Aral Balkan

I just upgraded to Leopard and my initial experience has left a sour taste in my mouth.

The installation was not painless. In fact, I had to restart several times as the screen that displays the locations that you can install Leopard into kept coming up empty. In the end, I tried saving the license agreement on to the hard disk and then proceeding to that screen and that prompted the installer to see my hard drive. It was the sort of workaround I'd device in Windows to get things to work sometimes. I definitely did not expect to have to resort to such tomfoolery in OS X (omg, I said tomfoolery, can I be an honorary Brit, oh please, please, please!) :)

The installation took forever. It took ages for the DVD to verify itself (???) and then ages again to install. I'm writing this at 2am and I started installing all this at around 10.30pm.

Some initial thoughts before I hit the sack:

I'm not a fan of the new menu bar. My old (default) blue wall paper looks horrible with it -- you really need a picture as your desktop to make the most of it. Also, I don't like the new black apple logo.

I'm not a big fan of the new dock either. The stacks feature looked good in the demos but, practically, the fan shape only occurs when there are a tiny number of items in a folder and I don't like the square representation too much. It definitely looks unusable when there are lots of items.

All in all, I find the new OS less visually appealing than Tiger. It feels like a step backwards.

It also asked me if I was sure I wanted to run FireFox, telling me that I was running it for the first time. That felt very Vista-like.

I do like the Open in Dashboard feature in Safari. I've already created a dashboard widget of the latest comments on my blog and it took about, oh, two seconds to do. More importantly for Flash developers, Flash appears to run in dashboard widgets created in this way but not entirely well. The bunny widget from my site, for example, displays but (a) you cannot type any text in the input text field and (b) data calls don't appear to be working. I don't know if this is an issue that Apple will address in an update but I sure hope so. Having Flash content run correctly in dashboard widgets would be amazing!

Finally, it doesn't look like all applications retained all of their previous settings (TextMate just asked me for my blog's password again).

All in all, my first impressions of Leopard are not very favorable. It certainly did not wow me in any way. I'll report back on my experiences as I get more familiar with it in the coming days and weeks.

Comments

• @Relly: Yep, you can set it to fan larger folders but you don't get the full contents. You then have to click to see the full thing in the finder. The fan only displays 9 items on mine. Even the folder that I have my in-presentation files in has 10 and doesn't display fully in fan mode. Also, you can't do anything but click to launch from a stack and that's really limiting to. You can't, for example, crtl-click and unarchieve a zip file that's in a stack, etc. (I did start watching the videos and fell asleep -- literally -- half way. I did read the little guide that came with it though, believe it or not!) @zwetan: I didn't get any options during install (like I was saying, until I saved the license to my hard disk, I just a empty page for that screen). I just chose the hard disk to install to and off it went.

  by Aral on 2007-10-27 20:05:50

• MacWorld details wich Adobe programs run in Leopard and which not: mailto:http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/10/26/adobelopard/index.php

  by aSH on 2007-10-27 10:18:44

• You can change the fan arrangement to default. I don't have leopard but i learn that from the lovely video on the apple site. RTFM :p ;-) And when are you coming back so I can hear your gripes in person? Right now, Toby is eating his shoes and I'm sure he'd love to share the skill with you.

  by Relly on 2007-10-27 11:36:15

• fan arrangement to BE the default.

  by Relly on 2007-10-27 11:37:20

• Hey there, I was thinking about upgrading. Do I have to re-install all my software and back-up all my datafirst? Or is it more of an ' upgrade' thing ?

  by Niels on 2007-10-27 14:11:27

• honestly I got kind of the same first impression, like 3h30mn something to install for 5GB upgrade ..I was like "WTF did I put a Windows CD somewhere ?" :p but looking at my trusty watch and after skipping that silly verify itself screen (sorry but to me veryfying a brand new DVD out of the store just make no sens) it took about 1h30mn to install, ok that's long and obviously somebody didnt do the math right for the installation time :D but once installed, wow I love it :) I like the black apple logo, the thiner UI, everything really the install went painless (ok a little longer than I expected), choosing the upgrade (no archive) options, I got all in place, prefs kept, and working. spaces and stacks really got me addicted to leopard in no time :) but for now what I like the most is more stability in the system itself, I went from 1 screen to 6, got tons more of application open everywhere, and it doesn't slow down at all. @Niels: yes you can just upgrade and you will not need to reinstall all your apps but best to RTFM in the instructions folder ;)

  by zwetan on 2007-10-27 14:36:08

• Sounds awful! I stay with Vista!

  by sascha/hdrs on 2007-10-27 15:01:43

• Aside from the really long install (I eventually told it to go ahead and skip DVD verification), I haven't had any of the issues that you ran into. Firefox opened without asking me any questions. I didn't have any of the odd installer problems you ran into with the installation volume selection. The really long install was annoying, though. I have noticed that some things seem a little more sluggish to me. Maybe it's just my perception, but it feels like the animations when I mouse over the doc seem a little jittery.

