My PB 1.67Ghz now runs Leopard, yay!

My upgrading from Tiger to Leopard on my PB 1.67GHz went smoothly. I chosed the clean install and checked to Archive home folder and setting. For years I’ve been doing Windows upgrade and nothing compared to this in term of migration easiness. I got clean system with all my application and home folder still preserved, even my Tiger bundled application could run flawlessly. What I’m afraid of is the speed of Leopard itself, I thought it would be slow since it comes with features which are designed for multiple core processor like Core Duo. Apparently that wasn’t true. After using it for a while, I found the speed still acceptable. But I had to remind myself not to run application which uses core animation framework, such as Photo Booth. Well I don’t need that kind of application anyway (yet). I also can’t help to wonder what is exactly the new Leopard 300+ new feature? Leopard does have many user interface enhancements, but for overall usage it shares similar experience with Tiger or any old MacOSX system. Nothing revolutionary happened, but it just keep better. As usual MacOS is not designed to fully backward compatible with old major releases. Sooner or later we either need to upgrade the OS, or at most the whole hardware. Two years of major release cycle is just too fast for me, where the price never gets any cheaper here

One feature that quite make a stir in Mac community is the solid menu bar. Some people get it right from start when they installed the system, but most people have what apple marketed as new feature, a transparent background. To myself I have no grudge for the top menu being transparent, actually I like it. I think it’s nice and some kind of reward for having installed the big cat. However, the problem comes when you clicked one of menu item and the white background becomes transparently blurred. That reminds me of what Microsoft did to Vista. I think that was a big design decision mistake. It isn’t cool at all, instead it makes the menu hard to read. Fortunately, one tool already available to cope with this matter, Opaque Menubar. However there’s no way to keep the top menu bar stays transparent. I tried the tool anyway, for I can revert it back whenever I need to.

These are several of my favorite leopard enhancements:

• It memorizes when and how I downloaded a file. I use 3 different browsers and sometime that info is useful for me.
• Download folder, so intuitive and prevent me to pile up junks
• Capture shortcut cmd+shift+4 now has number of rect pixel I’m going to capture, very helpful.
• Spaces, makes my desktop less cluttered with windows. It’s like having 4 different working style. However use it carefully, or you can be instead distracted by having to move to different space frequently.
• Xcode 3.0. Well this is main reason why I rushed to upgrade to Leopard.

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