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Leopard

Now that the dust has settled down and Apple hit the 2 million sold copies mark just on the first weekend I can decide for a moment whether to proceed with an upgrade on some of my machines (I’m still waiting for my DVD to arrive from.. err.. Interlog!). Since I recently bought an Apple iMac 24″ I’m actually entitled to a “free” upgrade, and that one I’ll definitely install.

If we ignore all the new eye-candy, which doesn’t mean a thing to me (Mac OS X is already too cute) and we delve into the inner core of the operating system, I found the following features to be quite interesting:

  • Slightly faster and definitely snappier than Tiger — and Tiger is already damn fast!
  • 64bits: No library hell! Just raw speed!
  • Time Machine: Ahh, I do like this! Having a version control of the whole OS is such a great thing;
  • Spaces: I’ve been using this from the Linux world from a long time now; Exposé kind of minimized the need to have Spaces but it’s definitely something cool to have;
  • Safari 3 and the new Mail.app
  • Random kernel enhancements that contribute to a snappier OS;
  • QuickLook - This one was definitely underrated but it’s really cool;
  • New Finder - Some people complain that Finder is not that powerful, but when I need raw power I resort to CLI. Unbeatable. Period.
  • Ruby on Rails installed by default!

Now wrap all this stuff on the usual “Everything just works” package and you get yourself an even better OS.

What’s missing? Something like Microsoft Outlook. Unfortunately there’s no equivalent on the Free/Open Source world or even on the proprietary side. Microsoft Entourage (Outlook for Mac) is bloated, slow and crashes too often. Plus, it’s still running on Rosetta. As for Mozilla Thunderbird, it’s definitely a great email client but lacks the calendar functionalities. Evolution is damn slow, buggy and far from being a stable product. I was definitely hoping that the new version of Mail.App would actually be a Mail.App + Calendar + AddressBook on steroids. Guess not.

Definitely the point that matters the most to me is that, overall, Leopard feels faster than Tiger.

Finally, and as a note, if you’re looking for reviews of Leopard, please skip Digg. I’ve criticized Digg in the past for having way too many Apple fans, but on this particular case, all Leopard articles were flooded with Microsoft fanboys saying nothing but rubbish.

I’ll give some factual insights as soon as I put my hands on the installation DVD!


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