I bought Leopard (OS X) on the 30th of October and as a test, installed it on the Mac Mini to see what it was like.

My first impressions were a mixture of ewww and wow. I’ll go into the reasons as you read on.

The thing that I was most looking forward to in Leopard was support for RAW images for my EOS 40D, which according to the so called geniuses at the Apple Store, it didn’t support. How wrong they were. Guess Apple didn’t update the fact sheet for their employees.

The other nice features are Quickview and Coverflow (which allows you to quickly see what is inside of any file, be it a JPG, PDF or a Movie), and the fact that OS X is now officially a UNIX approved system. So security and networking is quite robust. There are too many nice eye candy or eye chewing gum, as one of the girls in the office calls it. There are some serious features which are a great new addition. Time Machine which is a great backup application and Spaces, which is the same as the old Unix/Linux Virtual Desktop, but pimped out by Apple.

So the eww factor is the dodgy semi transparent menu bar and menus, which people have already found work-arounds for. But you still need a 3rd party application to switch it off, another app to suck on your RAM. I’m however sure that the real on/off switch will come out sooner or later. There are a few 100 sites which list all the features of Leopard and peoples feelings about them. No point in me going into them.

So after getting it to work fine on the Mini, I thought screw it, I’ll upgrade the Macbook Pro and be done. That was a mistake I made on last Wednesday evening. It upgraded fine, but it obviously brought in some of the fuckups of the previews OS with it. The fuck ups were due to me installing about 1000 applications and then deleting them. So this weekend, I backed up all the settings on both machines, wiped them clean, and installed Leopard fresh.

I spend Saturday eve installing the Mini, and Sunday eve the Macbook Pro. I am so impressed with how painless both installs were. The beauty of OS X is that it installs all the settings in one folder called Library, which then each application has its own folder. All you do is back that up, your documents folder + music/movies and whatever crap you’ve managed to accumulate on your desktop. You can even backup your application folder and just put all of them back on the new install. Which is what I did. And since you’ve backed up your Library, all the keys and serial numbers are there too. No need to find the CDs, or go look for the emails with the from the vendor with the serial number. Sweet. Steve Jobs, you’re a genius.

So far so good, everything running great and fast. With the exception of Photoshop, which didn’t survive the transfer over from backup. Typical Adobe 10000 files spread all over your machine, so if you miss one, it screws up, and you have to re-install the whole suite. Which I will do at a later date.

I’ll have more ramblings about Leopard as I get to use it more. Like a slight annoyance with Safari 3 and Saft.

UPDATE: 1:47 AM, Monday; November 5, 2007 Saft was updated about 10mins ago. And it is back to its former glory, working wonderfully with Safari 3. I am a happy Chappy!