Running Leopard

My Leopard install went pretty smoothly.  The process of verify the DVD before doing the actual installation took about a half hour to 45 minutes.  Overall, the installation took about an hour and a half.

After booting into Leopard for the first time I got a couple error messages.  One was from the applet CoreDuoTemp, which is not OS 10.5-compatible, and apparently hasn't been updated for the new OS.  The second error told me that LittleSnitch, the outbound firewall I installed, needed to be updated for 10.5.

After clicking through the error mesages, I ran Software Update and got the machine up to OS 10.5.1.  I then downloaded the latest version of LittleSnitch, which seems to be running OK. Now I'm in the process of exploring Leopard.  A few early observations:

One of the big new features touted by Apple is Spaces, OS X's implementation of virtual desktops.  I used virtual desktops a lot when running Linux but didn't really miss them on OS X, due to Expose.  However, Apple's implementation is neat.  For example, pressing F8 brings up thumbnails of each virtual desktop, and you can then drag and drop applications between them.

I use Mail.app as my email client.  My installations of GPGMail and Letterbox weren't compatible with the new version, so I need to check for updates.

One very cool feature in Mail is the ability to recognize certain kinds of data in the text of messages.  For example, I was reading a message which included the phrase "Monday at 9:00 AM."  When I moved my cursor over the phrase it was highlighted with a drop down arrow.  Clicking on the arrow gave me the option of creating an iCal event based on the phrase.  Too cool!

Reminders created in iCal now show up in Mail.  You can also write notes in Mail.  Both of these features make Mail more of a PIM than it's been in the past.

The Finder looks quite a bit different, more like iTunes.  At this point it's OK but I haven't decided if I like it as much as or better than the old version.

The new Dock is OK, but I already miss the little black triangles which appeared under open applications in Panther and Tiger.  The triangle has been replaced with a little blue ball, which isn't nearly as conspicuous.

That's just scratching the surface.  I'll probably post more as I use the OS.