Mac OS X Leopard: First Impressions

Matt arrived at our house on Friday evening with a copy of the latest incarnation of Mac OS X ‘Leopard’ for me. Since the MacBook Pro is my principal machine, I thought I’d install it on the Mac Mini (which after all doesn’t get used by me much, more by the kids when they want to play on the CBeebies website). Anyway, I’ve taken the plunge on the Mini and upgraded the operating system.

First impressions…

• I like Spaces, the virtual desktop thingy. I used to use this sort of thing under Gnome and it’s really good to have it back – being able to have a workspace for worky stuff and a workspace for non-work so I can ignore it when I’m really busy is a very very good thing indeed.
• The menu bar transparency pisses me off. Matt noticed this first, but it’s got more irritating as time’s gone on – if you have a blue backdrop for instance the transparency in the menu bar makes the bar go light blue. The busier the backdrop, the less readable the menu bar is; it would be good if the transparency could be switched off altogether (someone suggested putting a 60px-or-whatever-it-is white extension to the top of your backdrop to ‘fix’ the transparency to 0%). Matt also noticed the rounded corners are gone on the menu bar!
• The reflection on the dock is a bit distracting too – I liked the old dock!
• Actually, a bit more control over the graphical elements of the UI in general would be nice.
• The new Finder is quite nifty, but it reminds me a lot of iTunes.
• The file drawers thing on the dock is very very useful. I’d quite like to be able to squish the font down though so I can fit more documents in the curve.

I’ll probably take out next weekend to flatten the MacBook and install Leopard on there, once I’ve listed all the applications I’ll need to install. I’ve not zilched the machine since I got it, and in the first couple of months I installed all sorts of crap so I good broom is required to get rid of my learning curve 😛

Update: Barely 10 minutes after I’d written this blog entry, there was an Apple Update for ‘login and keychain access’. I wonder if it’s got anything to do with this…

Update #2: macosxhints.com has a nifty way of getting rid of the 3d dock at the bottom.