News for October 2007

Mac OS 10.5 Leopard First Glance…

Well it’s been exactly one day since I installed Leopard on my laptop, and here are my thoughts so far:

  •  In contrast to Windows Vista’s release, pretty much everything works out of the box.
  • Filemaker Pro does not work at all (for non-US English-speakers) unless you set the system’s international settings to US (but then at least you can customize everything back to the way you want it). With the exception of some other little utilities, everything else seems to work fine.
  • The spaces feature works well enough, even on dual-monitor setups. I’ve not really taken advantage of it yet though.
  • I realised I can’t use Time Machine because I don’t have enough free space. You need an external disk, and in actual fact it doesn’t need to be empty, but just for my MacBook Pro, Time Machine was asking for around 120GB free space. So it looks like I’ll have to shuffle some data around if I want to use it. It looks like it won’t let me back up to a windows network either.
  • The stacks feature is ok, but at this stage seems a bit pointless. It has allowed me to get rid of the folders and items from my desktop though.
  • By default, OSX will now hide network drives from the desktop. Since I use things like JungleDisk, it was more convenient to switch it back on.
  • Quickview is really good. Just tap the space bar, it pops up a window with the contents. I now find myself wishing that all file types were supported. For example I’d like to open Quickview on a zip file and get a list of the contents of the file.
  • The coverflow file browser isn’t as useless as I’d initially suspected. It’s really nice to spool along through a list of files visually. But unfortunately the thumbnails aren’t drawn quickly enough: you have to spool along and then wait a second or two for the images to display. And they don’t seem to be cached either, so this problem persists.
Posted: October 27th, 2007
Categories: Tools
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