upgrade or archive install leopard os x 10.5

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1

Not that fussed by the dock - it’s always hidden, so I only see it occasionally. Time Machine took a little while (read the beast part of a day) to do it’s initial backup. Word from the wise: run Mail BEFORE setting TimeMachine loose. That way, you won’t be waiting hours for the Mail database to be backed up again.

Another Gotcha - REMOVE all bundle folders from ~/Library/Mail before updating (I had SpamSieve in there) - even though Leopard’s Mail will disable these, somehow it missed mine and then proceeded to mash my inbox. This is important if you have installed extensions to Mail in previous OSes. After the update, you can re-install the SpamSieve plug-in as it does work with Leopard. If you are disabling SpamSieve, them temporarily disable the SpamSieve rule in Mail before updating, or you’ll find all your new mail ends up in the Sam folder by default!

I think this is the worst thing which has happened to me in the update.

2

I think the reviews are actually mostly positive, except for a couple of the interface issues such as the new Dock, menu bar, and folders. Some “reporters” are grabbing on to those negative comments and spinning them into negative reviews of the whole OS.

Also, before you upgrade, make sure you don’t have an old version of Unsanity’s APE installed (personally, I won’t run their stuff at all, old version or new, but that’s just me).

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306857

If you have an Intel Mac, the Leopard drive must be formatted GUID, not Apple Partition Map. Leopard will tell you that it cannot install if the drive uses the wrong formatting. If I find a link with info I’ll post it.

I have my copy because of a $40 rebate only good over the weekend, but have not installed it yet. I’m waiting to confirm that a few apps and drivers work before taking the plunge. I can’t wait, but resisting the urge to plunge and regret…

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3

Interestingly, I don’t see the transparent menu bar. It seems it may be very dependent upon the graphics card you have. On my G4 1.33ghz Powerbook it is a gradient gray bar.
As to the dock, I keep mine hidden also, but I do miss the pop-up directory list. What it does now is either the new “fan” effect which I detest, or it shows a 50 icon max grid listing which is maybe half of my Applications folder. To get the full listing you have to click again to open up a new window. Blah.

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4

Sometime around 30/10/07 (at 12:00 -0400) chuckamuck said:

Interestingly, I don’t see the transparent menu bar. It seems it may
be very dependent upon the graphics card you have. On my G4 1.33ghz
Powerbook it is a gradient gray bar.

Very interesting. On Macs with reasonably powerful graphics the menus
are translucent. Try dropping down a menu over the top of a text
document, something with lines of black text on a white page. It can
be surprisingly difficult to read quickly and easily!
(And I do mean surprisingly difficult. I was actually a little
shocked that Apple released something that has such obvious visual
usability problems in some situations.)

What it does now is either the new “fan” effect which I detest, or
it shows a 50 icon max grid listing which is maybe half of my
Applications folder. To get the full listing you have to click again
to open up a new window. Blah.

Hmm. Loss of scrolling ability, not great. How many items can show in the fan?

k (still not using Leopard myself yet)

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5

On 30 Oct. 2007, 12:24 pm, thatkeith wrote:

Try dropping down a menu over the top of a text
document, something with lines of black text on a white page. It can
be surprisingly difficult to read quickly and easily!

That isn’t so bad here as the transparency effect is only slight, which again is more than likely related to graphic card.

Hmm. Loss of scrolling ability, not great. How many items can show in the fan?

I’m sure it depends on the icon size settings you have in system preferences. I only see about 4 or 5 on my 12" screen. Stupid idea really. But thankfully you can turn it off. What does not seem to be changeable is the grid view size which has really large icons.

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6

While interesting and very pretty, I’m more afraid this new version
will only hog all the hardware performances I’ve gained while turning
my laptop into the most expensive iPod I’ve ever owned.

I look eagerly to all of you who take that leap before me. :slight_smile:

On 10/30/07, Joe Muscara email@hidden wrote:

I have my copy because of a $40 rebate only good over the weekend, but have not installed it yet. I’m waiting to confirm that a few apps and drivers work before taking the plunge. I can’t wait, but resisting the urge to plunge and regret…

–
Ernie Simpson – Freeway 4 Pro User – http://www.thebigerns.com/freeway/

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7

On 30 Oct 2007, at 18:31, Ernie Simpson wrote:

While interesting and very pretty, I’m more afraid this new version
will only hog all the hardware performances I’ve gained while turning
my laptop into the most expensive iPod I’ve ever owned.

John Siracusa at Ars Technica has the last word here I think:

‘Each new version of Mac OS X has been faster on the same hardware
than its predecessor.’

He concludes that Leopard is, for the most part, no different.

–

best wishes

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com

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8

I agree, a review of Freeway under the new OS would be most useful!

While I do not wish to argue with the likes of Mr. Siracusa, I think
some benchmarks are like political polls – they are skewed by
ideology and reflect very little in terms of everyday or practical
experience. For example, Spotlight was a nice addition – after the
day it took to catalog my drive contents. When its database became
corrupt, it was super easy to fix – and wait another day for it to
re-catalog my drive.

