[rvanderpyl]

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.