Apple Leopard
 

Should we upgrade?

the tutorial video looked good, but just how usable is all this stuff?

Does it run faster than the 10.4.10 I've got now?

Worth the $129?

I'd wait until either a new killer feature is added, you can no longer get updates, or your core apps that you depend on (updated in this same manner) require it. Then again, I use Linux, so I update all the time anyway...

It's a good evolutionary upgrade. I'm finding stacks very useful, as well as the ability to preview files in the Finder without opening an application. The Time Machine backup utility works seamlessly in the background, and if this saves my @ss once the upgrade will be worth it. Also having Mail and iCal "talk" to each other has made my life a little easier.

It's hard to tell if it's any faster than 10.4.10. I have a 24" iMac with the 2.16 GHZ Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM, so 10.4 ran pretty fast. Leopard is certainly no slower.

Thanks guys, think I'll hold off for now.

Another question: Entourage vs. Mail + iCal. I've used Entourage for years. It's ok, slow especially with years of mail, i.e. getting Sent and then searching is definitely slow, but hard to blame it with the volume of messages. Wondering if you've used both and prefer one over the other.

OS10.5 seems to have a glaring bug in the directory copy code for the Finder. If you're coping form one device to another (say, internal HD to external HD) and one device becomes unavailable for some reason (accidentally unplugged, for instance) Bad Things(tm) happen and you loose all your data.

Shaun, you could copy the older messages to another directory, tarball them so you have em, and keep only the recent ones in programs db. Make it a bit faster. OutLook has this automated, called "Auto Archive." Might want to check if your OSX mail program has anything like that, otherwise you can do it manually.

Actually, this problem has been around since earlier versions of OS X.

A typical "copy" in the Finder means you take a folder or doc and simply drag and drop from one place to another; to another volume for instance. After you are done, you have the "original" in the place it originally was and a "copy" at the destination.

The problem arises when one tries to "move" a file/doc from one volume to another, i.e. no "original" remains at the origin and the "original" is "moved" to the destination volume. To do this, one must hold down the "option" key during the drag and drop.

The lost or corrupt data will most likely be the actual file or document that was in transition from one volume to the other when the interruption occurred!

FWIW.

I think 10.5 is a must upgrade because of Time Machine alone, unless you are already making frequent back-ups.

Best,

Kurt

I always liked Entourage except for the 4 GB limit on the Mail DB and how slow it gets as you approach it.

If you get a lot of graphic attachments you hit the limit real quick.

Obligatory MS rant.

Entourage used to have a 2 GB limit on the DB. Only after you hit the limit and hopelessly and permanently hosed your DB would it tell you.

What's so difficult about warning you BEFORE you lose everything instead of telling you that you just lost everything.

To add insult to injury 2 weeks after it happened to me they upped the limit to 4 and put in a warning as you approached it.

I'm not a Mac person, but my brother is, he posted this answer to a similiar question on another forum.

Here's my non-technical, long-time Mac user report so far.

I'm now running 10.5 on my iBook while seeing if it is ready for my main machine.

Runs faster on a 1 gHz G4 than the previously installed 10.3, which is a huge surprise.

The Web Clip feature in Safari is great. I took parts of a half dozen different ski and weather web pages and made them into widgets. Now have a quick way to check snow conditions all on one screen.

I can see that Cover Flow and Quick Look in the finder will be useful for me in some situations, such as flipping through my downloads folder which has dozens of jpegs and pdfs with cryptic file names that otherwise give me no clue as to what they are. You can also Cover Flow through search results.

Haven't figured out if Stacks will be of any value, although I did use the OS9 version of the idea.

Front Row runs on my non IR iBook using the keyboard.

Mail now has a cool feature called Data Detection. You can select part of an email message and click to instantly send that data to iCal as an event, or to Address Book as a new contact, or, get this, to Safari to pinpoint an address in Google maps. This will be great for me since my daily schedule is mostly decided by emails I receive.

Spaces is an excellent addition to Expose, which I use all the time on my main computer with 10.4. But I like Expose so much that now I often have a half dozen browser windows left open, plus several emails, a bunch of docs, and maybe several other app windows. Expose is not enough anymore since so many tiny window icons means I can no longer see what's what to select it. With Spaces I can group email windows in one space, docs in another, browser windows in another, etc. Then all it takes is to hit F8, click on the space I want, mouse to corner to trigger Expose, then select what I need. Brilliant.

Assessment of iChat improvements will have to wait since I don't have a webcam on my iBook.

Time Machine is supposed to be the big new thing in 10.5 but I already have a good backup system. I plan on trying it but am not sure if it will replace my current routine.

All in all I am very impressed. There are some seriously cool things in 10.5 that I will use a lot. This is actually the first time I have bought a new version of a Mac OS within the first six months of release going back to System 7. I got 10.5 so quick because the OS 10.3 on my iBook had become a limiting factor on new versions of some software I need. However I'll still be waiting a while before trusting my main Mac with the new OS.

I think it's very much worthwhile.... mostly for quicklook. You can preview any file jus tby hitting the space bar, and bang, in microseconds it's open it all its glory... Pictures, documents, you name it.

Combine that with the cover flow view and you got a fantastic browser for your huge (Ok My) digital pictures collection !

And time machine is very nice too... Worth every penny to me...

The article I read today about this said that it happens only with a specific model of Seagate drives used in laptops.

Interesting, the one I read didn't mention anything like that. It occured when SAMBA crashed while moving a directory to a FreeBSD SAMBA server (article on Slashdot).

KStarnes, sorry for my lame explanation:-P I just threw a quick one out there, didn't explain it too well. But, yes, I did see that it occurred in previous versions...all the more reason it should have been fixed.

Apple needs to decide what the role of Finder is these days.

No problem Toad! :) Yes, it should be fixed.

Here's probably more than anyone would want to know about the bug:

http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopard/

Best,

Kurt