Apple’s innovations are cool but not always practical – Fontbook is
useless if you have a thousand or more typefaces to work with…
iPhoto (and its big brother Aperature) can hog enormous amounts of
precious drive space for photographers who have large numbers of
photos. Already I am hearing that “large” Stacks are problematic, and
I can’t help but wonder what performance tradeoffs Quicklook,
Coverflow, and Spaces will require.

Don’t get me wrong – I would love these new features… provided they
prove practical in my everyday use. And if they don’t, well… one
must keep up with the Joneses still. So – again – a review of
Freeway and the new OS will be much welcomed by many, I’m sure.

On 10/30/07, what the wrote:

yes I read that John Siracusa at Ars Technica is the word on reviews… though I’ll wait for 10.5.2 then jump in, more than likely over the Christmas holiday period… by which I will most likely do a erase and install… clean clean and clean… should only take a day to re-install everything!.. or do I wait another 6 months for Adobe to sort themselves out… glad I held off on CS3… as CS2 appears to work on Leopard… ahem

also LOVE to see some screenshots of Freeway running on Leopard.

–
Ernie Simpson – Freeway 4 Pro User – http://www.thebigerns.com/freeway/

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9

On 30 Oct. 2007, 9:19 pm, The Big Erns wrote:

So – again – a review of
Freeway and the new OS will be much welcomed by many, I’m sure.

Freeway 4.4 works the same way as far as I can tell. No new features and no glitches. Interface now takes on the new gray gui look, other than that seems the same to me.

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10

What about Quicklook and Coverflow – What kind of image do these
vaunted features show? Something recognizable as the file content, or
generic icon…?

On 10/30/07, chuckamuck wrote:

Freeway 4.4 works the same way as far as I can tell. No new features and no glitches. Interface now takes on the new gray gui look, other than that seems the same to me.

–
Ernie Simpson – Freeway 4 Pro User – http://www.thebigerns.com/freeway/

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11

Sometime around 30/10/07 (at 18:19 -0700) Ernie Simpson said:

Spotlight was a nice addition – after the
day it took to catalog my drive contents. When its database became
corrupt, it was super easy to fix – and wait another day for it to
re-catalog my drive.

Absolutely! It can take a glacial age to catalog large drives for the
first time, and while it does this you may as well not bother using
your Mac. A dual-processor 2GHZ G5 with 8GB of RAM behaved like it
was an old Mac IIsi on valium, with a mouse with a dodgy connection,
until this was done. Except in my case I think it took even longer.

Fonts are a particularly troublesome kind of thing for Spotlight to
index. At one point I told the Mac not to index the fonts archive,
but that meant I couldn’t search for fonts.

I noticed very quickly too that Spotlight lost the ability to search
for name fragments unless the text was at the beginning of a file
or folder name. I guess this is so you don’t match substrings within
words inside document contents, but it is a retrograde step. When I
went from Mac OS X 10.3 to 10.4 I could no longer find every MP3
track with the word “summer” anywhere in the name. “Summertime”, yep.
But “Midsummer” - nope.

Spotlight was a direct - and somewhat hamstrung - lift of the work
that Bruce Horn (yes, THE Bruce Horn) has been doing on a totally new
replacement to the Finder. His work is still unfinished, and may
remain that way, but even in the unfinished state that I saw it was
extraordinary. I wonder if we’ll ever see Spotlight begin to
approach that level of power and flexibility.

k

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12

On 31 Oct 2007, at 06:06, chuckamuck wrote:

other than that seems the same to me

Try running Quicklook. Freeway 4.4 supports the Quicklook feature, so
you can see your web site page in the icon.

A nice screen grab

http://www.softpress.com/products/freewayandleopard.php

I’m holding fire on upgrading. I usually do - it took me over six
months before I jumped to Tiger. However, I am lucky that I have a
second line machine that can be treated to an upgrade so I can test
at my leisure. I’ve also been told that new screen grabs for the
überbook will have to be taken in Leopard.

Not liking the look of Stacks, I have to say. Or the new Dock. Or the
transparent menu bar. I’m off to a local Apple Store to really give
the OS a road test soon.

:o)

Heather

“Freeway - Web Design for All”

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13

On 31 Oct 2007, at 07:31, Ernie Simpson wrote:

What about Quicklook and Coverflow – What kind of image do these
vaunted features show? Something recognizable as the file content, or
generic icon…?

I haven’t upgraded yet but, from what I see, they show exact images
of the file content. Additionally, Quicklook will allow you to play
music, video, and view multi-page documents like PDFs.

–

best wishes

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com

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14

Finder preview no longer shows a slider bar for mp3 or movie.

I trust that by the time I jump there will be ways to restore functionality
that has been removed or lessened.

Sales and marketing seems closer to Steve’s ear than interface engineers
these days.

