Advantages of Leopard

[antony]

Absolutely correct, cooner. I'm a big fan of Unsanity - WindowShadeX is invaluable to me - but they screwed up big time here. And Logitech should be hauled over the coals for using something so potentially disruptive and wholly unsupported in their products without at least informing the user first.

Gruber has a good overview of the situation:
http://daringfireball.net/2007/10/blue_in_the_face

[RobertB]

Wow, that's insane that Logitech would base their driver on a haxie.

Antony - I miss the window shade feature available on nearly every unix window manager except OSX but have always been fearful of the APE. Now that I'm running Leopard I'm even more weary.

[antony]

Well, to be fair to Unsanity, the Tiger version of APE has never caused me any problems. I'm confident that when they produce a Leopard version, it'll be perfectly stable. And WSX really is brilliant.

[cooner]

Gruber has a good overview of the situation:
http://daringfireball.net/2007/10/blue_in_the_face

Heh heh, Gruber is THE MAN. I was reading a bunch of Leopard reviews that afternoon but I'm pretty sure it was his article that got me to check for APE on my system in the first place ....

[LauDauns]

As has been mentioned on another thread, the source of many problems when "upgrading" (as opposed to a clean install, or archive and install) is older versions of Unsanity's APE haxie framework, or other low-level system tweakers that play around with OSX's internal organs, so to speak.

Anyone who's ever run something so low-level on their Mac should of course do either a clean or archive installation, to avoid system problems.

The Upgrade method of installation assumes two things: [a] that your system is clean, and [b] if your system isn't clean, then the haxie authors should at least have written their code so that it won't work on a non-recognised system. Unfortunately, older versions of APE don't do this :\

The most annoying thing about this whole APE situation is that a lot of people don't even realize it may be installed. It's all too easy to let oneself sound like "Bwahaha, you fool, installing unsupported haxies on your system, you deserve it!," but that's not always the case.

I haven't installed Leopard yet, but on some weird whim I did a search on my fairly new and tidy iMac for "Application Enhancer," and -- lo and behold, it had been installed. Apparently Logitech's mouse driver installs it, and I had briefly installed it before deciding not to use that mouse on the new machine. I'd uninstalled the Logitech driver, but it left the APE stuff installed.

Fortunately it was the "new" version that wouldn't have caused the BSOD, but still, I stripped it out of my system. I would bet a lot of people suffering the BSOD problems don't even realize they have a haxie installed on their system or that it's something they should have looked into updating. :/

I must agree,That was a cool interview :: I also encountered the same problem, although with the help of many people.
But I do not always feel satisfied.Apart from the outside you.
thanks!

[Deb Allen]

I bought a mac a couple of months ago after years of using windows. It was hard to get used to and Windows for Mac was a bit screwy, but I've installed Leopard today and now it all works wonderfully. and through Boot camp I can still hold onto those things I like in windows. Now I'm very happy.
Deb

[angee]

I am no "early adopter", but I am curious to learn from the experiences of others.

So, question to those who are already in the realm of the Leopard: What do you consider - for you - the greatest advantage of using the new OS? Is there something that would make it worth it even if the rest was not there? Is there a "killer feature"?

And are there things that disappoint you? Things you miss? Things that were better in Tiger?

(I admit, I am an "early interrogator". But maybe this thread is around for longer...)

Like a fool, I installed Leopard on the first day - and got lucky. The install went beautifully (I had a bootable backup in case it didn't), and all my critical apps - MS Word, Scrivener, RapidWeaver - worked.

No hassles at all, thank heavens.

Biggest advantage after almost two weeks of Leopard: speed. Almost everything happens faster. I had printing slowdowns in Tiger, they've vanished. The Finder is faster. Everything's faster. "Speed" is my choice of killer feature.

Also -

* I love the new Finder and Cover Flow, I've been able to browse folders and toss old material. And I've found lots of nuggets and treasures I'd forgotten I have;

* Time Machine - brilliant!

* Spaces. Not as useful as I'd hoped, but helps my workflow.

What disappoints me?

Spotlight. I was hoping that Spotlight would work like Google. Instead, I'm finding that for me, it's not working as well as the Tiger version. Sad.

