Wanted to add that I did do an Archive and Install, not just a plain Install. I read around first to discover what was recommended; most of the geekier sites I read said to do a Clean Install (after a backup, of course!) but I just couldn’t bring myself to do that.
I did do a full bootable backup using SuperDuper! first. I also checked for any of the files that seemed to be causing problems. Since I rarely install anything other than main programs (I read about them, I just don’t install them), I didn’t run into the APE problem.
One note of ‘awareness’: toward the end of the Install it will say “about one minute” remaining. IT LIES! That one minute was 14 minutes long for me. Good thing I’m patient.
In concert with what others have said, I agree with the disappointments over TextEdit. I was hoping for some additions, not just tweaks. Alas…
I love love love Time Machine. I am one of these stupid people that never backs up because it’s too hard, or I don’t have any CDs on hand, or “My Mac never has problems!” I love that I just plugged in the external hard disk and my Mac asked, “Wanna use this for Time Machine?” And away it went… taking care of everything for me.
I really like Stacks, particularly in concert with my Downloads folder. I just click on Stacks to see the last thing I downloaded (which isn’t always at the top of the folder view).
I haven’t quite mastered Spaces yet, probably because I put all my work stuff (Scrivener, Word, Yojimbo) in one space and all my Internet stuff, like chat, in another space… and I am constantly switching between them. But when I’m not chatting with someone, the work space is quite nice.
QuickLook (which lets you peek inside a document without having to open the app) is wonderful.
But Time Machine is made of win, as far as I’m concerned.
ETA: I forgot the biggest win feature of all!
In mail.app now, if you get a mail message with a date or time in it, you put your mouse over the date or time and a little pop-up menu appears with a menu item “Create new iCal event…” Adding stuff to my calendar is now 100 times easier!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 …
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!
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
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.
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…
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.
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:
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.
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 )
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… )
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?
TextEdit, the shell application on top of the rich text system—let’s just say it took me a while to even find anything new! It’s pretty much identical to the Tiger version. I think the only new feature is “Prevent Editing” which is nice for distributing read me files I guess. The text engine hasn’t really been addressed. There are some new import and export formats.
The text system in general, is probably the most disappointing thing about Leopard.
Amber - exactly. I think I said the same a few posts back, or it may have been somewhere else. This has been especially disappointing to me in terms of Scrivener. Tiger brought bullet points and tables, but both as buggy as anything. The problems with bullets and tables haven’t been addressed in Leopard. And the only noticeable addition from a user-perspective is grammar checking (which I turn off anyway - can’t stand it in Word, for instance). There are some under-the-hood improvements and fixes, but ont much that a user would notice. Some are postulating that now that Apple have Pages, they are less interested in making the text system more powerful as they wouldn’t want to help competition, but I’m not so sure that’s true as, as far as I know, the team working on the text system is quite different to the one that works on Pages. The weird thing is, the text system engineers seem brilliant (from their responsiveness on the dev-lists), so I’m not sure why there is not a more noticeable bump in the text system. Personally, I would have liked to see a “page layout” view (not that Scrivener would have used it, but it would be good to see one without having to put it together manually all the time), improved RTF and DOC import/export (which at the very least supported images - I think it is very poor that they have implemented brand new .docx and .odt exporters which have exactly the same limitations - no images! - as the older exporters), hidden text support, bullet point and tables improvements and a few more public methods for the latter, too. Oh well…
Best,
Keith