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Some more or less unordered thoughts and impressions of the latest iteration of Apples Mac OS X, nicknamed Leopard:

Despite all the naysayers who warn you “don’t upgrade, make a clean install”, i’ve updated two Intel Macs to today without much hassle.

In both cases, the famous “Welcome Movie Thingy” crashed 🙁 Hurray, good first impression.

In a nutshell: Leopard boosts Apache finally to Apache 2 which forced me to reconfigure my development webserver. Timemachine sucks bigtime as it doesn’t work over samba shares at all and over afp shares only with an intermediate disk image which is dead slow.

Parallels works fine, my Pureftpd Manager doesn’t. Share Points is no longer needed as the sharing tab has an option to choose the folders that are shared via samba or afp. Also, all input managers have stopped working (like the great InquisitorX). I guess hacks exists, but i don’t wanna run into trouble the next system upgrade.

I need to adjust myself to the new look and feel. It’s nice, that brushed metal is gone and the widgets are somewhat consistent, but I don’t like the colors: Inactive is too white, active to dark. The new front row app is odd. I like the old one better. The effects in photo booth and iChat feel like an “aaah, nice” and then never use it again feature to me. Muhaha, how funny, standing in a fishbowl.

Some things are nice and handy, spaces for instance and the pimped, system wide dictionary, that lets you search wikipedia. OS X comes bundled with rails now, which is nice. Also very cool is the new screen sharing core service, that lets you remote control other macs. I used Chicken of the VNC before, but that tool didn’t like german chars and right mouse clicks at all. The screen sharing thing is way better.

I’m no benchmarker, but the system feels fast and smooth on a Core Solo Mac Mini and a Core 2 Duo Mac Book, haven’t run it on a G5 yet.

I’m curious, if and when something bad happens to the new system… I did some extensive testing the last 2 days but until now, everything works as it used, it just looks different. I’m wondering if that was money well spent, i’m not sure after all.

The new firewall settings are a joke, aren’t they? I have the terrible impression of a Zone Alarm clone… So now then, it’s time for me to write the ipfw rules per hand, once again. Also the new front row isn’t just odd, it’s crap. iTunes store everywhere… But the funniest thing is, it shows me the top 10 french songs bought on the very day. Not that i was interessted in the german ones, but thats just stupid commercials within a product i already payed for.