  by Ryan Kennedy on 2007-10-27 16:08:31

• @zwetan:(sorry but to me veryfying a brand new DVD out of the store just make no sens) i agree but it could be a very dangerous step.. Somehow neither my MBP and PowerBook could mount the DVD but a third MBP could. So i have made a bootable external HDD with firewire 400 with Leo and the installation took 3-4 minutes(without the printer drivers)! I have never set up an upgrade from 10.X to 10.newX. I love the clean installation.(Old fashion??) NetNewsWire crashed all the time until i clean it's .plist. Is anyone using the mail app for RSS? @Aral: "I’m not a fan of the new menu bar." It's really ugly. "the black apple logo." I can't decide if i like it or not but i definitely don't like the fact that you can't change it from the Appearance preferences. I love stacks but they are useful only for some folders.. I believe stacks are multiple window's "start menus" but with a nicer FX. Spaces are useless for me and the only reason i could ever use them is when i configure my mac to boot windows every time i boot in os X. (???) There is nothing more useful, nicer and easy to use than expose. It's fun when i am on friend's pcs and hit the corners waiting for the windows to disappear.. I'm happy that i don't have to install remote desktop anymore for a basic use. I hate the problems with some Air apps. I consider OS X as a really serious and professional OS coming from a serious and professional company(even without the "Computers" in their name..) but sometimes i worry when i see photos, screens, UI you call it, like the one in time machine (background) and the photo that shows up when a pc is on the network. They have a sense of humor but it feels strange.. I mean windows just don' t works for me and i don't even have a pc since 2004(yes i have XP under a copy of Parallels just in case) but these are childish things. Is this called marketing? I like the quiet way time machine works(after the 1st full back up), although i don't understand how it works when you have opened apps and back up is in progress. I took a tiger back up and I'm still keeping it because i can't fully trust TM yet. Anyway i'm happy with the price of OS X in contrast with XP or Vista.. (I have just remember i first saw a preview of Leopard in summer 2005 while i was on vacation. It's been a long time..)

  by savvas malamas on 2007-10-27 17:10:07

• .. by the way i REALY LOVE that you can scroll a window, safari window etc when in non focus..

  by savvas malamas on 2007-10-27 17:12:17

• Yes, the dockbar and the menubar aren't looking that great! But you can make it better be disabling the glass mode of the dockbar, though. Also the menubar to bad you can't specify the transparency of it. Beside of that I like the Spaces stuff, though. QuickReview is nice too! About the duration of the installation that's odd. I was done within one hour -- I think dinner toke around a hour ;)

  by Weyert on 2007-10-27 18:35:52

• what I don't get about OSX is the fact that you have to buy each minor revision to the OS. Not sure what this would add up to over the life span of say XP, but I imagine it would be considerably more.

  by felix on 2007-10-27 21:08:14

• Hi Felix, The upgrades are not minor ones. Minor updates are automatically updated for free. Think of Tiger -> Leopard as XP -> Vista.

  by Aral on 2007-10-27 23:22:47

• Aral, I have had little to no trouble at all with Leopard. I did a clean install and backed all my work up on an external drive. I have a 15" 1.5ghz Powerbook with a combo drive, and it took 10 minutes to verify the DVD, then maybe 45 minutes to install. So far everything i have installed has worked perfectly. CS3, Textmate, Transmit, Firefox, MAMP, and a few others. So far, I have not been disappointed Leopard aside from the fact that I cannot use Sogudi in Safari 3. I will admit that the asking if you want to open a program for the first time is a little annoying, but it is a FAR cry away from Vista. I used Vista for about 3 days before i was so disgusted with its silly "security" features, that i reinstalled XP. On that note, I will have to say that comparing Leopard as "Tiger -> Leopard as XP -> Vista" is very unfair. Leopard is more than just an interface upgrade and some added swish like Vista was. It adds many substantial features that i am continuously being wowed at, and I would heartily recommend the upgrade. But with ANY OS, i think a clean install is the best choice. An OS manufacturer cannot make sure that every 3rd party app will work perfectly on an upgrade install. That would halt innovation i think. But i digress. I mean no offense with anything I said, just sharing opinion.

  by Greg Ferrell on 2007-10-28 16:11:45

• My upgrade experience was Painless. Took about 40 min (15 of that was verifying the DVD). I think many of the features are improvements, but the interface doesn't initially feel as clean and minimalist. I'm sure I'll get used to it quickly.

  by Josh Walsh on 2007-10-28 23:12:24

• "It also asked me if I was sure I wanted to run FireFox, telling me that I was running it for the first time. That felt very Vista-like."

