Well, as I’m sure you can guess I’ve been spending more time with Leopard. I’ve discovered some more good, and some more bad.
The Bad
On the bad front, I’m having e-mail problems, which I chalk up to my host. The interesting things I’ve discovered during this about Mail are a little unfortunate though. When a message can’t be sent, you get a little dialog box asking you which account to try to use to send it (including retrying). The problem is that Mail doesn’t seem to honor that setting (at least if the new one you try fails). It also seems to lose the association between my account and it’s SMTP server sometimes while I’m having these SMTP problems.
Also on the bad side, you can only resize disks with Mac partition tables. If you want to change the partitions on a disk with a DOS partition table, you have to redo the whole disk, just like before. That’s unfortunate. This wouldn’t be a problem if Apple would fix this, or Windows would read a Mac partition table (which have only been around for what, 15+ years?).
The Good
They fixed the iCal icon. You no longer need to open iCal to get the correct date. This is tiny, but it took a long time. Also on the small list, Time Machine does have neat effects.
In deeper reviews, Spotlight is wicked fast. For worst case searches, it’s as fast as it was before. But for some searches (especially those that seem to retrieve fewer hits) it is noticeably faster. This is especially true with applications (which they optimized) which is great and the main way I use Spotlight.
I really like the Screen Sharing they put in. I’ve been using VNC for a few years on my computers, but I’ve had mixed results lately. I used to use OSXvnc for the server which worked pretty well. I used Chicken of the VNC for the client. Both are nice. But for some reason when our iMac would view my laptop, it would mix up the red and blue channels some times causing all the colors to be very odd, but only in some screen areas. Apple’s built in VNC server that OS X had in Tiger was noticeably slower.
Well, I can say that Screen Sharing is very fast. It feels great, almost like using the computer directly. This is over a pretty good link (802.11G), but it is smoother than it was before. There is more to it than that, though. Screen Sharing offers scaling though OpenGL, so it looks very nice. Chicken of the VNC could do that, but I think it was experimental, and either way it wasn’t OpenGL so it wasn’t as fast.
The Other
I’m starting to kind of like the look of the Dock. Sure it isn’t more functional, but it is pretty. I’m not sure about the little blue lights though. I haven’t played with Spaces much yet. The menu bar isn’t getting on my nerves like I thought it would (I considered editing my wallpaper to put a white strip up there so it would look like it used to.) Quicklook is rather fast, but I keep forgetting to use it, I’ll have to get used to it being there.
