Leopard First Impressions

I installed Leopard today on a system almost identical to Dr. Webster's: 24" 2.4GHz with 3GB RAM. Overall, I love it. My observations:

- SPEED. Leopard is much faster on my machine. In particular, the new version of Mail absolutely flies compared to the last one. Safari also seems a little faster - just enough to be noticeable. The Finder also seems snappier, and while there was of course no Finder Cover Flow option in Tiger that I can compare Leopard to, I can say that Finder Cover Flow in Leopard is much, much more responsive than I ever thought it would be. It's really pretty, and surprisingly useful.

- STACKS. I actually really like Stacks - particularly in conjunction with the new Downloads folder. Makes it easy to keep my desktop clean. I never used hierarchical Dock menus myself (I kept my Apps folder in the Dock, but I never used it). But if I _did_ use hierarchical Dock menus, I would be annoyed at the inability to restore that functionality by disabling Stacks. But I still think Stacks are cool, and for me personally I've already used them more in a few hours than I ever used Dock hierarchical menus in 2-1/2 years of Tiger.

- SPACES. I never was a virtual desktop user, but I figured I'd try it out. I have one Space for each of my basic apps (Mail, Safari, Word, iTunes). It's really nice not to have a bunch of windows on the same screen, and not to have to keep hiding and unhiding apps. EDIT: I thought Spaces was a RAM hog, but I disabled it and got only about 10-20MB of RAM back. It appears Leopard is a RAM hog in general.

- THE DOCK. The new Dock is fine by me - I really like it. However, if you choose a light, solid color as your desktop pic, you'll notice that all the Dock icons have drop shadows _above_ them. This looks like dark-grey colored halos above every icon - really ugly.

- THE MENUBAR. I'm glad Apple made the final menubar less translucent than in the developer preview, but it's still a bad choice. I'm with Dr. Webster on this one. I like using a greyscale desktop pic, and I use the graphic systemwide appearance, so the menubar is nice dark grey for me. But try switching to the purple-tinged "Aurora" desktop pic that Apple uses as the Leopard default, and the menubar takes on an awful purple tint - really terrible, and distracting, and - when the Mac has finally, finally shed the stigma of being a "toy" - makes the Mac look like... a purple toy. Ugh. Can't wait until someone comes out with a hack to make the menubar 100% solid. (There was a hack, but Apple changed the way the translucency works, and so the hack doesn't work anymore.)

- FINDER. Cover Flow rocks. The new, iTunes-inspired sidebar scheme rocks. Quicklook totally rocks. And it's not just for image files and movies. Use Cover Flow to navigate to a PDF file, then hit command-Y to view it in Quicklook. Then click the Full Screen button in Quicklook - you have a beautiful, scrollable PDF, at full-screen size, with a black background. I've never seen anything that comes remotely close to this PDF-reading experience, in terms of being easy on the eyes and free of distractions.

- FIXES. Interestingly, my Aluminum iMac wakes from sleep much faster and more gracefully under Leopard - no more 3-5 seconds of blue screen before the normal desktop returns. This leads me to believe that Apple has fixed, or at least made real progress on, the screen-freezing bug that's afflicted some iMacs.

I don't care if Leopard is revolutionary or just evolutionary. So far, this OS version slays everything else out there. Tiger was the first version of Mac OS X that really felt like it fulfilled the original promise and potential of OS X. But Leopard is the version that finally goes beyond that original promise, and provides functionality that makes me go, Wow.

Eye candy may be the media story here. But the real story is the under-the-hood stuff and the improved file management.

That's my $.02.

Best,
Matt

The icon drop shadows bothered me a lot, so I changed the Dock to 2D mode by putting defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES into terminal and then killall Dock. Everything seems a bit faster.
Apple has changed the fan behavours; my Macbook Pro's fan stays at 2000RPM all the way to 80C, at which it ramps up to full speed. Fan Control doesn't work at all, but SMCFanController does. I don't mind the transparent menubar thing, although I'd like an opacity slider, and I hope someone makes a hack to bring back the rounded corners.
I like the new Finder a lot, and I can't get enough of Stacks. Quick Look is very cool and is going to save a lot of time, but I don't think I'll ever really use Coverflow. Spaces is nice but nothing too interesting.
Overall it's a nice addition to 10.4, but there isn't a whole lot of exciting new end user stuff. I'm sure all of the upcoming 10.5-only applications leveraging all of the new technologies in 10.5 will make it worth it, though.

