Here we go… I’m literally in the middle of an install on my iBook. It’ll be my first leopard install, and I thought I would do it on my laptop first. From what I hear, it has been all good things about 10.5 on iBooks.
Well for the most part the install went flawless. I haven’t had any problems at all thus far, and every application I use seems to be functioning properly. I’m not going to go into all the things I love quite yet, since I have only been using Leopard for all of 1 hour. It’s more like lust at the moment.
There are a number of things however that have me pretty irked at the moment. Now, understand that this is in regards to my G4 iBook, so most of this stuff probably won’t apply when I update my Mac Pro tomorrow.
Table of Contents
Non-Transparent Menu Bar
First, my Menu bar isn’t transparent. A quick perusal of the apple discussion boards shows i’m not alone, and no one has any real answers yet. It seems to be a problem with old architecture. Theories range from video card drivers to software errors. I don’t know enough about it to comment, but it was a bit of a let down. Not a deal breaker, but a let down none the less. Just a quick aside about the transparency, why is my dock completely transparent, but the menu bar is not? Sounds like a coding problem to me. In my opinion if you’re going to support a specific architecture it should be fully supported. Apple has had a pretty decent record when it comes to this, so I am hopefully a patch will fix my problem soon.
Blurry stacks, and blurry graphics in general?
Now, here’s one the would have been a deal breaker if I did not have a mac pro. For some reason some of the graphics are a bit blurry. It’s faint, and I’m not sure i’ll be able to capture it with grab, but I’d acting like Tiger did when I turned down my resolution below 1024×768. I’m wondering if the same thing is happening here… Yeah I download the Office… deal with it.
As you can see, the text is a little bit blurry. It’s not terrible, but can get annoying pretty quickly. Like I mentioned earlier, this will hopefully be fixed in no time. I expect some bugs in a major operating system update, and I have to admit that this has been a far less painful experience then a Vista upgrade. Now on to something that I’m pleasantly surprised about!
Spaces is Awesome
If dealt with “spaces” on other operating systems of the unix/linux persuasion. It’s not a new concept for me, so I didn’t think this would be anything all that needed. But I have to say, 1 hour into using Leopard I’ve used it quite a bit, and it’s so eloquent. Here’s a quick video of what it is just in case you have been living under a rock lately.
Final Thoughts
It is a little bit early for me to list of some of the bigger deficiencies and some of Leopards greatest accomplishments at this point. I’m super stoked about Leopard though so don’t take this entire article and me being annoyed with Leopard on a whole. I’ll likely be posting over the next couple days some brief thoughts as I use 10.5 a lot more frequently.
Joshua Schnell
