A couple of months ago I did a small review of what I thought would be the really interesting features of Apple Mac OS X Leopard. Not only were all my predictions about the user interface and the growing up of certain features true (yes, drop the balloons!), but Apple also introduced some new features including a new dock and menu and stacks. Obviously I wanted to test this (nearly) feature-full product so I managed to get my hands on the WWDC2007 build and gave it a try.

After an afternoon of playing with Leopard, I was amazed about how well this beta release works. Here and there I encountered some bugs (especially in Photo Booth which has a bunch of new effects that just crash the app) but overall everything was simply quick. Might I say it was maybe even quicker than my Tiger install? Especially the Spotlight search has really been improved to offer more of a feel that Quicksilver does at the moment for Tiger. Furthermore the new look, with harder contrasts between active and inactive windows, is just so much cleaner and with the help of Quick Look and Cover Flow the finder has just become so much more useful.

Finally I was really amazed about how they improved some of my personal Mac Whines. First of all they changed the little network menu item. It now auto-refreshes and shows the difference between open and closed networks. Another network related improvement is the automatic discovery of shares on the network, allowing you to browse open shares much like you would do on Windows. In other words: no need to explicitly mount folders, and no crashing finder when you switch network with a folder mounted.

All an all I think Leopard is worth the money as it offers a lot of improvements over Tiger. I didn’t even mention Time Machine, Spaces and all the other new features, but I think it is those small things that make you a happy Mac user.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 20:31 and is filed under Apple, Leopard, mac, osx, software.