I’m not really surprised that the day after release the Leopard whining is starting. Its not like this shit should be surprising to people. However, the arguments in this post and in others leaves me with a WTF? Honestly, complaining that its too gray? And why is the Dock hated so much? Leopard looks polished, professional and when using a computer for a dozen hours a day, works like a charm. I remember with Panther people complained about Expose. Can’t please them all.

[From TidBITS Blog Post: Doing the Leopard Moan]

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…

I need to find a tool that we can host on our local servers that allows for different user accounts to be able to have a Flash Streaming playlist of different conent.

So for instance User X would get Album X for 10 days, but User Y would get a different one for maybe 5. They could continue to login and get access to different streams.

So I guess its an administrator personalized audio site. Any ideas? Post in comments.

There was actually quite a bit stripped from Leopard leading up to GM, including some groovy video effects, screen savers and such. My guess: it was done for minimum system compatibility and they’ll show up in a bonus pack of some sort later. They were rather processor intensive actually. I also wager iPhone 1.2 firmware, and new firmware for AppleTV and iTunes 8 are on the very near horizon.

[From Leopard backpedals again: No more iPhone note syncing ]

This is missing though the fact that Bootcamp backups are migratable into a fresh Leopard install during the installation process.

[From Shirt Pocket Watch - Time’s Arrow Redux]

The third party hard drive market will be thrilled with Leopard. I just bought G-Tech drives for everyone in my department as mandatory TimeMachine drives. 300 bucks or so per drive is a small price to pay for knowing that all data on all drives is backed up and consistent. I got a TB one for my computer (my MacPro has 2TB of storage).

[From Glenn Wolsey : Blog Archive : 4 Classy External Backup Drives To Pair With Time Machine]

[From Oink founder: We’re just like Google - Telegraph ]

So, this begs the question as to whether being a conduit for illicit behavior is implicit with that behavior? Google does not route the packets that enable illegal activity, but torrent trackers do by facilitating the initial seeking of seeds and peers, as well as participating in the scrape that leads up to the successful completion of a download.

I love BitTorrent, but its forces an interesting issue in terms of the liability of the tracker.