So I have been using Leopard now for a little over a week. All in all the experience has been a good one, but with some niggling issues.
1. Time Machine, I’ve had some issues with TM in the week I’ve been working on it.
- When it works it’s great. But it seems that the first backup of the day slows my machine to a crawl for a long time. After the first backup of the day, all the incremental backups run just fine. I improved this a bit by taking certain files and folder out of TM. The ones that I took out where Parallels VMs, and files that I have under source control.
- I also had to fiddle with the folders TM backed up along with Spotlight. I had Spotlight NOT index my TM folders (I don’t want to see them in the results of searches). The problem with this is that when I want to find a file I need to recover I won’t be able to use Spotlight to help me. What I really want is for Spotlight to be smart about TM backups. I want my TM backups to be index, but to not appear in search results. But I would like to be able to easily search TM backups in Spotlight when needed, but for Spotlight to show the file as a backup and also to show which backup it was found in. In this mode I would also like to be able to recover the file if needed. I guess I want better integration between Spotlight and TimeMachine, which would seem like a no brainer to me.
2. Mail. Faster and more useful then the one in Tiger, but I’ve noticed some stability problems, and the way some of the new features work is not very compelling to me.
- MailActOn Plugin just stops working at times. I need to restart Mail to get it to work.
- Mail sometimes hangs. I am forced to Force Quit Mail and restart. Sometimes, when it hangs, it hangs hard (usually when TM is backing up, so I think they are interferring with each other). When this happens Force Quit doesn’t work, and I have to restart the whole Mac to fix it.
- Notes & Todos. When I got the Leopard version of MailTags, one of the things they took out was Events and ToDos. This bothers me now. The way Notes and ToDo and Events are handled in the new Mail is not as useful as the way MailTags did it. If I store a ToDo on my IMAP server, it puts that ToDo in a Calendar called ‘calendar’ in the group CRT. I don’t want this. I want it to create the ToDo in my Work calendar. As a result I have configured Mail to store all nots and ToDos in my local computer. This allows me to create ToDos from Mail in the correct calendar, but I cannot tie them to a mail message. The notes are OK, but I have yet to use them. It might take me some time to see this feature being useful.
So, after a week I can see where the problems in Leopard are. I still think this upgrade is useful. But like all upgrades, Apple will have to do some work to fix all the kinks.
