Anyway, so Happy Birthday MacOS X, from all of us here at Mac Singularity.

I should say that if you’re upgrading, uninstall unsanity’s “application enhancer” and be advised that it may be installed by some other utility you use – I think it appears as a preference pane if it’s installed. Old versions seem to cause some problems with Leopard. I stay away from things like Application Enhancer for this reason. Oh, the Logitech Control Center foolishly installs APE and so you may have it without knowing it. I have never installed any 3rd party mouse drivers – I just plug in their mice and it works so I never knew what the drivers would do.

Personally, I think Leopard is a great upgrade. As John Gruber pointed out, it’s almost a death by 1000 cuts approach. Yeah, there are big new features like Time Machine and Spaces but there are lots of small improvements in a lot of ways. The new Network system preference pane, the new Software Update (with a “not now” option for restarts). The most comprehensive review (which still doesn’t touch on everything new) is of course John Siracusa’s at Ars Technica, which also talks about the additional abilities added for developers.

Time Machine makes it absurdly easy for backing up, even with a laptop. Every time I plug in the firewire drive Time Machine immediately starts churning and does a backup and it usually is over in a few minutes. I thought Synk was easy but this is even easier. I like the data detectors ability in Mail for adding events to iCal. Spotlight is much faster. I’m starting to miss features from Leopard when I come to work to my Mac Pro so … that’s usually a good sign. However, stacks are annoying (especially since the icon for a folder in the dock now can be especially meaningless and indistinguishable).

The biggest problem to astronomers is that all this X11 business is annoying for those of us who use X11 a lot. I think in the long term this move to a new codebase, etc. will be positive but for now, for me, the problem with no full screen X11 is a deal breaker. I’m going to try the revert-to-Tiger X11 tonight and see how that works. Hopefully, we’ll see improvements to X11.app shortly in Leopard itself. If you don’t use Leopard full screen, there are still some things are still buggy in Leopard. Namely, there seem to problem with the “Application” menu, an xterm always launches, and some programs (like ds9) don’t like the DISPLAY variable trickery that X11.app now uses. And, X11 doesn’t seem to play nicely with Spaces.

However, the upside is that you can use the Terminal.app to launch x11 programs now without weird crashes about DISPLAY not found or whatever. I think eventually this will go well, but for now Leopard’s X11 has some problem. I wish they had just held back on the changes until everything was up and running.

So, if you’re in the middle of some X11-intensive project, I wouldn’t go buy Leopard and install it today, as you may encounter some unexpected bumps. I put Leopard on my Macbook which pretty much does no IRAF or IDL these days so my astronomical productivity is unaffected.

Updated at the bottom

• Installation took about an hour but I had no foreign language installations (thanks to Monolingual) so it didn’t update them – I think that saves a lot of time.
• Quicklook only works with iWork ’08 docs.
• New screensavers are kind of neat (Mosaic option on photo album based screensavers)
• Spotlight reindexes upon install (~1 hour for me)
• AFP disconnect problem at long last solved (only took 6 years! No more spinning arrow for 10 minutes when an Appleshare volume is mounted and you accidentally leave the network.)
• Emptying trash from dock shows warning – this never used to happen even when the option to warn was set it Finder preferences.
• The new preview is nice – group search results by page (no more 10 results all on the same page) and some more annotation features.
• Lame – No netinfo manager. This means I no longer know how to change the a) shell, b) home directory location for a user. I did an upgrade and it still knows I use tcsh so … there must be some way but not with Netinfo manager. Updated You can now do this in the account preference pane.
• X11 Toggle Full Screen not working. This is troubling, I assume it’s a bug or a bad config file but I can’t get X11 to enter full screen mode, though it’s enabled. The command simply does nothing.
• Where’s the new applescript language guide? This still says updated 1999. That’s rubbish.
• Automator seems better but … could just be I never looked at it thoroughly. I made a nice iPhoto->Zip archive workflow that works nicely.
• It appears to install iTunes 7.4.2
• I’m just now testing out Time Machine. I wish it had a “only back up home folder or this folder or that folder” option rather than a “back up everything but exclude this or that” option.
• Dashcode could be cool. Xcode is on the disc – I’m not sure how new the compilers and such are.
• I like the new print preview in print dialogs. Macworld has a nice hidden features

That’s all for now. I wonder how long until Fink releases a new point release and the headache that usually is.

I haven’t actually installed IRAF on this machine… I’ll do that over the weekend. I’d be very surprised if anything broke though. Except the X11 full screen thing I already mentioned but most of you probably use the Quartz-wm anyway.

Update Juan Cabanela reports that you can change shell and home directory location, etc. in the accounts preference pane which you can read about at Macworld.

You can buy Leopard from Amazon using my affiliate links and, to borrow a term from Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, make me rich. Amazon’s price is actually better than the higher educational price (which is only discounted to $116, lame – it used to be reduced to like $79 or thereabouts.)

Leopard Single License – $109

Leopard Family Pack – $189