Having managed to acquire Leopard early, I have successfully installed it. After backing up my system I chose to go the easy route, being a Mac user for less than a year, I wanted to take the method most "newbie" Mac users would probably take.

The installation began without a hitch. I was perplexed at first to see the time estimate on completion was 4 & 1/2 hours. This shortly jumped down to about 45 minutes. Whew. After about an hour I was staring at Leopard's welcome video & the new dock. I immediately began to poke & prod my system.

Ok. The Dock isn't so bad. Having really liked the appearance of the old Dock, I thought I was going to hate the new "shelf". Not true. The longer I use this the more I like it. Instead of having the little black arrow under icons to denote running programs you get this little nity "blue glowy" which remind me of the wisps from Warcraft III when playing as the elves. Teehee.

Stacks: OMG I LOVE THIS. I cannot begin to express my pleasure. I hate hate hate files on my desktop, but being hypocrite, most of all my downloads always end up here. The downloads stack is PERFECT! By default your Documents folder is a stack on the Dock as well as the new Downloads folder which resides in your user folder but doesn't seem important enough by Apple to get a mention on the side of the standard finder file/folder browser window.

Quicklook: While in finder select a file, hit the space bar. Its that simple. I was surprised at how useful this is.

Leopard Quicklook

Spaces: Being a Web Designer by trade & a crazy multitasker, I crave desktop real estate. I thought spaces would be useful but I am just now coming to terms with it. WOW. This may seem really sad to you but I would gladly pay the 130$ for leopard if spaces were the ONLY feature. This is so effing great. I can have Twitteriffic & Adium in one area. Firefox in space 2. NetNewsWrire in Space 3. iTunes in space 4. Thats if I'm at home - at work it will be more like dreamweaver/photoshop/firefox/mail etc etc. Anyway - I really really enjoy spaces. Maybe this is more because I have a MacBook Pro & not a desktop, albeit a 17 inch one, I wish I had dual 30 inchers.

Mail.app: Not a whole lot of changes here but I like them. I don't think I will use the notes or todo features in mail but will use my own solutions such as TaskPaper.

Coverflow: Its pretty. Haven't felt the need to use it yet but hey - I'm not complaining when they give me more options to view files.

iChat: I use Adium. 'Nuff said.

Front Row: They've basically turned Front Row into Apple TV sans Youtube. I like the improvements though although I'm going to miss the cool spinwheel. Is it too much to ask, and maybe I'm just missing a setting here, to be able to turn off the god-forsaken acoustic guitar music when watching photo albums in Front Row? I mean...geeze....the music is annoying.

Time Machine: I plan to use this & am excited about doing so but I don't have the external drive that I plan on getting yet. I will rectify this problem within the next few weeks.

Bugs & Problems:

Ok - so thats the very very brief run-down of my initial thoughts. Now on to the not so pretty stuff. Now I understand all of these snafus may not be the fault of Apple & may instead (most probably are) the fault of the developers of these respective programs. Nevertheless, these are the issues I've had so far:

Spaces: So in Space #1 I have Adium in the center of my screen. I Control-RightArrow to Space #2 & am browsing in Firefox. When I do this, my mouse cursor may hover over a link on the page. I can click the link just fine but when if I hover my mouse there for a second I get a tooltip that pops up from my Adium window. I'm guessing either Fixfox, Adium or spaces itself has a bug in it where something is causing the OS or one of the programs to think my mouse is hovering over Adium. I suspect this is an Adium issue that they should be able to fix easily.

Twitteriffic: The boys at Iconfactory better get cracking because Twitteriffic bugs out, I suspect, due to a Core Animation change. When Twitteriffic goes out to check for new updates, the existing updates duplicate themselves visually over top of each other. I have to fix this by hiding the Twitteriffic window & unhiding it or by manually arrowing down the individual twitter updates to get the display to refresh properly.

Dashboard/Widgets: Dunno if its one or multiple of my widgets. I've tried, through a process of elimination & Terminal killall Dock to figure out the culprit, but it seems something is caushing my widgets to completely hard lock, not update themselves & become unclickable. So far my 2 possible offenders are iStat Pro & a moving doppler radar weather widget I have. When I don't run both of these all of my other widgets seem fine.

I will refrain from making any more blog posts this weekend & will just update this posting as I find more information to share.

It seems TUAW has a nice post up about other people who've gotten Leopard in early as well.