So today I joined the Apple masses in upgrading my work Mac to Leopard. I figured I’d give my first day impressions.
1. The upgrade itself was painless. While some people have had problems with the upgrade I fortunately did not run into any.
2. The new Finder has a new look. I like Cover view and the sources sidebar. It seems that Apple is going to unify their look-and-feel around the iTunes model. I will need to work with Leopard more to give a better review.
3. Time Machine got setup with almost no effort. It recogized my USB hard drive and asked me if I wanted to use that drive for time machine. All I had to do was tell it what not to backup. The rest it did on it’s own. I will need to use this over time to see if it holds up.
4. iCal. I like iCal’s new look. I am also looking forward to see how iCal works with CalDAV. The only issue I had was a little trouble with Spanning Sync. Nothing serious, but I did need to upgrade to the latest version.
5. Mail. This is the app that I use the most during the day, and therefore the app I noticed the changes the most.
- All my plugins where deactivated when I started Mail. This was annoying. I use MailTags and Mail Act-On heavily and have come to count on them. However I was able to get both those plugins working again, had I not I would have seriously considered going back to Tiger.
- IMAP seems to be much faster. One of the annoying things with Mail Act-On was that it took some time to finish actions that required a IMAP write back to the server. Now these actions are much faster. It seems that Mail has improved it IMAP support. It even supports IDLE without a plugin!
- Reminders in Mail are nice. Since I use a Ticker file with MailTags due dates I have turned Mail into a little GTD program. The only problem I have is there seems to be no way for me to tell Mail to hide ToDos until they are due today or past due. I also cannot view them at the same time as my Today tickler folder. I’d like to have one view to see everything I need to do.
- RSS in Mail is also nice. While I still plan to keep using Vienna for most of my RSS needs, I do plan on moving some of my RSS feeds to Mail. All of the RETS.org feeds can go in there, and since MailTags works with RSS articles I can incorporate them into my Today folder.
That’s it so far. I have yet to use Spaces, and I really need more time with Time Machine, Finder and Mail to see give a more detailed review. I plan on posting again after Annual, and we can see how well Leopard works on a travel laptop.
I was actually thinking that iTunes looks more like Leopard, not Leopard like iTunes. Its just that iTunes was released before Leopard.