I wouldn’t mind how much candy there was if we had the choice to turn it
off.

regards
Brian

Paul Bradforth said recently:

On 31 Oct 2007, at 07:31, Ernie Simpson wrote:

What about Quicklook and Coverflow – What kind of image do these
vaunted features show? Something recognizable as the file content, or
generic icon…?

I haven’t upgraded yet but, from what I see, they show exact images
of the file content. Additionally, Quicklook will allow you to play
music, video, and view multi-page documents like PDFs.

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15

On 31 Oct 2007, at 09:40, Brian Steere wrote:

Finder preview no longer shows a slider bar for mp3 or movie.

That functionality, apparently, has been moved and “improved” to
Quicklook/Coverflow or whatever doodad it’s called.

I agree about being able to turn off the eye candy. I like the Tiger
Dock. I have it tamed to my liking. Losing a plain hierarchical
listing of a folder in the Dock in favour of a Jack-in-a-Box is a
major step backwards in my opinion.

I’m feeling really frustrated that in order to get the major “under
the hood” improvements, like a 64-bit architecture and so on, I have
to put up with annoying stuff that breaks the way I use my computer!

Heather

“Freeway - Web Design for All”

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16

I don’t like the way the new Dock took away the hierarchical menus that allowed me to navigate through my disks and folders. However, Default Folder is giving that back to me. I’m actually running DF 2.0.4, and although the core functionality is not working, the doodad in the menu bar is. The developer says he has a DF4 coming, I guess Ill wait until he releases that to upgrade from DF2.

I actually like the way the new Dock looks, except maybe the indicators that show which apps are running could be more obvious.

My menu bar on my iMac G5 is not translucent. I guess I don’t have the graphics card to handle that kind of “advanced processing.” So it looks fine to me.

Screen sharing other computers directly from the Finder is really cool and actually works better than other VNC clients I’ve used.

I’m not seeing the Quicklook/CoverFlow previews of my Freeway files as in the screen shot linked above, but I don’t know if I’ve done the right things to make that happen.

I did sorta get the blue screen hang after I installed, and it seemed Spotlight indexing was hogging the machine. I ended up doing some geeky stuff from a remote terminal to stop it.

I haven’t tried Time Machine yet, that was one of the big reasons to upgrade, although I still backup via other means. (It’s best to have multiple backups, and even better to keep a backup off site if you can, but anything is better than nothing.)

I was pleasantly surprised when my Canon Lide 30 scanner and CanoScan Toolbox software worked.

Every app I’ve tried has worked fine so far, though I must admit I just launched stuff and poked around for a minute before moving on. The only things I’ve had some trouble with are a few third party preference panes, like Peripheral Vision. The main functionality of that one works, but the Pane itself will not load. If it doesn’t get updated, I’ll probably install growl instead.

Some menu backgrounds seem very white and bright to me, I’m not crazy about that. Also, some text seems smaller/darker/more cramped. I’m not sure what’s happening there. Both of these may just be something to get used to.

Overall, I’d say it’s going well and I’m looking forward to taking advantage of the new features as time goes on.

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17

Too right! If I’d wanted to be bullied I’d have gone for Windows
The Mac Ethos didn’t conquer the world - eye candy effects might.
But we do have 3rd party community who usually help us work how we like to.

I was interested to scan the ars technica review to get a little sense of
the underlying technological movements though.

regards
Brian

Heather Kavanagh said recently:

I’m feeling really frustrated that in order to get the major “under
the hood” improvements, like a 64-bit architecture and so on, I have
to put up with annoying stuff that breaks the way I use my computer!

Heather

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18

On 31 Oct. 2007, 5:48 am, Heather said:
I’m holding fire on upgrading. I usually do - it took me over six
months before I jumped to Tiger. However, I am lucky that I have a
second line machine that can be treated to an upgrade so I can test
at my leisure.

Yes, that is exactly what I am doing. No way am I touching my desk Macpro until i’m satisfied with testing on my now ancient laptop.

19

On
Also, some text seems smaller/darker/more cramped.
I’m not sure what’s happening there.

From what I noticed on restart after install, there were several warnings of font conflicts with Helvetica fonts so it appears that Apple is installing a new version that causes conflicts that I haven’t seen before.

20

Joe Muscara wrote:

I’m not seeing the Quicklook/CoverFlow previews of my Freeway files as in the screen shot linked above, but I don’t know if I’ve done the right things to make that happen.

I noticed this initially, but they appear in CoverFlow after after they’ve been re-saved in FW 4.4. So you may not see some sites in full glory if you are not currently working on them or haven’t upgraded.

Otherwise my early days with Leopard show no fears for the likes of Heather. I’m not suggesting she’s a Luddite, of course, but technology does move mostly for the better. If you want to break in gently, all the old finder views, icon and hierarchical included, are still there (View menu) and you can play with each new toy, one at a time.

More importantly, even some of my older applications still work smoothly and only miss out on the new QuickLook/CoverFlow imagery. No doubt, future updates will take care of that and provide the right hooks for Leopard enhancements.

Colin