My favorite search utility, HoudahSpot doesn't work in Leopard, and hasn't been updated yet, so there's no help from that quarter.

As a work around, I've created some Smart Folders in the Finder, and these are superb, so they do (most) of the job, and I'm not unhappy.

If I were giving Leopard marks out of ten, I'd give it nine.

So, I'm pleased I installed Leopard, love it, and wouldn't go back.

Cheers

Angela

[AndreasE]

What disappoints me?

Spotlight. I was hoping that Spotlight would work like Google. Instead, I'm finding that for me, it's not working as well as the Tiger version.

Ouch!

What exactly does that mean? I've read Spotlight was improved, and now you say it was better in Tiger? How do I have to imagine this "disimprovement"?

For me, Spotlight is one of the cornerstones of working with my Mac.

[antony]

I've been using Leopard on a new MacBook for the past couple of days, and I love it. I've even gotten to quite like the translucent menu bar

Spotlight is much faster and more useful, for me. I'd also be interested to hear why Angela thinks it's worse - I almost never used Spotlight under Tiger because it was so slow, but the speed increase under Leopard, coupled with the new boolean search and launching shortcuts, means I'm using it a lot more now.

Andreas, have you tried Quicksilver? If you rely on Spotlight so much, you might find QS does a better job...

[AndreasE]

Andreas, have you tried Quicksilver? If you rely on Spotlight so much, you might find QS does a better job...

Yes, I have tried Quicksilver, mostly because everybody strongly advised to do so - but I am afraid i still not got the point of it. For what is it supposed to be good? Just to launch applications? Thanks, I don't have that much, and the dock is enough for them. To control applications via keyboard? I was always fiddling around with the commands, there were just never the ones I was searching for, or I did not understand what these commands meant to be... It was, in a word, annoying, and I don't use it anymore.

I use Spotlight to search in my assembled materials, downloaded stuff, text parts, informations of all kind. For that, it's indispensable; since I switched to the Mac, I do not put as much effort in folder structure as I did before, because of the possibility to search all across the hard disk. Is it possible to search with Quicksilver? I wasn't aware of that.

[antony]

Is it possible to search with Quicksilver? I wasn't aware of that.

Absolutely, yes. It's one of the principal reasons why QS is so valuable as a Spotlight replacement (the other being the actions you can then perform on a selected object).

Depending on where you tend to save documents, you may need to adjust the "catalog" preferences to ensure QS will search the right folders, but once it's set up it's a lot more powerful than Spotlight, mainly because it learns what you're looking for the more you use it.

(For example, I'm working on a script called SKELETON KEY right now. It's location is ~/Archive/Writing/In Progress/Scripts/Skeleton Key/Skeleton Key.scriv, so it's fairly buried in the heirarchy. But all I have to do is fire up QS, type "ske", and it finds the Scrivener document immediately.)

If all you're using Spotlight for is searching for documents, then to be honest I think the 10.5 Spotlight will serve you just fine.

On the other hand, if you want to see what QS can do, here's a grat video by its creator where he explains what it is, why he created it, and what it can do:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 1634507068

[RobertB]

I've found that the new spotlight is so fast I haven't even bothered installing Quicksilver yet. It pulls up applications when you search almost as fast as QS and seems to remember the most frequently launched ala QS as well.

Congrats on the new MacBook, Antony. I've had mine for a year and it is a workhorse. Leopard actually seems to have really helped to speed things up as well.

[antony]

Yeah, Spotlight has definitely become a good launcher in Leopard. But I use QS for so much more - copying, deleting, moving, looking up phone numbers, launching URLs, running javascripts, controlling iTunes, etc - that I couldn't do without it

The MacBook is superb, so far. If all I did was write, I could easily see it becoming my main computer. (But I also do a lot of design work, which demands a larger screen, so no danger of getting rid of the iMac just yet )

[AndreasE]

Thanks for the video link. I have to admit this is impressive. Maybe I should indeed give it another try. (Although it's rather the speed of thinking that's the problem, not the speed of accessing data... )

[brett]

I probably won''t be using Leopard for a year or so, when I'll probably upgrade my 2005 PowerBook to a MacBook. But I'm curious to know whether 10.5 brings any significant changes to TextEdit. What have you early adopters discovered?