I'm interested to hear about G4 performance of the shipping version. My fastest Mac is a mini 1.5GHz G4. I know on Intel Leopard flies, and Tiger is fine on this little thing.

Jon, I'm running the last developer preview (GM downloading from Apple right now, but it's still going to be a couple hours. Insert rant about how devs didn't get the GM until after the retail stores were selling it.).

It's running quite well on my Powerbook G4 1.5 w/ 768Mb RAM. I haven't noticed it being any slower than Tiger, and it actually seems to be running multitasking better.

After a couple weeks of using this as my primary desktop, I've got to say that the semi transparent menu no longer bugs me. The shadow above the dock still does, but I expect that'll be fixed in an update. The glass shelf dock doesn't bug me anymore either. The perspective is off, but when you drop an item into the dock, it actually looks like it's dropping on, rather than Tigers 'floating on' approach.

Spaces still has some bugs (hopefully fixed in the GM), and I get the feeling that I'm going to end up having a massive feeling of relief in a few months when Time Machine saves something vital. I went out and bought a 500GB drive to hook up to my Powerbook since I was needing a bit more drive space anyhow.

I've been using stacks in grid mode. That way it gives you visual feedback when you type in the name of an item in the stack. It annoys me that they disabled the Tiger dock folder behavior, since I used that every day as well. I kept an 'Applications' and 'Frequently Used Apps' folder. I've ditched the Applications stack, since it's annoying, but the Frequently Used Apps works just as well as a stack.

The real win is in the details though. I quite like the square corners, it makes it feel like the screen actually ends at the bezel, not slightly inside. iCal is no longer a massive pain to use. Tabs in the terminal, consistency accross the UI, little visual hints when you've found text you were searching for, Finder acting sanely when you disconnect from a network but are still connected to a server, the list goes on.

From a developer standpoint, it's excellent. I'll be releasing a couple of quick projects in the next few weeks that take advantage of the new frameworks. All my current apps are staying Tiger and Leopard compatible though, so the only benefit it gets me on those are the improved dev tools. Any other Cocoa devs in the audience will agree when I say: IBOutlets and IBActions being automatically read from your header files into interface builder - worth the cost of Leopard in itself.

-BW

I'm currently pulling a backup of my PowerBook (identical to BDub's except I have 1.25GB RAM), so I should have an additional Leopard-performance-on-G4 report soon.

I'm curious about the promised resolution scale independence... whatever it was called. Is that a real feature, or was it dropped?

Also, what is the bulk of the install? Its huge! Is it the bundled apps, the templates for DVD maker thing? Eliminating printer drivers and dev stuff and the life apps and demos, how big is the core install footprint?

About 3.3GB.

About 700MB of that is the new Alex voice, too.

cool, freaked me a little... this is the largest increase in size of any release. The hardware hasn't changed much afa devices go... I guess I should be asking what is the size difference in the Darwin releases, then how much more in the difference between everything else. Most of what changed, by the bytes, is in the interface, then?

Moosemanmoo: you can get the rounded screen corners back. The broken utility I referred to - the one that could reduce menubar opacity in the developer versions of Leopard but not in the final version - has been retooled by the developer as a utility that will restore rounded screen corners. It also will let you choose the curve radius, and which corners you want rounded:

http://www.manytricks.com/blog/?id=19

Catmistake: AFAIK resolution independence was removed, or turned off, in the final release.

As far as size goes, this is the first OS X install DVD that works on both PowerPC and Intel. I imagine that bumps up the size noticeably - although I don't know if it impacts the actual install footprint. As far as the size of the whole DVD, it's a dual-layer disk because there's more than 4.7GB of data on it. And the total installation time was increased by at least 40 percent because it takes so long for the installer to check the DVD to make sure it's physically okay (the installer lets you skip this step, but the thought of a munged Leopard install because there was a problem with the DVD disc made me think patience was the better choice).

