Yes, this is a post about Apple’s newest OS for their Macintosh computer, and that OS is code named Leopard.

Leopard, or OS 10.5 is the 6th installment of Mac OS X, and yes I am running that Operating system on my MacBook Pro right now. You see, I decided to be safe and sensible this time around, having bought the last upgrade, Tiger, the day it came out… and getting a little burned by it, I decided to wait a little while and let all the developers get their apps up to snuff and even for Apple to get an update or two out there… HA!

So…

I made it to a whole six days before my Apple fanboy geekness won me back over to reason and I rushed to the Apple store to drink my cool-aid pick up my copy of Leopard.

While the upgrade to Tiger was a very bumpy ride in terms of compatibility with existing apps and drivers of which most were broken, I must say this seems to be a much smoother upgrade. Only two apps have been broken so far, and both developers have promised upgrades within the month.

So on to the wonderfulness that is Leopard!

Right out of the box and into the installation screen, you can tell OS X is feeling much more refined these days. It’s just a feeling of… grown-upness. I don’t quite know how to put my finger on it. The installation options were a bit more streamlined and intuitive, and the graphics were great, even on just the OS installer.

So after having made a disk image clone of my Tiger installation so that in case of emergency I could re-image my hard drive right back to it’s previous working state, I inserted the Leopard DVD and booted into the installer.

I opted for a wipe and clean install, there’s just something about starting completely fresh… so at 3:10 in the afternoon the installer started doing it’s thing.

At 3:28 it automatically rebooted.

At 3:33 I was looking at my brand new shiny desktop. I was amazed as this seemed much faster than a Tiger install. Very Impressive!

Now let me ramble randomly about this OS.

So, I LOVE stacks! What a brilliant idea! It makes my life that much easier.

Having To Dos and Notes Integrated into Mail is also awesome, now if only I could sync those properly with my iPhone (uhh, hello Apple, are you reading???)

Spaces is such a beautiful thing. I had never seen Virtual Desktops done right until now. It is intuitive and easy to use, and WELL INTEGRATED!!! The level of integration is what makes it work so well IMO.

All the nice new little visual enhancements are nice, subtle little things like new animations in iChat when accepting a chat invitation, the nice and completely smooth, no jitter, spaces transitions, all these little things just feel so refined. This is definitely the most refined version of OS X yet.

But let me tell you one of the features I have been looking forward to most. That is TIME MACHINE! What a life saver. I backed up manually for a long time, then I tried using DeJaVu for a while, but I was less than impressed. So clunky and un-reliable. I moved on to try many different various automated means of backup but was never satisfied with any of them. But Time Machine, ahhhhh, what a beauty. It saves whole system, and incremental backups all at once, keeps tabs on everything, doesn’t slow down the system at all, is very easy to use and set up, and best of all it just WORKS! Time Machine alone was worth the money.

Spotlight is FAST! Blazing fast. It worked fine before in Tiger, but it’s plain snappy now in Leopard. It’s very nice. For that matter (and I’m not making this up) my Laptop is noticeably faster all around with Leopard. I’m going to attribute that to the fully 64 bit architecture.

As to peoples complaints about the visual changes in Leopard, what a bunch of whiners. The barely translucent menu bar is beautiful in my opinion, and I LOVE the 3d dock. I certainly didn’t have a complaint about the dock even to start with, but using Tiger on the computers at work, then coming back to my Laptop, Leopard is just so much more visually appealing.

Well, I can’t think of anything else to say about Leopard right now so I guess I’ll quit boring the pants off of all 2 of my readers…