The reason I switched to the Mac five years ago was for the Mac OS, not the hardware, so I was looking forward to the Leopard release. Now that I've used the new OS for several weeks, I can definitely say that it's the best Mac OS to date. However, there are some flaws that are driving me nuts!
Time Machine is genius. Backup made easy for the masses. I'll probably lose some geek cred when I admit that I didn't backup before on a regular basis. On occasion I'd burn my iTunes purchases to a DVD. There was a period where I dabbled with ChronoSync to create a weekly backup, but that never worked the way I wanted. Now I can plug in an external USB drive and forget about it. Genius I say, genius!
Mapping network drives has always driven me nuts on the Mac. On Windows you just map a drive, tell it to reconnect automatically and you're done. On a Mac you have to map it manually every time you login, or add the drive mapping to your login items. Even worse is losing your mapped drives after your Mac goes to sleep. There are some techie solutions available, but most of them involve mucking around with Terminal. No thanks.
All of these networking woes are behind us now with the launch of Leopard. Mapped drives appear in the left-hand column of the Finder. Log out, restart your mac, and those drives will still appear on the left. Click on one of the names and you are reconnected in less than a second. I'd offer up a "brilliant" or "genius," but this is the way network drives should have operated from the beginning. So instead I offer a hearty, "it's about time!"
Spotlight has finally graduated from a good idea to a good tool. No longer do you type in a keyword to wait 60 seconds while the list populates. It's fast, very fast. The order in which the list populates also makes more sense. Applications are the first item listed, always. That means you can type "iph" and before you can say, "I like cake," iPhoto is at the top of the list. A simple tap of the return key and iPhoto is loading. Once again, this is the way it should have been from the beginning, so it's a welcome change.
Installing Leopard is another story altogether. I chose the upgrade path instead of a complete reinstall of the OS, which was a bit of a mistake. My macbook didn't like the upgrade at all. The OS would load and run, but I couldn't shutdown or restart. As you can imagine, that got frustrating fast. A format and reinstall took care of those issues.
On my iMac, I ran into keychain madness. Loading Safari would prompt the keychain password box to appear. Loading Mail ... scratch that ... loading anything, and I mean anything, would cause a keychain password box to appear front and center. Using the Keychain Access utility I reset all of my passwords and solved the issue.
The upgrade process was frustrating at times, but could have been far worse. All in all, I'm extremely happy with Leopard and recommend the upgrade to anyone not using their Mac as a primary work computer. For those who rely on your Mac for a living, I suggest waiting a bit longer until the next major service update (10.5.2) to make sure all of the major bugs are ironed out.