Best,
Matt

Best,
Matt

I just finished the install on my PowerBook. It seems about as snappy as with Tiger, but an interesting thing to note is that the menubar is NOT translucent -- it's a nice grey gradient with a drop shadow. I suspect Apple only supports the translucent menubar on machines with a fast enough processor/video card, and apparently the 12" PowerBook G4 doesn't qualify.

now i really feel left out... my mac is so old that panther was the last thing it ran at all smoothly.... maybe next years student loans can get me a nice imac..

Weird. I just upgraded and can confirm this. The menus are still subtly translucent, but the menubar no longer is. And I'd just gotten used to it!

I'm now noticing a problem where my Bluetooth Mighty Mouse stops working after waking my iMac from sleep. The Bluetooth menu reports that BT is still on and that the mouse is still attached, and the mouse acts like it's still attached (the light on the bottom blinks twice when it's not attached). The only way to fix it is to reboot, which logs me out normally but sits at the "spinning clock" graphic for a very long time. A couple other people on the Apple discussion boards report the same problem; with some of the other problem reports I've been reading, I hope 10.5.1 will be coming out soon.

I have used Leopard for over about 18 hours now, and the only real problem I have noticed, is that a harddrive I am trying to partition, either makes disk utility freeze, or it crashed the utility. It has happened with like 3 HDDs. I think it's a bug, because it just sits there With "Creating Partition Map" and it's a PITA. I had to go to an iMac G3 to partition it with 10.3, and it did it pretty much instantly.

All in all, i did the upgrade install and it seems to have gone off w/o a hitch. I am happy to be using it on my macbook (White 2.16Ghz w/ 1GB RAM, 120GB HDD, and DL DVD-+RW)

Bluetooth was buggy in Tiger as well... they think it went away.

oops... was going to quote the whole apple reply, but can't... I just quoted from my original bug report.

I have a feeling Bluetooth won't be around much longer. It never lived up to its hype, Bluetooth 2.0, for instance, promised quality wireless audio, but from what my ears hear, it sounds like poo. Seems to be fine (but buggy) for simple devices (mice/keyboards), but with wireless usb around the corner, I think (hope) they'll just stop using it... kill the technology... problem solved.

Bluetooth was pretty buggy before 10.4.3 or 10.4.4 IIRC. I recall having fairly annoying problems with my bluetooth headset where it'd be recognized once, and then never again unless I manually edited it out of the bluetooth config file.

I'd prefer if bluetooth didn't go away. The idea of being chained to my desk instead of being able to pace to my whiteboard when I'm on a Skype call is annoying at best.

There are other more better wireless technologies coming... but you'd rather have Bluetooth? As I see it, it takes too much power (drains phone batteries fast), and just doesn't work (consistently).. Its not Apple's fault, ya can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear. Being that's all that's available for digital wireless devices, I understand your position... but when there's something better, to cover everything BT does but better,, why keep it around?

I'll take what's available and working today over what's better and coming. When the better thing is available, then I'll switch over.

Now, in fairness, my usage of bluetooth is limited to my Jabra headset paired with my laptop. When I use it, I tend to be plugged into a power source, and I drop it in my charger when I'm done the call. It's rare for me to use a bluetooth device for more than three or four hours at once.

You refer to better stuff coming. Links?

I guess we'll have to disagree that Bluetooth is "working today." Sometimes it works great. Sometimes... its like its haunted or something. Everytime I try to use it, I have to pair it again... agrivating. Now, Jabra is higher end, right? Maybe I've just been using cruddy hardware (like my moto stereo bt headset or my cruddy moto v551), and Jabra has nailed it, or maybe bluetooth never worked any better, or even as good as regular ol' analog wireless radio. I guess my point was Bluetooth had wonderful unparalleled PR that, IMO, was a snow job... they never came close to living up to the hype, at least in the arena of consumer audio. I guess its fine for telephony audio... if it would always work, but I get it working about 50/50 -- not sure where the problem is.

I have read and laughed at several posts (elsewhere perhaps) of anticipation of being able to listen to music via bluetooth on a bluetooth enabled ipod. Apple could have easily enabled this on the iPhone, and I even think there's a hack to let you do this somehow... but they didn't, because it sounds so bad. Forget Bluetooth 2.0 headsets for enjoying audio... you may as well be listening to music over a telephone line, because that's what it sounds like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_usb
hate linking to wiki-p but I am lazy... also, after glancing at this, appears WUSB won't even compete with BT... that's weird. And I'm not buying it. Bluetooth is like that 5th Beatle... couldn't play anything, no talent, but everyone liked him, so he was "in the band"... I guess he dressed cool and cracked jokes or something, and that's what I see BT as... all the techy co.s are including it in their devices, even if it is only marginally functional.

