blackrimglasses

I use a Mac probably 14 hours a day, 5 days a week, and a few hours a day on the weekends. My Mac at work consists of a Mac Pro with four screens, 8 gigs of RAM and a shit load of stuff going on.

At any given point I have 4 terminal windows, 30 web browsers, RSS reader, mail, blog program, Pukka, iChat, Skype, Oracle, VMWare Fusion and assorted other apps (iGTD, etc) running.

I live and breath the Mac.

Leopard is perfect for this. The thing that you first notice about Leopard is that it appears “smooth” for lack of a better term. Things feel unified, coherent and uncluttered visually. The reflective dock anchors the screen (I actually really like it, it gives the screen dimensionality) and the unified UI and deeper drop shadows make the display “pop”

Of all the enhancements to Leopard (and there are a ton that just fit right into my normal flow), the coherence of the visuals and the UI makes all the difference when most of your day is spent surrounded by an array of Mac screens.

Some other things worth noting:

- Anti-aliasing is much improved over Tiger, so that fonts look really sharp and crisp.

- Speed is hugely improved in all areas, especially in multithreaded operations on a multi-core chip (s)

- Disk IO has less overhead it seems

- Core Data access has greatly improved, as has Spotlight/MDS indexing speed

- Spaces is perhaps the killer app for Laptop users, and an essential GTD device for focusing for me at work

- Coverflow and Quicklook comes in very handy when you’re looking through a directory of spreadsheets

- Coverflow + Live Preview of videos becomes SUPER handy when looking at dailys or comps of videos

- Quicklook with multi-select is the best tool for looking at website comps that I’ve ever seen

- I put my Applications folder in the Dock, switched it to “Fan” view and ordered it by last modified. Since I test apps a lot, that works nicely. I did the same with my Inbox folder, Outbox folder, Downloads and Documents. Stacks is super nice because it imposes a concise focus on your files

- The new finder is something I ENJOY using rather than have to use.

- With the new iWork, I have de-Officed my machine officially

- iChat Theater will be a life saver with my remote offices, as will screen sharing

- The new Apple Mail is very powerful, especially when you crack open Automator or the Apple Script dictionary. A lot of fun stuff will be written with that for sure.

- Time Machine is now a requirement for every employee in my department.

- I’m disappointed (but not surprised) that some stuff got axed before GM. We should see it soon. I think there will also be some firmware updates for iPhone and AppleTV very soon to match Leopard.

- iTunes is woefully out of place and needs an upgrade

- Blue scroll bars still????????

- When some good Applescript and ObjC wizards get their hands into Leopard, the apps we’re going to see will be fucking amazing. The Developers Tools samples show some of the potential and its bright indeed.

- Consequently, the shareware/donationware/freeware Apple market is set for an influx of eye candy/functional apps like Delicious Monster, but with more of a focus on productivity.

- I think people underestimate the importance of eye-candy because we get so deluged with eye candy done poorly. Tactility in a two dimensional world is very difficult to produce, and Apple does it really well.

- Windows looks like an amateur piece of software now, Vista especially.

More as I play around…