I upgraded to Leopard
Last night I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Leopard. Installation took less than two hours and went without a hitch. None of the problems that have been reported have shown up, even though I chose the “Upgrade” option rather than “Archive and Install” or “Erase and Install”. Only two programs so far have died on me: Google Earth (fixed by downloading the latest version) and Photoshop Elements 2 (which will cost some money to upgrade). There’s a few other apps which potentially might be broken, but I haven’t gotten around to checking them yet. The app with the most changes is iChat. The buddy list is handled differently, with offline buddies thrown into a separate category. A nice addition is a chat room manager, which can be programmed with your favorite chat rooms. It is currently unclear if it handles Jabber better than the previous version of iChat. There’s also some new video chat features, but I haven’t checked those out since I never do video chats. Unfortunately, AIM is so fucked up of late that it appears I’ll be moving a lot of my chatting over to IRC, which iChat doesn’t support. The overall appearance of the GUI has been standardized and noticeably altered. The old brushed metal look has disappeared in favor of the matte gray look that iTunes and some other apps have been using for a while now. The menu bar, which has been solid white since Macintosh was first released 23 years ago, is now translucent. How good it looks depends on how bright or dark the desktop pattern is. It would be nice if the translucence was adjustable. The Finder looks more like iTunes now, with the same side bar design. It also has Cover Flow, which I regard as useless eye candy (fortunately, you don’t have to use it). The Dock has been altered as well. The translucent background has become a plain stretching off to infinity that mirrors the icons above it. The black triangles that indicated which apps were open have been replaced by glowing blue ovals which look like something from a movie about aliens. Finally, there’s Stacks, which are folders placed on the Dock which spring open when you click on them, producing a curved column of files. Most people seem to hate it, but I dunno. It works well enough for the Downloads folder. One thing I haven’t gotten to yet is Time Machine, for backing up the hard drive. Once I’m certain everything is good to go I’ll activate that. Overall, Leopard is a pretty good update.