Three Days With Leopard: First Impressions
decembrie 5, 2007 by alexandrulz
I’ve spent the last three days fiddling with OS X Leopard (I was too curious not to try it), and my feelings towards it are rather mixed. Basically — but without making it a full-blown review, and in no particular order, they would be:
- The newfound consistency is a wonderful idea, but I don’t really fancy the theme. The theme is pretty similar to the look of iTunes, while I would have preferred a more Aqua-ish look. I used Shapeshifter before — I may use it again if it works.
- Also in terms of look, I don’t like the huge shadows under the windows. I’m sure there’s a hack somewhere, but I didn’t bother looking for it — which doesn’t mean that I won’t. On the other hand, I do like the new dock look (for what it’s worth… it won’t be long before I revert to my old, Classic-like desktop I hacked a couple of months ago — also on this blog).
- In terms of speed, Leopard is hardly the beast I’ve heard it to be. It runs okay on my Mac Mini. I don’t use hardcore memory eaters, like Photoshop or Quark XPress, but Aquamacs, XCode and NetBeans have no problem. It does boot slightly slower than Leopard, but compared to how Vista runs on a dual-core system with 1 GB RAM and all the OS X-ish visual effect, it runs, well, like a leopard :-D.
- I haven’t had the time to fiddle with Time Machine, and chances are I won’t do it too soon — my old backup scripts work fine. Spaces is cool though.
- Finder is still broken.
- I heard a lot of people complaining about Java — but I had no problems so far. Save for the dialog windows (which do look “generic” indeed), I’m a happy NetBeans user.
