[DM-MUG] upgrading to Leopard

[Darcy Baston]

I've upgraded to Leopard and wanted to share a few hiccups.

When trying to do an archive and install on an external firewire  
drive, the installation crashed on permissions and missing files, but  
when I rebooted to it, the new OS ran just fine. Weird.

When performing an upgrade to a 10.4.x (don't remember the last  
counter, but was most recent), the installation was almost flawless.  
The only thing that I thought went wrong, was that the funky cool  
"welcome to Leopard" movie didn't play. I guess this is only displayed  
with a fresh install?

Some hiccups were introduced though:

-Web sharing in the Sharing section of preferences reports that my IP  
is 169.x.x.x, but it really is the dynamically assigned 10.0.x.x my  
airport base station setup is giving my computer.

-I can't browse to my ~/Sites folder when web sharing is turned on. If  
I try it, http://10.0.1.198/~db/ for example, I get "Forbidden You  
don't have permission to access/~db/ on this server" errors. I can't  
browse to the 169.x.x.x variant file sharing is suggesting I use. I  
get a connection timeout. I can browse to http://10.0.1.198/ however,  
and can see the default apache install page.

-I can't add a user to the permissions of ~/Sites. Whenever I click  
the '+' symbol in the user privileges pane after a get-info, the  
Finder crashes.

I've repaired permissions and it doesn't fix anything.

I'm going to edit /etc/httpd/httpd.conf to get the default root folder  
to point to my personal sites folder to see if I can get around the  
permissions error that way.



Besides that, Leopard works GREAT! It's VERY fast on my Macbook  
2.16GHz. The quickview feature is awesome. It's my favorite so far.  
Coverflow view renders very quickly and is fun to use as well. The new  
speech synthesis sounds fantastic. It's so cool to hear a computer- 
voice take breaths while reading text. :)

The multitasking is better. It's like the kernel handles threads  
better. I'm able to do media encoding while working on music in Logic  
Express, and where I used to get pops and pauses, I get seamless  
multitasking.

Image Capture connected to my Epson RX580 for scanning without having  
to update any drivers or reinstall them. I REALLY appreciated being  
able to jump back into productivity without a hiccup there.

Safari does better HTML rendering. When using the Google RSS reader at http://google.com/reader 
  in Tiger, the left pane used to jitter and jump any time a new RSS  
item came up. I had begun using Firefox to get a better experience.  
This new Safari is jitter free now.

The new dock is horrible. I don't like it and am using the more  
traditional view by either putting on the left, or playing with 'write  
default' at the command line.

I don't like how when you used to just see a folder's icon when you  
dragged it to the dock, it now renders a stack of icons indicating its  
content. If you only have one file in a folder you drag to it, it  
shows the icon of that one file instead of the folder. That's just  
silly and is making me go back to DragThing for custom icon drop zones.

The new folders are ugly and harder to identify in a hurry. Once  
CandyBar comes out, I'll be customizing them.

The new spotlight is wonderful. If it was useful before, it's that  
plus fun now. Results come up MUCH quicker. The new math functions  
mean I don't have to use the calculator for quick results anymore. I  
really like that. The implementation of boolean searching is really  
useful.

Airport and network detection is greatly improved. I used to get  
annoying pauses when clicking on the airport menu before networks  
appeared, and now the menu is rendered first, and detected networks  
appear afterwards. Before, it used to wait for a network or two before  
rendering the menu. The menu also now shows which networks are  
encrypted with a padlock icon.

Being able to see network activity in Mail.app inside the left pane is  
extremely convenient. I caught myself still using the hotkey today  
when the information was already displayed heh.

The smart searches in the left pane in the Finder are very useful.  
I've added one called 'Desktops' that searches for images with a width  
of 1680. You could do this before, but having them grouped and spaced  
away from the other pane items is nice.

Spaces is a very enjoyable virtual desktop solution. I took to it  
right away. I had tried other products like You Virtual Desktops  
software, but didn't like it. Spaces feels right.

I'm not a fan of how Leopard hides part of the contextual menu items  
under a "More" submenu when right clicking on an icon.

I appreciate the new alternating colors for file rows when using the  
Finder in list view.

The About This Mac menu shows what partition is your current startup  
volume. Was this in Tiger? If not, it's a nice addition. I'm guessing  
this is most useful for Bootcamp users.

The Path Bar that you can turn on in the Finder is also a new  
favorite. I just wish you didn't have to click twice on a folder  
indicated in the path to open it. Would be nice to be able to do drag  
and drop folder operations with it too.

The new rendered shadows around windows feel too wide and too smeared.  
I find them distracting.

I won't be using Time Machine as I prefer to do mirror-backups and  
don't want spontaneous file operations occurring while I'm consciously  
managing system resources. Plus, the fact that it makes new copies of  
10GB files whenever you edit them (like a disk image), is silly and  
wasteful to me. Maybe when they begin using the ZFS file system which  
allows for block level updates, it will be more efficient.


In summary, I'd say that the core upgrades to OS X are great, the new  
UI tools are spiffy, and the enhanced apps like Mail are greatly  
appreciated, but Apple put on way too much extra glitz and glamour.  
Why they changed the icons from a color-differentiating icon scheme to  
something flat and monochromatic is an unwelcome mystery. The new dock  
is more entertainment based and has less utility to me, but you can  
tame it with some effort through different positioning, hacking, or  
using desktop pictures that are darker near their bottom edges. And  
those window shadows...they've become ugly paint on an already good- 
looking canvas.

Darcy