Mixed Feelings About Leopard

My preordered copy of Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 arrived today. I opened the shipping box and found a very cool box containing a disc, a book, and a pair of stickers. I could not install it immediately as I would still need my Mac for work, but I did install it once I was home. These are my impressions after working and playing with it for a few hours.

After installation and restarting, my impressions are a mixed bag. As the computer finished its startup, I saw my familiar desktop, the new dock, the translucent menu bar, so far so good, then a set of folder icons that were just awful. So far I have been unable to find a way to bring the old folder icons back.

The first thing I checked was that my old software still worked. Software I had written still worked and even looked a little nicer. NeoOffice still worked, though the new file preview features in the Finder do not show me anything about the content of files it creates. The GNU Image Manipulation Program broke. A new version of that program was recently released and downloading this provided me with something I could use. While checking this, I got the very odd looking alert shown above the first time I opened X11.

I set up Spaces, installed the new version of Xcode, and as I started to play with this, I noticed that Apple has made it quite a bit harder to tell what programs were open. Previously, a small but easy to see black triangle was displayed under the application icon. This has been replaced with a fuzzy blue dot. Now that dock icons are shown with a reflection such a dot is even easier to miss among the blue in the icons.

I was excited to see that my biggest complaint with Xcode had been addressed. It is now possible to click and hold the dock icon and select a file to bring to the front. Then I was disappointed to find that this was implemented in such a way as to be useless for the reason I wanted that feature. It is not uncommon for me to have my screen filled with various windows of source code when I hit a point where I need to look at the documentation for something. I switch over to Safari, pull up the documentation, and at that point I want to bring up the file I was working on. I click and hold the dock icon for Xcode, select the file I want from the list that pops up, and... It turns out that the list will bring a file to the top of the set of Xcode windows. To see the window, I need to click the Xcode icon, bringing all of my open files up. Now I can no longer see my Safari window. I can use Exposé to select just the window I want, but one shrunken window with source code looks like any other. Selecting the file from a list would be so much easier.

I didn't spend much time in iCal, but I did notice that the to do list does not scroll down far enough to display more than the due date and the top half of the first line in the item title. (Update 2007/10/27: I am not able to reproduce this bug.)

After a few hours of use, it seems like I can live with Leopard and perhaps some of my problems will be resolved with a future update, but this seems to be a release that should have had a little more polish.