrassed to admit that perhaps my favorite Leopard feature is the new screen savers. The collage and mosaic display styles for the pictures screen saver are practically hidden (look for the small slideshow, collage, and mosaic display style icons in the Screen Saver System Preferences). The collage display style is perfect for my MacBook Pro. I love how I can continue to see previous pictures. With the previous slideshow display style, I too often would notice an interesting picture only to have it vanish and be replaced before I was ready. The mosaic display style is amazing on my 24″ iMac. I find myself standing before the screen mesmerized as I try to guess which picture is being displayed.
Cover Flow and QuickLook
I rarely, if ever, enable Cover Flow in iTunes. I simply don’t find that seeing the album cover for those of my albums that have covers in iTunes is helpful. Maybe my CDs have been siting boxed up in my basement for too long for me to remember their covers. Because of my extremely limited use of Cover Flow in iTunes, I was amazed how much I use it, and how useful I find it, in the Finder. Almost half of my main Finder window displays Cover Flow view. I often browse files by looking at nothing more than the Cover Flow view. If I need more detail, I use Quick Look. One of the greatest features of Quick Look is that I can continue to use the arrow keys to switch between files in the Finder white the Quick Look window is displayed.
File Sharing
The behavior of connecting to file shares in Leopard is so intuitive. I like how the other Macs on my LAN are automatically displayed in the sidebar of a Finder window. I was pleasantly surprised when I first clicked on one of these Macs and was automatically connected to it as a Guest which was exactly what I wanted. Later, when I needed to connect to another Mac as a specific user, I was thrilled that I could easily do so from the Finder window (“Connect As…” button) and that, in the future, I would continue to be connected as this user. What a great implementation that addresses multiple use cases with such simplicity.
Unmounted File Shares
Speaking of file sharing, I’m thrilled that I can now forget to unmount a volume, move to another location, wake up my machine, and be able to use it without having the Finder blocked for a ridiculous period of time waiting for the now missing volume to reappear. This is one of those features that those who only use Leopard and onward won’t appreciate since they, as they should, simply expect the system to behave this way. The rest of us can now remark that, back when we used Mac OS X, you had to remember to unmount your volumes before you slept your machine and moved it somewhere or else the Finder would hang when it woke. Yeah, and it was uphill. Both ways.
Software Update
While I don’t perform all sorts of voodoo before installing minor software updates, I am somewhat careful. Gruber’s process from 2004 is almost identical to mine (I reboot rather than just logout). Well, my process is now one step simpler. The new Software Update application will reboot the computer after downloading the updates and before installing them. Another pleasant surprise that makes my life simpler.
Time Machine
I almost forgot to mention Time Machine which is apt because it works so well that I have forgotten about backups. I used to use a sophisticated backup system involving rsync, but now I just use Time Machine. Since I backup my MacBook Pro over wireless, the initial backup would have taken a ridiculous amount of time. Fortunately, I avoided this by following the advice to configure and start the backup over wireless and then plug the external Firewire disk directly to the MBP to complete the initial backup.
Summary
If I was to summarize Leopard in one word, it would be “surprising.” Overall, I’m very pleased with Leopard but not for the reasons that I expected. Rather, it’s the pleasant surprises due to unexpected features or from the unexpected value of features that makes me so pleased. Sure, I’ve enumerated a handful of inconveniences but I’ve either already dealt with them or expect that a future update will. I’m hoping that Leopard will continue to surprise me, in good ways, in the future.
which provided a good refresher and update. To keep from getting too lonely and re-establish contact with old Mac acquaintances, I’ve created a Twitter account: 
