Leopard
Posted by Daniel Lyons Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:14:00 GMT
The upgrade rocks, overall.
It took about an hour to install. My observations:
- Wow, everything is so translucent and pretty it’s so hard to remember two years ago when we all kissed Steve-o’s feet for removing this feature in Panther.
- Time Machine is really neat. But did we really need an absurd new button for it?
- Tell me this is usable, with a straight face:
- Help now comes with bonus shitlight:
Much has been made of the dock. It’s really ugly. I take that back. It’s really pretty. So pretty I keep on staring at it. Distractedly. Did you ever use a mirror for a desk? How about get a bunch of soft blue LED track lighting for it. I suppose I’ll get used to it eventually. It’s not like we get a choice. And the side dock is glitchy, if you can stand having it on the side in the first place.
I have been playing a lot with Emal. The todo function is nice enough I can probably give up on OmniOutliner with the horrendously ugly icon now (and I have been using org-mode with Emacs for everything more sophisticated anyway). The RSS functionality is nice but without folder hierarchies I may be stuck with NetNewsWire. I’m going to try and live without RSS for a few days and see how much I really care about it.
The new Safari is somewhat nicer. Nice enough for me to give it a shot, foregoing Firefox for a few days. The new iChat is a pleasant surprise. The new Terminal is slightly nicer.
Time Machine seems to be a bastion of weird UI considerations. I can’t take a screenshot within it. Clicking the close icon on the window you’re working with closes Time Machine but keeps the window around. Otherwise it seems to be pretty excellent; it has the kind of completely unobtrusive UI that would frighten and confuse developers of a certain obnoxious, intrusive and unreliable backup program. It looks like the best backup program ever.
You’re going to want a Firewire 2 drive. After a few hours of rearranging my files it’s re-backing up 4.6 GB of stuff, and it has to take a complete snapshot when you first get it running. Fortunately, it’s pretty smart about doing it in the background, but of course it slows things down a bit. Disconnected operation is going to be the key concept here, plugging in whenever you want a snapshot taken.
Apart from the usual BS about the usability and looks, it seems to be great. No troubles so far.
