Leopard’s out and the world has stopped in its tracks! Okay maybe not, but there were block long line ups in New York, 9am Friday morning blog unboxings and the only news which would ultimately matter to me, my experience with the install. So, when I walked into the office on Friday morning I was happy to see that I had 5 copies of Leopard waiting for me to uncage them.

My test machine was a brand new 20″ aluminum iMac that one of my clients bought for his family (I guess the iPod effect really is true). I unpacked it, did a clean install, said goodbye to the factory fresh install of Tiger and in about 35 minutes was transported through the trans dimensional Leopoard welcome screen to OS X 10.5.

Next on the plate was office Mac Mini (the office test computer and the perfect computer to try an OS upgrade on). To my surprise, the upgrade from Tiger went off without a hitch. All the installed programs worked right out of the back, user settings were retained and OS X 10.5 was even speedier than the previous operating system.

After the Mac Mini, I installed Leopard on the 24″ iMac. I made an image of the hard drive with Super Duper! and, with my fingers crossed, proceeded to upgrade the operating system. The upgrade went off without a hitch. Again, every program worked including such notables as Entourage, Neo Office and the entire catalogue of Adobe CS2 software. Amazing!

Next in line was my 24″ iMac. I made an image of the drive contents using Super Duper! and once I was sure that I had a fully recoverable back up I started the upgrade process on my iMac. The results were great on first inspection (story to be continued later); All my programs worked, the OS was peppy and I was ready to try a back up with Time Machine.

My final install was on a 1.4 GHz iBook with 1.25 GIGS of RAM. To my surprise, it took less than 30 minutes (although I did cut out installing the language pack and all of the printer drivers). The OS feels really peppy on the iBook too – much quicker than Tiger felt.

So, after 24 hours with Leopard, here’s what I like:

1. The packaging – or lack there of. Apple has done a great job making the Leopard packaging look appealing while using a minimum of materials. Although, I’m sure the ink, metals and plastics used in the holographic imagery isn’t all that good for the enviornment… It’s nice to see companies taking steps to cut down on the overall use of materials for their packaging needs.

2. Time Machine looks great. I formatted an external Lacie drive and it’s now become the dedicated Time Machine back up for my iMac. We’ll see how well Time Machine performs in the coming weeks. I’m not overly enthusiastic about the fact that Time Machine doesn’t allow a user to back up their Mac to a network drive but maybe I can learn to live with this issue. For the time being, I think that I’ll continue to create back up images of my Mac over the network with Super Duper! and have Time Machine back up to my external Lacie drive. If I can’t find any reason to keep Time Machine then I’ll revert back to Super Duper!

2. My favourite feature by far is a much more intuitive Finder. Wow, it’s at least 12 billion times better now. Finder finally has a memory to save your directory viewing options over shared drives that delete .DS_Store files. The added view options, ability to view other computers on your network and general refinements of Finder alone are worth the price of the upgrade to me. Coverflow looks like a great addition, but it’s going to be slow on networked directories – especially ones with lots of files in them.

3. Spaces looks great. I will definitely use it for Photoshop and in my day to day work flow.

4. The interface feels more polished and cohesive. I really like the translucent menu bar. It’s just a nice little visual detail. However, I find it a little difficult to see which programs you have open and closed on my Dock though. I do like the Dock’s reflective surface that the program icons are now sitting on and when programs are close to the Dock the reflection of the open window is a nice little feature. I also like how the window you’re currently using has a nice, big drop shadow to add emphasis to the window. So, overall, the interface feels stronger, and more consistent look and feel wise.

5. I don’t mind the stacked menus. I’m not a big fan of how the Applications folder placed in the Dock displays icons of all my installed programs. I fixed this by deleting the placed Application folder, making an alias of the Application folder in Finder and then dragging it down into the Dock. Now, my Applications directory opens up in Finder just like I want.
- Speed. All my systems are faster. Photoshop is more responsive (I’m still running CS2 and hoping to upgrade to CS3 in the coming week). Boot time is about the same as Tiger. Shutting down… Well, hmm. That’s about my only issue (and only on one computer).

As of 10:29 AM this morning my experience with Leopard had been flawless. At 10:30 AM, however, (Gasp!) I experienced my first issue with Leopard. My iMac developed an interesting quirk as a result of the upgrade and it no longer wanted to shut off properly. The Mac appeared to shut off fine but for whatever reason, it wouldn’t fully shut down (The hard drives power down but the system fans remain spinning). As a result of this issue, turning on the Mac is impossible unless I either cut off the power to my power bar, turn it back on and then press the power button on the iMac again or hold down the power button to shut down the system. When the Mac turns on again it complains about not being shut down properly and that OS X has recovered from a system crash. I can live with this issue for now and I am hoping it’s an issue that isn’t only experienced by me. I’ll see if I can do anything to get it under control (as far as I can tell I am running the latest firmware on my Mac). My worst case scenario is doing a fresh install of Leopard which won’t be all that bad I guess but I just hate having to reinstall of my settings!.

And that’s it. I’ve been hanging out with Leopard for about 32 hours now and I’ve got to say, he’s easy to get to know and has become a good friend.