This isn't going to be a proper review, as I only installed Leopard about thirty-six hours ago, but I've had a chance to look through the new features, give 'em a try, and this is, by far, and in my giddy, nerdy opinion, the most bestest awesomest version of OS X.

I've been using OS X since version 10.1.3. As each new version came out, I either upgraded or bought a new Mac with the new OS on it. I upgraded to 10.2.0, 10.3.0, and 10.5.0. I bought a couple Macs in the 10.4 timeframe, but neither was a .0 release, so I didn't have to deal with the .0 headaches.

The Bad and the Lame

As any good geek knows, there's no such thing as a stable .0 release. Performance sucks, bugs abound, and one gets a generally bad impression. When I went from 10.1.9 to 10.2.0, I wanted to slowly lower my PowerBook into a pit of magma. The UI was sluggish, and nearly every built-in piece of software behaved as though it was repeatedly getting hit in the head by angry little digital dwarves. I opened my computer to find the dwarves so I could kick their little digital asses. I didn't see a damned thing, but that doesn't mean they weren't there. I know they were there - laughing at me. I could hear them.

I hate them.

Mail (the built-in Apple email client) in particular has been buggy out of the gate with each new .0 release. Whether it's disappearing messages or, what I'm getting right now, the random dropping of the From and Subject lines in my spam folder (rather important, I do say), there's always something. I've found the .1 releases fix a lot of this stuff, but the point is, 10.x.0 always shows promise, but provides a user experience that only the patient will be able to tolerate. If I were doing anything business related with my Apple, or if I were working on something I couldn't easily reproduce, I wouldn't upgrade to 10.x.0, nor would I suggest anyone else do so. I'm just too much of a geek to wait.

Fake Steve Jobs just posted about problems he's having with Leopard. While my experience has been totally different from his, I've been in his place with previous upgrades, and it's awful. Apple makes great stuff, but customer service and tech support is the worst I've encountered for anything. We're talking computers, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners, baby wipes, petting zoos - anything. The service reps are snotty, ignorant, and unhelpful. I'd recommend that you take a soldering iron to your hardware before you bother calling these guys.

All that said, for me the pain has been worth it, and now that I know what to expect from a 10.x.0 upgrade (everything's broken), I don't get quite as upset about the problems.

Your mileage will probably vary.

The Good and the Not at all Lame

I used to complain about the $129 cost of upgrading to a new OS X release. It's always worth it in the end, but the marketing sets you up to expect the cure for cancer on a DVD, and that's not quite what you get.

Apple overdoes it with their "EIGHT BILLION NEW FEATURES IN [insert feral cat species here]!!!!! ROFTML!!! LOL!!!"

You get the feeling after a few hours that, among the eight billion new features, seven billion, nine hundred and ninety nine million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and fifty are changes to the fonts used by various apps. The rest of the changes, however, are substantial and nifty.

Some new and lovely stuff - not at all a full overview or list of all that everybody will dig - this is stuff that I - Rory Blyth - The Smartest Man in the World - think is among the bestest:

• Cover Flow - The OS X equivalent to Window's File Explorer is called "Finder", and one of the new viewing features - in addition to the usual icon, list, and detail views - is Cover Flow. It lets you browse through files with an interface similar to that of iTune's visual carousel style browser. Windows has its preview feature for images, but Cover Flow provides similar functionality for any supported file type. Yes, there are many file types that are not yet supported (guessing third parties need to write their own adapters), but you can still browse through documents, images, PDFs, videos, and so on, without having to individually open the files. If you've ever searched for something by double-clicking, waiting for the appropriate app to open, and then closing it because you haven't yet found the file you want, then Cover Flow is huge. That you're able to browse all supported file types from one to the next in the same window is a beautiful thing. While some will discount this as fluff (the naysayers have been out in force, bitching as usual about software they haven't even used yet (what is it with geeks?)), once you've used the feature, you'll understand why it rocks.