  Tiger does that too :) It happens when you have something like Firefox as the default app for web pages. Upgrade it, then start it for the first time by double-clicking an .html file rather than the app itself.

  by Olly on 2007-10-29 12:12:44

• [...] Well after reading some comments (from aral for example) that there are still some things to work out i’m becoming a bit more skeptical than I was.. [...]

  by Finally Leopard in the house on 2007-10-29 12:42:32

• "The upgrades are not minor ones. Minor updates are automatically updated for free. Think of Tiger -> Leopard as XP -> Vista." Seems to me to be more akin to Win 95 -> Win 98 or Win 98 -> Millenium. Some revisions under the hood, some new features (ie: improved menu support & multi-monitor/desktop support). Naw this sounds like a .5 update. Not that such is bad. Nor is $150 unreasonable for such an update. - Saj

  by Jason The Saj on 2007-10-29 13:30:11

• I don't know what you guys did wrong ( I am guessing the verification of the 7 gig DVD took forever). Personally, I downloaded the .dmg (I know I know....I am broke) and mounted it on an external USB (1) drive and installed it that way. The upgrade took about 40 minutes and I didn't have to touch anything until the first-and-only reboot. I agree that the menu bar is annoying, I can see an update coming very shortly because frankly, it annoys everyone ! I am a graphic designer and Quick Look is definitely helpful as Adobe Bridge was hungry in system resources. The Spaces application is quite neat, although not ground breaking, since most Linux distros have provided it for the past million years. Overall, it didn't take long for the update, it didn't quite require as much space as first stated by Apple, so I am very pleased with it. Aivanne

  by Aivanne on 2007-10-29 23:23:06

• My mate just got a new MBP with leopard pre installed we were both dying to get it out the box to see how this new OS handled as we are both collectors of Macintosh produce since the ealry 90s... installation was fast 35mins easy and hassle free. once it was set up my first impressions were WOW this looks really cool it was solid, fast, stable, thumbs up to Apple. But after the initial installation of his software I couldn't help noticing the super NASTY sidebar that made me feel like I was using XP AND YOU CANT CHANGE IT??? the other thing I really don't like is the in collum view. when you go to preview an audio file you click on the icon to hear it but you can not skip it forward.... in order to do that you have do it in quickview by pressing apple-y or clicking the eye button in the tool bar... Whats wrong with quicktime bit like in Tiger....And we had a kernel panic in the first 5houres...... If I could skin it with tigers skin I would install it on my G5 but as it is at the mo its a step back in functionality as i see it. I didnt move to Tiger untill 10.4.6 was out panther was so solid. Shame to say all this as I love Apples OS and have done since day one, But i really dont like the new line stuff.... Sunda

  by Maradnus on 2007-11-21 21:09:00

• Leopard is still very new, anyone who would install it as their primary without testing it, in my opinion is dicing with data loss. There's a bug whereby moving data to an smb share can disappear if the destination is diconnected for any reason, if you have a cross platform network this is a very real problem. Some smart a**e will say use afp, but if you have multiple NTFS based servers, or use a secure off site backup depository which uses Win 2003 servers, what you gonna do? Read this, and weep http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopard Mike

  by M1k3 on 2007-11-08 08:37:58

• [...] previously blogged about how difficult the upgrade process was for me (the installer refused to recognize that I had a hard disk in my MacBook Pro until I forced [...]

  by Leopard is tarnishing the reputation of OS X at Aral Balkan on 2007-11-25 14:09:50

• Finally, it doesn't look like all applications retained all of their previous settings (TextMate just asked me for my blog's password again). You got off easy. I just did a migration from Tiger (on a Macbook Pro with fried nVidia chip) to Leopard (on a nearly-identical Macbook Pro -- same specs except slower CPU and less RAM). The process failed several times after two+ hours of grinding due to bad files. Once I got rid of those, it seemed to run fine: Cranked for two and a half hours, pronounced itself done. I was able to login, but found (as you did) that no settings appeared to have been brought over. On closer examination, I realized that not only had no settings been brought over, but virtually all (though not strictly all) files had been skipped, as well. Curiously, all the files and directories in the Shared user space were brought over; in the space that actually belonged to the user being migrated, nothing came over but the directories. (Yes, that's right: The entire directory hierarchy came over, but none of the files in the directories came with it.) No files in the Library folder were brought over at all, so no settings were copied. I decided that rather than run Migration Assistant again (no reason to suppose it would behave differently), I would use Synk Pro to bring over all the files. For reasons that are lost in my haze of frustration, I was connected at this point via the network, while logged in with the user ID I had just migrated. The process was tedious, but I was on vacation, so I let it grind. When I was done, to my great consternation, I discovered that another user of the Mac I was trying to migrate to had been assigned ownership of all the files I'd just copied. (I've traded messages with the guys at Decimus, who publish Synk, and they tell me Synk does nothing but copy the existing permissions. Sure enough, when I later looked at the permissions for those directories on the old Mac, ownership had been changed to the name of that same, other user -- which didn't exist on that Mac.) Aside: The new ownership/permissions widgets on the Get Info dialog are downright dangerous. It's trivially easy to screw yourself out of rights to a file or folder by adding a new user; and it's now necessary to go to the Terminal to set permissions or group for system users like "_www". That's not an improvement. The old system was limited, but it made it clearer what you were doing; this one obfuscates what you're doing. Add to that strange behavior with external drives, and I am seriously considering a backward migration. The only thing that gives me pause is the fact that I have to support Leopard in my office, and it's easier to do that if I run it.

  by eric on 2009-01-10 14:41:07