The Move to Leopard

The decision to upgrade was pretty easy. We have two “must not break ever” apps, Aperture (for me) and World of Warcraft (for kat). Everything else is just the standard stuff that should never break from an OS upgrade (Firefox, Adium, etc.).

The Install

I was totally fooled at first (because I didn’t actually read the screen) by the DVD integrity check. That took forever. It took longer than a trip to Trader Joe’s. Literally. I went to TJ’s and got provisions for dinner and when I got back it was still only at 91%. I wasn’t going to take the chance after hearing about a bum DVD that somebody got. Sure, it was a long-shot that I got a bum DVD, but these upgrades come along so infrequently, what’s another 30 minutes?

After that I’m not sure what happened because I was off watching Samurai Champloo. If you like Cowboy Bebop and The Boondocks, you’ll dig this. Except for this random squirrel creature that shows up as a plot convenience device, it’s pretty awesome.

First Impressions

I’d like to change the login screen background. Google and ye shall receive. I mean, it’s a awesome shot. I’m just not a big purple kind of guy. That’s all.

Safari is much faster on the web apps that I use. I live on the web, so a fast, stable browser is very important to me. I’ll have to give Firefox another chance to see if my crashing problems have gone away.

Mail will be interesting. The biggest upgrade to Mail for me came from GMail opening up IMAP. So, I’ll see how that goes. I know I’ll be using it a lot more at home now. At work, Outlook is still the Boom King.

Address Book is still in need of a cleaning after a failed experiment with Plaxo. I strongly recommend against syncing Plaxo with GMail contacts and then Plaxo with your local address book. Google has a funny way of counting somebody a contact and it doesn’t yet jive with my own ideas. Time Machine would have saved my bacon on that one.

Time Machine I have yet to try. I need to buy a new external HDD. It would be interesting to see somebody try and track drives sales with the Leopard release. I’m betting Time Machine will cause a little surge in sales.

Spaces I’m just getting used to. I think they will be more useful on the laptop than the iMac. Although, depending on how it plays with WoW, kat might find it very handy.

The other 8 trillion features that I haven’t seen or used are all awesome and well worth the upgrade, or something like that.