Fred Cirera

No wonder why the batteries life is so short, Leopard is constantly accessing the disk. I have unsuccessfully tried to find which process constantly access the disk to kill it.

This afternoon I have installed MacOS 10.5, better known as Leopard. Here are some of my first impressions.

• The new finder is way better. Everything important is on the left side bar. One of the sections I find interesting is the shared section. I have a bunch of disks I share through the network. I also have some machines I have converted into small severs. Just a few clicks in the shared section, I can now access the disk or the machines on my network.

• Screen Sharing is great. Before I was using the free version of VNC to do administrative work on my small servers. Screen Sharing uses the same protocol as VNC but it is faster. The cut and paste and drag & drop from the desktop to the remote desktop works well. I can even have access to my Windows XP box. I just have to run a VNC server on Windows.

• I don’t have much to say about Spaces it is convenient, and it does the job. Before I was using Virtue.

• Spotlight seems to be faster. My main machine is an old PowerBook G4 and spotlight was a little bit slow on Tiger. It seems they improve the performances on Leopard.

• Preview also has been improved. Now you can do simple images manipulations, such as select, extract shapes, resize, and convert images into other formats.

• I also like the new Mail.app. Integrating the Notes, and To Do List into the mail, seems to be a good idea. Before I was saving my notes and list of things to do into files, all over my disk. I was loosing them frequently. Now everything has been centralized into mail. I have played a lot with the Calendar The integration with the mail seems OK.

• Before installing Leopard, I was very excited to see how Time Machine worked with FileVault. That was the big disappointment of the day. Time Machine does not work if your home directory is encrypted with FileVault.

• One more thing I found disappointing is the poor stability. I had a crash with Mail.app and one with Preview. I hope these problems will be fixed soon by Apple. We don’t want MacOS to look like some of the Microsoft products.

That’s all for today. If I find something wrong or great I’ll keep you posted.