Like every other Mac-geek on this planet, I got Leopard on Friday - the Family Pack, since by now we’ve got 3 Macs in our household. The installation went relatively painlessly. I don’t run APE, which can cause crashes on install, but I still had a minor issue where it refused to recognize any partition on my Laptop. For now, I’ll blame it on the rEFIt boot loader. Simply running disk utilities and looking at the partition data fixed that problem, so it was only a temporary setback. (If you’re visually inclined, I took a few screenshots during the installation)
But what’s the verdict in terms of actually using it?
It’s a rather mixed one. On the UI front, I’m rather disappointed. There’s a lot of rather ugly stuff going on. (Well, ugly for Apple. Still beats any other OS out there.) The only explanation I have is that they’re trying to go for the “upscale executive” look. Which is a bummer - OS X used to be fun when you look at it, now it looks more like work. Still, it does look fairly good. And I’m sure there’ll be plenty of 3rd party apps that fix any shortcomings in no time.
Speed-wise, Leopard, and especially Spotlight, took a great leap forward. Spotlight was way faster than under Tiger even while it was still indexing.
In terms of functionality, it’s an interesting beast. No single feature is overwhelming enough that you’d say “I MUST HAVE THIS”. But there are tons of neat little usability enhancements that will make your life much easier. Be it the new text-highlighting search in Safari, the ability to restore previous Safari sessions, Data Detectors in Mail - all very good additions. Oh yes, WebClips too. It’s a really nice feature, but not the one thing to sell them all. So, overall, it’s worth the money, but not too exciting. And no, not even Time Machine is that exciting. Then again, it’s backup software - it’s a marvel that it’s interesting at all.
But the real enhancements in Leopard are on the Developer end of things. The new frameworks (Core Animation, FSEvents, etc..) are mind-blowing. The tools have gotten even better. Instruments (ex-XRay) is the best profiling tool I’ve ever seen. In fact, the name “profiling tool” doesn’t even do it justice. Objective C 2.0 is a solid step forward. The scripting support for both Python and Ruby is fantastic.
In short, if you’re a developer, you must have Leopard. If you’re an end-user, it might not be the worst choice to wait a week or two before you install it. It will be inevitable, though - I’m fairly certain all the developers out there would love to go Leopard-only with new software.