Thoughts on Apple's latest cat - a week with Leopard

My copy of Leopard finally arrived via the "Up To Date" program offers to recent Mac purchasers. Once I'd received my copy I sat down to undertake the upgrade process only after I had a complete bootable backup copy of my existing 10.4 drive. Rather than undertake the traditional "clean" upgrade that I'd undertake with a Windows PC I opted instead to migrate from 10.4 to Leopard. The process took approximately one and a half hours as it went through the upgrade steps..

As I've gotten to know Leopard better here are some of my top observations:

Preview.app - as someone that actively reads large PDF files and edits images this is a great update of Apple's built-in viewing application. Some series changes have taken place and will enable users to discard Skim! a great application that let users mark-up and annotate PDFs.

Automator - while I haven't had a lot of time to experiment with the new version of Automator. A number of significant changes have been implemented making it even easier for the average user to perform repetitive tasks. I'm looking forward to working with Automator in greater detail but they've improved integration across applications and the operating system.

Stacks - this was a feature that I was skeptical about using since it seemed more like glossy feature-ware than a useful addition. However so far I've started to use Stacks to help organize my desktop since I leave a number of high priority documents sitting on my desktop. I took these documents and placed them in a folder that sits on my dock making it faster easier and neater to access these documents.

iChat - Apple has made a number of positive improvements to iChat beyond including access to more networks to connect with buddies. A number of interesting features have been added to the application with the ability to utilize a much wider range of backgrounds including custom back-drops from a user specified picture. Our testing indicated that the application can effectively change the backdrop to a user selected picture(s). The application also allows you to transfer files directly to your buddy via file transfer or sharing through iChat Theatre - both of which worked well. The most useful function included in iChat was the ability to share your computer with your buddy. As a replacement for Chicken of the VNC an open source remote administration application the latest version of iChat is equally useful for an average user. We were able to utilize screen sharing to prove out the ability for a remote users to execute a variety of commands across various applications (e.g., Finder, iPhoto, Safari).


More thoughts later.