Those fine folks out at Cupertino have another iteration of their operating system out. They tend to be really good at timing these things, and I find myself contributing to their coffers every year right around my birthday. So after being delayed for a weekend (they didn't ship copies to university bookstores in time for the release, and university bookstore's were selling it for cheaper than the Apple Store), I finally have Leopard. Which is good, I guess. I bought this OS in part because of the promise DTrace held, and in part because of Time Machine. I am currently not doing anything requiring DTrace, and I haven't yet taken the time to teach myself enough about it, and Time Machine requires that I reformat my external, something I am not quite prepared to do yet.

In general, like almost any of the past OS X iterations, it seems to have changed the UI in not-so subtle ways. I could complain about things I find weird, but three months from now, the UI changes are going to be unimportant. Mail is better behaved with IMAP, which is sort of nice. I don't really care that much about the newly added RSS support in Mail, or the changes in iChat. Spaces is cool, I haven't gotten used to it, and am hence using exactly one Space, though it had potential. I don't think I am going to be using the coverflow Finder look much, it does strange things with multiple selections. Stacks are cool, but having the choice of having stacks and pre-Leopard style folders on the Dock would have been better. As would have been the, promised, creating a stack from an arbitrary collection of items feature. I like the new spotlight indexing feature, it is finally usable for what I do, but really, Quicksilver did this pretty well. And besides, I am now stuck without Quicksilver.

All this might make one wonder why I installed Leopard. It wasn't easy (trust me on this, my MacBook Pro had issues with the install). I formatted my hard disk, after backing up most of my data onto the external, the format did wonders for my space problem, and got rid of most of the accumulated junk. I am actually excited about the prospect of using DTrace, even though too much work, and a weirdly busy travel schedule makes this a bad time to learn D. And at some level, not having Leopard would have bothered me, since I'd want to do all the cool things everyone else was talking about, and in some ways OS X upgrades are strange, you're damned if you do upgrade, and damned if you don't. And well there's Quick Look, which is nice for most file types. Really it's a good upgrade, if you are me.

I am going to be away for the next few weeks, leading this weird busy schedule involving travel. Or watching other people travel. Should be exciting, maybe I'll have more fun stories.

Panda