10.30.07

The post-Leopard upgrade post.

Posted in Home at 12:08 pm by JohnB

I visited the Apple store. I STOOD IN LINE! I smiled when the shutters raised at 6 PM and everyone cheered. I high-fived the staff member who handed me my free t-shirt. I wandered around the store wondering what else I could buy (iPod Classic, 80GB in silver, but don’t tell anyone!), and then I picked up my shiny Leopard box and handed my switch card to the friendly girl with the mobile card-machine. The deal was done.

On my return I gazed with reverence at the box (actually all joking aside it is one of the nicest bit of packaging I’ve seen in a long time!) removed the DVD and slid it into the side of my Mac.

The installation is about as simple as I was led to believe by the nice chap on the Apple site. Click the button, restart the machine, select the drive and wait. A couple of hours later the job was done and I reveled in the delight of the new feaures and functionality.

Now then.. what did I actually get for my money (129GBP… I bought the family pack so I can so my MacBook Pro G4 too)? Lets review:

Email:- now has integration with the address book and has functionality for Notes and Tasks. The details sensing functionality is cool too, the application can sense phone numbers and addresses in the body of an email and hovering the mouse over produces a drop-dow allowing you to save to either an existing or a new contact.. this is nice!

Stacks:- I like this feature. Any folder can be dragged from the Finder window to the Dock and when clicked it shows the content in either a fan or a grid, click again and it goes away.. very neat!

Spaces:- I love having a lot of desktop acreage. To put this into perspective I ‘work’ using a Vaio laptop.. its a nice piece of kit and it has a nice wide screen, however it spends the majority of its life hooked up to a hi-res DELL monitor, acting in dual screen mode. Even then I sometimes don’t feel I have enough workspace. The ability to have multiple desktops, easily accessible with a key combination to separate my various activities and with no apparent overhead on the system itself is simply phenomenal!

Time Machine:- This is the BEST piece of Backup/Restore technology I have ever seen.. bar none. I actually invoke it on a regular basis just to look at the thing.. is that too sad? It does require an extra drive on your systems, either internal or external. I’m using a Firewire 800 connected 500GB Lacie unit and after the initial build of the image, Time Machine snapshots my system every hour. I know this because the drive spins up and chatters for a few minutes.. thats it, no impact on working, no glitches, delays, hang-ups, nothing. I love it!

I know that there are a raft of other little touches such as the Finder updates, Network accessibility improvements etc, etc, all of which I will discover over time (or actually may not, they’ll just be there making my life easier) but my impression right now is that it was worth EVERY PENNY.

J.

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