  
  
  You can read your way important documents without opening them.

• iChat Improvements - The latest iChat, OS X's built-in IM client, comes with a mix of features that provide new eye candy, fun - but not especially useful - toys, and a few functional bits. My favorite of the new is the ability, just by clicking on a "buddy", to send that person an SMS provided he has enabled the feature on his end. I know there are apps out there that will already do this - I'm not claiming that this is the world premier of this capability - and the reason I'm writing this out in bold is that geeks have this habit of not reading an entire post, but choosing instead to leave a comment as soon as they find something to be angry about. OK. Apologies for the loud sentence back there. I've just been doing this long enough to know that there'll be a few people who will want to start one of these stupid "But [company x] did this a million years ago, so the feature is obviously stupid since it isn't brand new" arguments. Let's not do that for once. Aight. The other new feature I love is that, with the other's permission, you can now record video chats to MP4s. My French grandmother and I used to video chat all the time when I was living on the east coast. I'd give anything (and, for once, that's close to the truth) to have been able to have recorded those chats. I miss her, you know? I wish I had more things to remember her by. That, for me, is a very welcome feature. Friends come and go; you lose family along the way. If it's as simple as clicking a button to be able to store a video memory of them, then that's something that alone makes the new iChat one of the best improvements to OS X.
• Dashboard Widget Awesomeness - Widget apps abound nowadays. Whether included with the OS or built by third parties, people dig widgets. If you aren't familiar with widgets, they're the little applets that typically run all the time, usually in a controlled environment that is either part of the desktop (as with Vista's Sidebar) or accessible via a hotkey (as with OS X's Dashboard). The problem with widgets is that they're a pain in the ass to create if you want something custom. I hate Javascript. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, and it seems to be the popular way to create widgets. If you aren't a dev of any kind, then you won't just hate trying to create a widget - you probably won't be able to do it at all. What Leopard brings to the table is a new feature of Safari (the built-in web browser). You navigate to a page, find something you'd like to have quick and easy access to all the time, go to the File menu, select "Open in Dashboard..." , and then highlight the part of the page you'd like to have as a widget. I created one today that lets me see if I have any new MySpace mail at the touch of a button. I hate keeping MySpace open in a window just to see if anything's arrived. The convenience here is fantastic. I've never checked to see if MySpace does automatic notifications when you receive new email, and I never will - I don't like giving these sites permission to send me email. It seems to always go wrong somewhere along the way. Getting similar functionality without having to receive email I don't want is The Good.

  
  
  This is the actual widget.

• Dashcode - If you want to create your own widgets without getting your hands dirty, Dashcode will help you do that. I still think creating widgets sucks dog balls, but you might get a kick out of it. You still need to get into the javascript if you want to do something truly custom - otherwise, you'll probably be working from a template. I need to play with this thing a bit more, as I suspect it might kick ass, but I'm going to withhold judgment on the ass kicking until then. 

  
  
  Aright... Dashcode might actually be pretty cool.

• Bootcamp is Official - Bootcamp is now an official part of OS X. Bootcamp allows you to dual boot between OS X and Windows. I prefer to run Windows as an app inside Parallels, but some people would rather keep the two OSs separate. Whatever your preference, you have the choice, and both options are supported and easy to use.
• Dock Stacks - OS X's Dock, the much cleaner OS X alternative to the Windows Start Menu, now supports stacks. A stack in OS X isn't like stacks in Windows Vista. In OS X, a stack seems to be a folder kept in the Dock. When you click on the folder, the files in the folder, depending on how many there are, will either appear as a stack or as a grid above the Dock. The key here, though, is that you don't have to open up a new Finder window to access these files. You just click, and there they are. This not only makes opening frequently accessed files easier, it also helps you avoid having to clutter up your desktop with Finder windows. Another feature that should exist for every OS in the universe, and one I've been hoping somebody would create, is that stacks are automatically created in the Dock for your Documents and Downloads folders. Yeah, you can add folders to Windows's File Explorer side bar, but then you have to open up a File Explorer window, click on the folder you want, and then click on the file you want to open. The difference isn't going to be important to everybody, but given that Windows and OS X are both used by end users (rather than business users exclusively), this sort of thing should just be there. I use my Documents and Downloads folders all the time, and I expect it's the same for many other users. This kind of convenience, as well as allowing people new to computers (both my grandmothers, for example, got started pretty late in the game, and the things we take for granted weren't obvious to them) to be able to get to the things they want or need without having to know where the folders actually are is a good thing.

