The saga of Leopard continues.
It looks weird. I like the look, but it’s different enough to make me go ‘augh.’ There’s a new ‘stack’ ability, which lists what’s in a folder. This is good for Downloads and Documents folders, which have returned to my Dock, now that I can click on them, see what’s in, and click on a content to open that. Very nice.
The apple menu bar is transparent, which is cool but creepy. I haven’t yet found a good background image, but that’s be being picky. The Doc is also a little transparent, but now you can see what apps are open thanks to baby spotlights under the app.
I love how it handles upgrades! You open up Software Updater, it downloads, and then it disconnects you from the GUI to upgrade while you can’t accidentally fuck it all up by doing other things. This is like Windows XP, and I actually like it. On the other side of the ‘Like Windows’ coin, the window focus seems to be like Windows, and I’m mad. In the old Mac Days, you’d open an app, let’s say Mail, let it load, click back on an open app, Safari, and Mail would do it’s thing and leave you alone. Now? I have Safari open, I open Mail, go to type in a long snide post to a forum in Safari, and suddenly MAIL is in the foreground and I’ve typed something in the wrong place! HULK ANGRY! This doesn’t happen ALL the time, so I may have run into some bizzare sequencing, but if this keeps up, there will be death. Seems to ONLY happen when I’m running installs at the moment.
Booting up took longer until I uninstalled a couple older non-Leopard savvy apps (my RSS reader, Vienna). Right now my startup is Microsoft Daemon, iTunesHelper, HimmelBar, Scanner Program, Adobe Sync, Growl and Airport. Which is a lot and I’m going to see if I need all that! Still, the fewer non-Leopard apps in your startup, the faster it goes. I’m taking the scanner out, so that’ll leave me with Microsoft and HimmelBar that aren’t Leopardish.
HimmelBar (http://softbend.free.fr/himmelbar/) puts an icon in your menu bar so you can click and open any app. I’m quite fond of it. Works okay, though the only ‘bug’ is the image, which is white and not … er … transparent. JavaApps (Civ IV and Pirates) run a little faster, though Civ IV still crashes randomly. Known issue. Needs more memory. Speaking of, 1G is fine for RAM. There’s a minor hiccup with some things, but that’s to be expected. Nothing worth bitching about.
Boot Camp is official now, so my XP side is happier. The Leopard DVD had the new drivers and it was a damn easy install. Boot to XP, insert DVD, and BAM. Love you, Mac!
TextEdit now works like a lightweight word processor. It’s not up to the glam of Pages (which I adore), but it’s got some sweetness I’m enjoying. Like it reads .DOC files and .RTF and pops open a damn sight faster than Office. Office. Haven’t tried it yet! I tend not to use it anymore, since I got a copy of Pages. Mmm. Pages and Numbers are good.
I use RSS feeds to keep tabs on peoples blogs and such. I found that Mail has an RSS reader (I know, I know, Safari does, but for whatever reason I like to separate my RSS and Web browser). Mail’s RSS is okay, I miss a couple things (like clicking on the title to go to the page), and it took me a while to grok the smart folder to make unread messages show up in the Dock icon, but all told, I like it better than Vienna on a Mac.