At the risk of this thread devolving into a Bluetooth argument (oh wait, it already has), I'd like to know what your experience with A2DP actually is. Is the Motorola headset you have the only Bluetooth audio device you've ever used, or have you tested a wide variety of products and can definitively say that A2DP as a protocol sucks? Because, you know, Motorola isn't exactly known for making high-end audio products, and perhaps it's actually the headphone drivers that sound like crap.

I had another headset... can't recall the brand, but very popular, respected for ... I think they just happen to have the best wireless-g consumer stuff now... fine for phone, it was an earpiece type, fell out into the cat water bowl... actually still worked after I dried it out, but eventually it got stepped on, and that did it in. The Moto headset had a jack, and when it was jacked in it sounded decent... but then it was regular wired audio, not BT.

Are you saying some stereo BT headsets sound good enough for enjoying hifi music? If so, brand it, and I'll check it out.

Again, sorry we got off topic... and such a good thread, too

--edit
It was D-Link

I find this kinda funny. Way back in the early-mid '90s I was running Amiga OS and had my old A500 setup for a 4-grey desktop and everything set to a 3D-ish look. Now Leopard takes it a step further and adds gradients and effects. What goes around comes around...

I pulled the HDD from my Yikes and put it in my DA so i could test my DA in Leopard, i did have to make a .dmg of the DVD and mod a file so it can be installed on my 533mhz DA.

it ran good, allot better then i thought it would. the only issue i ran into was in disk utilities wile trying to repair permissions. wile trying to do this it didnt do anything, it just stayed there. i rebooted and tried again, and got the same results. i tried a few more times and it just stayed there doing nothing. i dunno if its just a issue on my system or not i haven't seen anyone mention it yet. maybe its to early yet after leopard release for people to try to repair permissions. does anyone else have this issue

another report was issues with Leopard and a GF2MX. i put my system into deep sleep and it woke up just fine, i allowed the monitor to go to sleep and it woke up fine as well.

but anyway Leopard ran fine and was just about like tiger is but maybe a bit faster on this DA at 533mhz with 768mb ram a 40gb HDD and a GF2MX.

"wile" - madmax, are you a native English speaker, or no?

In this context it's spelled "while".

Did you leave it for some extended period? It just might be working, albeit very slowly.

Truly, it feels just as fast or faster than Tiger? Those Apple OS engineers are amazing! M$'s OS team seems even more clueless than ever!

dan k

I ran disk utility again and tried one more time to repair permissions. I let it sit there for a half an hour and still did nothing.

it would seem as this is broken for me.

I have to say, i really really like leopard. I received my install DVD yesterday, and immediately backed up all my stuff onto a 2nd HD. I then performed a wipe & install of leopard. All told, it took about an hour and a half, from putting the DVD in, to being @ the leopard desktop. I've had no issues whatsoever with it, and am really impressed with the new features.

Just my 2¢.

(Dual 1.25 GHz G4 PPC (MDD G4) w/ 1 Gig RAM)

specs:

PowerPC G4 @ 700Mhz 256k L2 Cache 1:1
PC-133 RAM at 640MB
100Mhz FSB
80GB 7200RPM harddrive (ATA/66) w/ 8MB Cache
Geforce2 MX 32MB DDR VRAM (non-upgradable)
DVD/CD-RW (Dvd function busted, used external DVD to put it on)
FW400/USB1.1/56k v.90 Modem/mini-VGA out/Sound I/O /100Mbit eth
17" (16.1" Viewable) Flat CRT @ 1280x960@72Hz

Let's hope it works good! it's just about done transfering applications.

