leopard on my mac

I installed Leopard on my mac last weekend. Overall I think it’s just kind of OK.

The big new features of Leopard like TimeMachine and Spaces are great (although not new) ideas for a consumer operating system, but they’re implemented rather inflexibly in Leopard. For example, when you use a backup disk for Time Machine, Leopard requires that it be formatted in HFS+ and that it be solely used for backups. Time Machine seems to be designed to take up all the space on the backup disk and throw away old snapshots when the disk is full. This is great, but what if I have a huge external drive and I only want to use part of it for backups? I could partition it, but why can’t TimeMachine just have a “space limit” setting? That being said, TimeMachine’s UI is really quite amazing. I’ve been reviewing some research on visualization software recently and I’m definitely taking a few cues from TimeMachine.

All applications have a more unified look in Leopard, which is nice to finally see after years of inconsistency. It’s nice to use Mail.app as an RSS reader and having tabs in Terminal.app is lovely. I also bought iWork ‘08 recently so I can use Keynote for presentations. I love it. It’s so much more pleasant to use than Powerpoint.

In the end, Leopard is another $129 $99 (with my academic discount — see, there are financial benefits to my return to academic life!) that I use to keep myself on the cutting edge.