So, yes Melinda and I bought a Leopard family license on a whim for our 3 macs, and yes had we got to wait in line 2.5 hours for a couple of t-shirts and a DVD in a fancy looking case, but for us it was all worth the effort and money.

Upgrading

When we got home I decided to be the first to do an upgrade, obviously first backing up my trusty Tiger install to an external drive. Two hours later I still didn’t have a running system as my upgrade had caused me an unresponsive (and unfortunately blue) startup screen, which didn’t have an error code but was quite similar to the Windows blue screen of death.

EDIT: This problem is now known to be related to a haxie container framework called Application Enhancer. If you did install ‘APE’, you should do a clean install.

I gave up soon after this and decided to just do a fresh install which went both faster and worked immediately. After me, Melinda tried an upgrade and hers ironically went without any bumps at all, so I guess my problem will only affect a small percentage of switchers. The official Apple support site already has a thread with 270 responses and maybe a few solutions.

In short: make sure you have a backup before you go into the process of upgrading as you might need to reset your tiger install or do a fresh install and transport the data.

3rd Party Applications

Once we both had Leopard running we started playing with its features and we were bot impressed by the speed. Leopard is fast, VERY FAST. Only a very few applications didn’t work properly though, mostly browser hacks like Saft and Inquisitor that use the now no longer supported InputManagers concept. We did find a little tool called PlugSuit that re-enables InputManager support and has let us use Inquisitor again (Saft didn’t work but SafariStand did most of what we wanted from Saft).

All and all I am happy with Leopard as it is a decent upgrade that, has a few very interesting features for everyone and probably doesn’t give you all the trouble an upgrade to Vista would give you.

A few unboxing photos

Just a quick headsup for those mac users who are not particularly excited about upgrading their OS:

Boatloads of Leopard-only developer environment improvements will likely result in many applications releasing new versions that will no longer work in Tiger (10.4). If you’d like to keep your apps up to date, you’ll have to upgrade to Leopard.

Specifically:

• Objective C 2.0 has been released and it looks like a number of important improvements, such as automatic garbage collection, won’t work under Tiger.

• Core Animation makes it easy to add any number of shiny gimmicks to your app. Core Animation only works on Leopard though.

EDIT: Also check out Matt Gemmell’s partial list of 43 leopard-only development features - use any of those and your application becomes Leopard only.

Personally I wasn’t planning on switching until a suitable version of java 6 is released for OS X Leopard, but possibly I’ll be forced into switching sooner than I planned.

(Of course, Cristiano already switched - that’s his personal copy of Leopard above. He’ll write about his experiences installing Leopard soon.)

I went to the Apple Store in Regent Street today to get a free Leopard t-shirt. I was a bit early and noticed a line was forming so got a spot as 9th in line at about 3:30PM. Eventually hundreds of people got in line behind me and Melinda (and a few people even were arrogant enough to get in line in front of us, assholes!). At 6 the doors opened and I had to push some queue jumpers who were told a couple of times by us and Apple employees to *** off.

Strange thing is that, although we only went for the t-shirt (first 500 would get one), we eventually ended up buying a family license as we have 3 macs anyway. Most of the photos can be found below or on my flickr page.

PS: We got applauded at which felt really weird and cool at the same time.

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.

There are many obvious reasons why people like Mac OS X, but when I switched to Apple I was really charmed by the not so obvious features. So when Apple announced Mac OS X Leopard last WWDC many people were excited by the obvious new features like Time Machine and Spaces. I however am again more excited with the not so obvious features. Let me share with you two of the major things I look forward to.

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