Re: The official thread for any and all discussion related to Apple Macs.
Spaces. I never knew it would be so good. I thought okay, apple designed virtual desktops. Fine. I may or may not use it. But within these few hours of using it, I've already gone crazy about spaces. The very fact that you know where your space is, makes it really useful.
As for Time Machine, surely the killer app. I don't really need bootable backups, though I'd expect some to want that feature. Still, since it takes six minutes to reinstall, and you can just as well restore your system using time machine, it's almost there. I'm so glad my hard drive came at just the right time.
Front row. They've amazingly screwed it up. While the new interface has a lot of improvements, it takes away some of the most important things. The music pauses when invoking frontrow, and pauses when getting out of the 'music' menu. This really sucks. Also, the click-forward timings are changed. The earlier click forward timings were perfect. You could skip and entire TV show opening credits with one click. And if it went a little too ahead, just click-back. The click back was short while the click forward was long. Now it's unpredictable. Of course there are a lot of improvements....
Stacks. Another killer feature. And since each icon renders a preview, you can immediately know which stack you want. And it's even got drag and drop between stacks, finder windows and whatnot. This has won me over.
Now, for the unnecessary quoting:
Its a hard disk, obviously installing from a Firewire HD is faster then a DVD
What the hell! I mentioned that it will obviously faster than Firewire. You don't have to go 'against me' and say 'pretty much the same thing'.
Just tell me if I can set the Apple menu to opaque again.
I find no problems with the transparent menu bar. It's quite usable. And I'm sure someone will bring about a menubar hack which will make it opaque again....
Apart from the ‘main stuff’, some of the many things I find that just amaze me:
The cosmetic changes. The OS is just too good looking. And while i know this is superficial, I am one for eye candy. But it has to be usable. Apart from the new dock, menubar and the new unified windows, here's a screenshot of the menu's. They have rounded edges which makes them look really amazing.
*img3.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/b38f2ff93c.jpg
Spotlight is lightning fast. Now you will say the same about Windows search and others. Well that 'was' the speed of spotlight in Tiger. This is really really really fast. Instant. Kaboom! It also throws up a dictionary meaning for any word that is searched for.
*img3.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/f5ac0eca89.jpg
Then there's the improved help. Right from the menubar. And if there's a menu command, you just move down to it and it shows you where the menu is.
*img3.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/19d674f434.jpg
A lot of stuff has animation attached to it. And useful at that. When you create a new folder, it sort of moves out of the mouse pointer and onto the window. So you know where the 'new folder' is created immediately. Preview animates the zooming in and out of images. And finally, the open/save dialog boxes have a "media" menu on the side where you can access all iPhoto, Music and Movies right from there. And Photos in any Media browser includes 'events'.
And one big feature surprise that wasn't mentioned anywhere else. It is faster than Tiger! You would expect that the newer OS will be slower than its previous one, but in leopard everything is zippy. Most of the apps open with one bounce. There's no lag in anything.
Now for the baddies:
Frontrow. i've mentioned it before. Front row while having some nice improvements takes away a lot. When you get into Front Row, it pauses iTunes. When you get out of the "Music" menu in frontrow, it pauses the music. This really sucks. I think they've just about ripped the front row interface from AppleTV and dumped it on leopard. The click-forward/backward timings are all mixed up and unpredictable (though I think these are just bugs waiting to be ironed out). That said, Front Row has a beautiful interface and is much more fluid than the earlier one. Just hope that these things are taken care of.
Finder seems to give too much importance to Coverflow. I like coverflow in finder, but I like it at a certain size. Now, when you resize a finder window, the coverflow size increases, not the list at the bottom. So you have to resize a window, then reduce the coverflow size to get some viewing area. Hope someone addresses these.