  
  
  It looks like a computer banana. Sort of.

• Wikipedia Support - As dodgy as Wikipedia is for, well, anything, I'll finally admit after all my bellyaching that it's a great dirty reference if you want to find something in a hurry and don't care about whether the information you get is any good - or even true. To provide me with easy access to biased, phony, highly questionable reference material, Apple has built Wikipedia support directly into its built-in Dictionary app. Hey - I'll take what I can get. I've learned to love Wikipedia even if I haven't learned to trust it.

  
  
  "[F]ictional accounts"? This is why I don't use Wikipedia.

• DVD Playback Improvements - There are so many things that drive me nuts with DVD players, and some of those issues have been addressed in OS X's built-in DVD Player. Video quality enhancements, more convenient bookmarking, and other small features have arrived, but the big one for me is called "Scratched Disc Recovery". If you're watching a scratched disc, Leopard's DVD Player can locate and avoid these sections. I've had several DVD player apps freeze up or enter The Mode of Eternal Stuttering when scratches are encountered. I'd rather let the app skip those sections than try to muscle through them.
• Safari Improvements - I frikkin' HATE it when I use the find/search feature of an app but still can't see what I'm looking for. I'll search, and the word or phrase will be found, but it won't be highlighted (highlighted well or at all), or for some reason it'll show up without highlighting as the last line on the screen as though that's the first place I'd look for find/search results, or a million other stupid UI screw-ups. Safari - Apple's web browser - dims the page around the text you're searching for and clearly highlights the word or phrase on the page. OS's of any kind are packed with little annoyances like bad search highlighting, so it's one more irritation I get to live without, and these things add up. Tabbed browsing has also improved. You can now drag tabs around the tab bar, as well as between Safari windows. I think that both of these features already existed in other browsers, but I don't use other browsers, so I find this splendid.

  
  
  The search term is in the yellow box.

• Spaces - This is the OS X equivalent to the multiple desktop feature you'll find in various flavors of *nix desktop managers. Casual desktop users are used to having just one desktop. They clutter them up, keep many unrelated apps open on the same screen, and so on. It can make things messy. With Spaces, you can set up a few different desktops that you can quickly switch between. So, you could have a desktop set up for working on your writing (if you've recently quit your corporate job to pursue a writing career), a desktop set up for software development, a desktop for video editing, a desktop for audio editing, a desktop where you're running some kind of intensive processing app that you don't want to see until it's finished... you get the idea. Like many other features, it's about convenience. You can also view all your Spaces at once if you want to navigate visually rather than cycling through them sequentially.

  
  
  I'm a busy guy.

