So yesterday I went into town to get Leopard, what a palava that was. Ended up standing for an hour in the rain outside in the queue, I originally was gonna sit in Starbucks but the line was surprisingly long at 5PM so after I’d got my skinny white chocolate mocha I went and stood in line. Starbucks must’ve done pretty well for themselves because about half the people in the line had Starbucks cups in their hands.

It was funny standing in line and watching people come up and ask what we were queuing for, people are so curious by nature. Anyway at 6PM the doors opened and in we went. The first 500 people through the doors get t-shirts and I was one so I got a t-shirt, woo! I ended up with an XL though so I’ll use it as a lounging t-shirt. It’s black also so it’s not like it’d go with any of my clothes. I headed straight for the tills and was hoping to be in and out in 10 minutes. It wasn’t to be.

For some reason unknown to myself the Apple Store has but two tills, the employees have little hand held machines that they can use to do card payments but I was paying in cash so I had to wait in line. I think I was the 3rd or 4th person in line so I thought it’d take no time. That was until the guy in front of me decided to pay by a credit card and for some reason the woman had to phone up and verify it and that took ages. The other till became available but then one of the guys with the hand helds took over it because his customer wanted to pay card and cash. This was one of the guys who had been in line behind me! I was not impressed. 15 minutes later and these two till were still with the same customers and I was getting very pissed off. I actually considered just walking out.

Obviously I didn’t! Someone came down from the Genius Bard upstairs and took me upstairs and used the till normally used for charging Genius Bar costs as a normal till. He asked me if I was a student and I said I was but I didn’t have a card and he said did I have anything to prove it and I remembered I had the letter from Mark for Student Services in my pocket so I gave him that. And it worked! So I got a 10% discount which was nice. Once I’d bought it I promptly left the store.

After getting the train home and double checking my bootable backup did in fact boot up, I inserted the DVD. Off it went installing while I played Lost Planet. 40 minutes later and it was done and it came to account creation. When I was going through the upgrade options I chose Erase and Install rather than Upgrade because I didn’t want all the crap that gets accumulated and I could just use Migration Assistant to get all my programs, files etc. back. However when it came to creating the account and asked me where my old account was it couldn’t locate it on my external drive. Bugger! So I created a new account and then once it had loaded the desktop I went into Migration Assistant again and tried it there, no luck. I tried Finder to double check the backup was in fact there, but the drive wasn’t showing up in Finder. Was my external drive incompatible with Leopard? No, it was turned off. Somehow I’d turned it off and completely forgotten I had and thought it was still on. Turned it on and went back to Migration Assistant, there it was. So off that went loading all my files, took about 40 minutes for that to do.

Finally it was done, time to play! First thing you see is the new desktop. It’s quite a change from Tiger to Leopard. A lot has been said about the two big changes of the desktop, the Dock and the Menu bar. The Dock now looks more like a shelf that the icons sit on, it’s reflective and if you drag a window down near it it will reflect that also. People said it looked strange if you put it on the left or right of the screen and so Apple opted to change it to a rather bland alternative. I think I’ll be keeping mine on the bottom.

The other new feature of the Dock is Stacks. If you put a folder in the dock then when you click on it, the contents are shown in a stack in either a fan or a grid. It’s good for getting quick access to something you’ve just downloaded or a video to watch.

The translucent Menu bar has come under a lot of fire since it was unveiled in June, I don’t think I’ve read any one praising it. With the right background it works fine but with the wrong background it just doesn’t look right. The translucent menus are hit and miss as well as what you have behind them varies a lot. I like the rounded corners of the menus but I don’t like that they don’t match up with the Menu bar, they are most often white while the Menu bar adjusts to the background. I’m hoping Apple will give the option to make the Menu bar translucent or opaque in 10.5.1 but really it should’ve been there all along.

After the desktop is the new and improved Finder. Finder is like the Mac equivalent of Windows Explorer. For Leopard it has been given quite a makeover and has a new sidebar which looks a lot like iTunes. You’ve got your Devices which encompasses the internal hard drive(s), external hard drives, CD’s, DVD’s and your iDisk if you have one. Then it’s Places which is where you can put shortcuts for the folders you access the most often. Lastly you have Searches which is very handy. By default it has searches for files you’ve accessed today, yesterday and in the past week as well as smart folders for all images, movies and documents. However you can also add your own searches at any time by using Spotlight.

The biggest thing about the new Finder is probably the Coverflow view. Coverflow was introduced into iTunes the middle of last year and it allowed you to browse your music by album artwork. Now Apple has integrated it into Finder and you can use it on any folder. It’s pretty fast and really useful for viewing photos. But to make things even better Apple also added Quick Look which allows you to preview certain files before you open the program it uses. Hit space and a little box pops up with a preview of the file, hit space again and it’s gone. While this seems a little trivial with images, as Preview loads fast anyway, it’s certain to be very handy with PSD’s, PDF’s and Microsoft Office documents whose programs take more than a few seconds to load. You can also preview movies and view multiple pages of documents in Quick Look which is excellent.

My favourite feature of Leopard so far is probably Spaces. Spaces is a virtual desktop application that allows you to have multiple desktops and switch between them. It’s handy because you don’t have to close windows and reopen them and it’s better than Exposé because you can find things easier. The keyboard shortcuts and ability to assign programs to certain spaces is very handy as well.

One of the most talked about applications being added in Leopard was Time Machine. At its most basic, Time Machine is a backup program. However the way it does the backups is very useful. Originally it takes a complete copy of your hard drive and then every hour it backs up whatever has changed. At the end of the day it changes those 7 backups into one week one and then at the end of the month it changes it into a month one. So if you want to find a file you accidentally deleted you load up Time Machine and you find it. But of course Apple being Apple they gave it a gorgeous interface so that you feel like you are flying back in time. You can either load up Time Machine while you are in a folder and it will cascade all the different versions of that folders starting with the most recent, or you can jump to a specific date. However if you can’t remember the name you can also use Spotlight.

Which leads to Spotlight. Spotlight was first introduced in Tiger and it was pretty naff really. It was slow and it often brought you the wrong things first. However Apple seems to have done a lot of work on it now and it’s really fast and you can change the order it searches folders which is a nice touch.

So so far I am really liking Leopard and I’m not regretting upgrading. I haven’t run into any bugs at all so far and all my programs and peripherals are working fine, hear that Vista? I know I was pissed off that Apple delayed Leopard but it has certainly been worth the wait.

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