The installation process was smooth enough. I had to restore my user icon but I didn't notice anything else going missing. I had to upgrade SSHKeyChain but it needed upgrading anyway it turns out Leopard can manage without.

X11 now starts automatically when you run an X application, with DISPLAY always being set. Fink's SSH didn't get on with Leopard's X, but as it turns out Leopard's SSH is more recent so I just uninstalled Fink's. The X horrors people reported from 10.5.0 seem to be largely gone.

My previous install of Gimp crashes on startup. Wilber Loves Apple to the rescue.

Terminal now has a “use bright colors for bold text” option which seems to solve the problem of dark grey text being invisible. ⌘-double-click no longer visits a URL but the right button menu will do that instead. It appears to have acquired tabs, too, but I'm not convinced I'll use those.

The same tab features appear in Safari and are certainly as well thought-out as any browser's tab system I've met: being able to rearrange to drag is overdue, but being able to drag tabs between windows - or out of the window entirely - is a new one on me. Neat.

Its new “inline find” is an improvement on earlier versions but still nowhere near as convenient as Firefox's typeahead find. Resizable text areas are nice though most websites seem to manage to avoid stupid-sized ones these days anyway; perhaps it would have been more useful five years ago.

Apple's Dictionary application has become more useful; as well as the OED and a thesaurus it now knows how to look things up in Wikipedia too. Having the front/back matter is nice too though it took me a while to find it (it's hidden away under the Go menu and doesn't seem to be available through anything you can do to just the window).

Spaces is a total disaster. Applications stick like glue to the space they started in. Tab to an application, select its dock icon, even right click and create a new window and you're taken back to space 1. This is true even if there's a window from that application open in the current space already. I'm amazed it got out of the door in this ridiculous state. Apple have completely lost sight of the idea that its the documents that matter, not the applications.

It gets worse. ⌘-TAB to an application that has a window in more than one space and it'll apparently at random switch to one of those spaces, quite possibly not the one you started from even if that already has a window from that application already.

It's not just me who hates this crock.

(Edit: see comments regarding 10.5.3.)

Coverflow is very pretty, but I doubt I'll actually ever use it. Having not only icons but also windows reflect in the dock is clever enough but slightly distracting if you're typing in the bottom line of a terminal. The menu bar being partially transparent isn't so good - with my current background image the result is muddy grey, not very attractive. I've not yet found out how to turn any of this stuff off.

I'll be giving Boot Camp a go in a bit.

Tags: geek, leopard, mac

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