• Built-in Grammar Checking - Something I love about OS X is that it provides any app a suite of "services" that provide common functionality. Spell checking is a good example. Instead of each app having its own implementation of a spell checker, you'll find just one used throughout the system (a custom spell checker can still be created if you're really into coding spell checkers). I've been using a kick-ass piece of authoring software to assemble my first book, and the spell checker is exactly the same as the spell checker that Safari, for example, uses. What's new is the addition of grammar checking. Microsoft Word supports grammar checking, but I haven't seen this feature shared with other apps. Plus, you'd have to install Word first, and then the feature would still only be available to Word. Grammar checking is built-in to OS X, which means you're far more likely to see it across many apps. That's awesome, especially for those of you who can't tell the difference between "it's" and "its".
• TextEdit Enhancements - TextEdit is OS X's built-in equivalent to the Windows Wordpad application. But, where Wordpad doesn't seem to have been updated since the invention of the wheel, TextEdit gets the occasional facelift, making it more useful rather than more irrelevant. I use Pages from iWork for my document editing, as it's a spiffy environment (far superior to the messy, sluggish version of Word for OS X) for writing, but TextEdit is still useful for a casual bit of document editing. One new feature is that TextEdit can now open Word 2007 files. For free. No having to buy another MS app to do it. I still dig MS, and I haven't become a hater since I left or anything, but c'mon - stuff like this should be available to every user. Don't charge for the file format - charge for a document editor that provides advanced functionality that most people don't need.
• Time Machine - A simple backup utility that will make sense to casual users. That is, no stupid jargon that only geeks are going to understand. Also, the interface isn't clumsy like whatever feature it is in Windows that offers similar functionality. I can't even remember the name of the thing - just that I hate it. The only thing I don't like about Time Machine is that it requires a second drive, so I can't use it with my laptop without connecting it to an external drive. But, better this than nothing.

There's plenty more to Leopard, but my fingers are tired and my brain is tired and I'm tired.

Some Final Thoughts and Stuff

This is the first release of OS X that I feel surpasses Windows in the quality and quantity of features for end users. I think Windows is the better OS for business users, but I wouldn't want to go back for my civilian activities. Vista probably does plenty of this stuff, but discoverability isn't one of its strong suits. Unless you're a geek, you could spend months using Vista without figuring out what it has to offer. Apple does a great job of not only creating these features, but making them easy to get to.

OS X is also nice in that it feels like it was designed with a tight, unified plan. If you want to change a setting, set preferences for an app, or any other everyday task, there's usually only one or two easily discovered ways of doing it. Connecting to a network is a good example of this. You can click on the WiFi icon on the menu bar, or you can go to the System Preferences dialogue. Both lead to the same configuration tool. I still haven't gotten the hang of Vista's networking. I get notified through those stupid task bar notifications, see an icon that I can click or right-click on (leading down two entirely different paths), go to the Control Panel in Classic View, go to the Control Panel in the new view, get to network settings through the Start Menu, and so on - it's confusing as all hell. To make things worse, the configuration dialogues hardly make any sense at all, and there are several different configuration dialogues from which to choose, each offering different functionality, but they're so poorly organized and the links to the dialogues are so poorly named that just connecting to a wireless network can turn into a huge mess. Yeah, you can tell me that if you click this, click that, right-click this, slide that, select that thing, right-click again, double-click over there, and then click the "Save" button, you can easily connect to a network, but that's not all right.

Visual Studio rocks, Windows Mobile rocks, the Xbox 360 rocks, as do many other MS products, but I'm not a fan of Vista, and I'm not a fan of getting long winded explanations about how "easy" it is to perform common tasks that require fifty keystrokes and twelve-thousand mouse clicks. I also don't care for all the workarounds that some geeks think are acceptable. They aren't. A few workarounds are to be expected, but if I have to start modifying config files or editing the registry directly, then something's wrong. Even worse, if the OS does something but the feature is buried so deep in some mouse clicking morass, and a user turns to a third party tool to perform the task because they didn't know the OS could do it, then it's just unacceptable.

I've never used an OS - desktop, mobile, etc. - that didn't have some fun tweaking utilities, but you shouldn't have to use a tweaking utility unless you want to make a huge, probably unsupported change to the OS.

What I mean to say is: despite the imperfections and .0 lameness, I'm still where I want to be, and my life is still easier than it would be if I were dealing with that damned Vista network configuration mess.

OS X 10.5.0 is the royal effing goodness if you don't mind waiting a little while for the .1 update that will, if history repeats itself, solve any major problems. This isn't a big deal, either, as Apple releases updates fairly quickly. There isn't going to be a year long wait for a one gig service pack.

Tired.

Off to bed...