I have a Lucent Wifi Card for it, but don't really need it, since I have wired Ethernet, and it sticks out the front anyways.

i think that might be good to run Leopard, but the problems will come from the 100mhz system bus and the 2x AGP. but since your CPU is faster then mine that should make up for some of the slower speeds of the Mac you have.

i am running a Digital Audio
CPU: 533mhz ( on a 133mhz system bus)
Ram: 768mb
Video: Geforce2 MX (on a 4x AGP slot)
Storage: a 120GB HDD, and the stock 40GB HDD
Optical: Pioneer DVR-110D

and it runs Leopard nicely ( altho the GUI dose suffer from the slower videocard) but the faster AGP slot and the faster system bus makes up for allot . it would be even better on a G4 with a 167mhz system bus.

Leopard Sounds Great, but can you disable Time Machine ?
I think it is a waste of HD space and performance dapper I know I will be eating these words but oh well.

-Seth

Time Machine only works if you have a second drive, and you have to specify that you want to use it for TM too.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html

To answer your question: time machine is completely optional. You need to set it up for it to work. Basically, if you don't want to use it, remove the time machine icon from you're dock and forget about it. Probably not the best idea tho. Go get yourself an external HD< and set up Time Machine. You won't think it's "a waste of HD space" when you loose an important file!

No Classic! Didn't realize it until I tried to launch Emailer . . . I still depend on so many Classic apps, so that right there is a non-starter for me.

It feels roughly the same speedwise as my solid old 10.3.9.

Actually, I'm still looking for something, anything really, that seems any improvement over Panther. All I'm getting so far is lots of broken apps. :-P

dan k

I've just noticed that the bottom of the menus are rounded, and so is the dropshadow of them.

There are other emulators... I wonder what the chances are that classic functionality is a hack away.

I just wanted to add my experiences with Leopard. It installed without a hitch on my iBook G4 (1.33Ghz, 14"), and my friend's Powerbook G4 (1.5Ghz, 12"). For kicks, I threw the install DVD into my Quicksilver, which started life as a 733Mhz G4. I'm happy to report that the installer had no qualms with my machine, and happily installed Leopard without a hitch. The specs of my rig:
- Dual 1.6Ghz G4 (PowerLogix upgrade card)
- 1.5GB RAM (3x512MB PC133)
- 1x60GB (Boot Drive), 1x40GB, 1x250GB
- Flashed PC Version GeForce 6200

Just wanted to share my experiences.

Cheers,

The Czar

You just got to love Apple not putting the sawtooth, Cube,GBE, DA, QS in the blocked Machine ID list, which allows you to use a CPU upgrade to get past the virtual speed block. and then it becomes a supported machine

Maybe they were throwing a bone to the (soon to be out of business) companies that make Mac processor upgrades.

na, i don't believe that

There is no "blocked machine ID list". The installer check is based on processor type and speed.

there is a Machine ID list but none of the AGP G4's are in that list, the only thing that blocks them (if they are slower then 867mhz) is the virtual cpu speed check . the only thing you have to do is mod the OSinstall.mpkg

below is the virtual CPU speed check in its original config

// require 867Mhz+
if (system.sysctl("hw.cpufrequency") < 866000000) {
return false;

to show something like this (this is how i modded it

// require 300Mhz+
if (system.sysctl("hw.cpufrequency") < 299000000) {
return false;

here is the machine ID block list ( as you can see there is no AGP G4 in the list)

var badMachines = ['MacBook3,1','iMac','PowerBook1,1','PowerBook2,1', 'AAPL,Gossamer', 'AAPL,PowerMac G3', 'AAPL,PowerBook1998', 'AAPL,PowerBook1999'];

Also there is a memory size check

var minRam = 512;

i modded it as well to say 256mb

the guide is here

Guite to install Leopard on unsupported Machines

and here is LEM on unsupported Mac's running Leopard

List of unsupported Machines running Leopard

it shows a list of unsupported systems that people have got Leopard running on ( mine included )

I've just ordered Leopard on the Apple Store .. Tiger runs just fine, i just hope that i will have no problems, I'm choosing to to and update on Tiger.

I have an iMac Intel 17" Core 2 Duo 2 giga Ram :-)))

I have just "tasted" Safari 3, it is a very good improvement of the "old" Safari 2, but it still does not open certain web sites, where Firefox works fine. Better than nothing :-)

P.

Leo's in my Mac :-) !
A 45 min update on Tiger, and Leo's roaring like a charm ...