First Look at Leopard
Since yesterday afternoon when I received our Leopard family pack, I have now installed Apple’s newest operating system on all four of our machines. If I have a one-word impression of the new OS, it is this: buggy! Of the last three operating system upgrades I have performed, Leopard has definitely been the most problematic.
That’s not to say I don’t like the new operating system. I do. There’s lots of great things about it. But despite the extra months Apple delayed it, Leopard is hardly a finished product.
In the next blog, I’ll go into more detail about my whole experience. Overall, most of the cosmetic and graphic changes are pretty neat. Performance is overall surprisingly faster than Tiger, at least on the surface. All of our machines, which range from a 2.66 Ghz Mac Pro with 6GB of RAM to my wife’s 2.0 GHz Core Duo black MacBook seem to handle general operating system tasks well.
But it’s the bugs that have my attention. An error message popped up on every machine at the end of the installation process telling me the user keychain could not be found. Apple has already addressed that with a software update, but on the MacBook it wasn’t clear it solved the problem. On the Mac Pro, iTunes (7.4.2) hangs when I run a movie or a TV show when I enlarge the movie player, stop the show, and close the movie player so it shrinks back into iTunes. But as the top edge of the player screen starts disappearing by shrinking into iTunes, the application hanges. I’ve had to Force Quit iTunes every time to recover. On my wife’s iMac, iTunes couldn’t find her library and came up blank because she had the iTunes folder in her Documents rather than her Music folder. (Yes, I fixed that.). Small things for sure, but considering how smoothly the last two operating system upgrades have gone, these are very noticeable to me. Leopard also dumped all my printer profiles on my Mac Pro; I have yet to check my other machines to see if they might have suffered the same fate.
So far, the only application Leopard seems to have killed is my Juniper Network Connect VPN client software. (That was almost expected; Tiger did the same thing.) I tried my Adobe CS3 and my Microsoft Office 2004 applications earlier, and they seemed to work just fine.
Anyway, I’m out of time tonight because I’ve got to go into work tomorrow and I’m still installing and configuring my systems with Leopard. Stay tuned. I’ll write and post more as soon as I can.
That’s not to say I don’t like the new operating system. I do. There’s lots of great things about it. But despite the extra months Apple delayed it, Leopard is hardly a finished product.
In the next blog, I’ll go into more detail about my whole experience. Overall, most of the cosmetic and graphic changes are pretty neat. Performance is overall surprisingly faster than Tiger, at least on the surface. All of our machines, which range from a 2.66 Ghz Mac Pro with 6GB of RAM to my wife’s 2.0 GHz Core Duo black MacBook seem to handle general operating system tasks well.
But it’s the bugs that have my attention. An error message popped up on every machine at the end of the installation process telling me the user keychain could not be found. Apple has already addressed that with a software update, but on the MacBook it wasn’t clear it solved the problem. On the Mac Pro, iTunes (7.4.2) hangs when I run a movie or a TV show when I enlarge the movie player, stop the show, and close the movie player so it shrinks back into iTunes. But as the top edge of the player screen starts disappearing by shrinking into iTunes, the application hanges. I’ve had to Force Quit iTunes every time to recover. On my wife’s iMac, iTunes couldn’t find her library and came up blank because she had the iTunes folder in her Documents rather than her Music folder. (Yes, I fixed that.). Small things for sure, but considering how smoothly the last two operating system upgrades have gone, these are very noticeable to me. Leopard also dumped all my printer profiles on my Mac Pro; I have yet to check my other machines to see if they might have suffered the same fate.
So far, the only application Leopard seems to have killed is my Juniper Network Connect VPN client software. (That was almost expected; Tiger did the same thing.) I tried my Adobe CS3 and my Microsoft Office 2004 applications earlier, and they seemed to work just fine.
Anyway, I’m out of time tonight because I’ve got to go into work tomorrow and I’m still installing and configuring my systems with Leopard. Stay tuned. I’ll write and post more as soon as I can.
posted by Andy Foster at
8:05 PM
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