“People new to the Mac and existing users alike will be wowed by many of the reportedly 300 new features built into Apple’s latest update to its OS X operating system, Leopard,” Joe Hutsko reports for MSNBC.
“These include a no-brainer backup system, a screen utility that turns a single Mac screen into virtually several screens at once, and improvements to the iChat video chat program that makes it easy to share pictures or a PowerPoint presentation with a friend or coworker in another office or in another country as if you were sitting right next to each other,” Hutsko reports.
“Is Leopard worth its $129 price of admission? It depends. Some of Leopard’s new features, such as Spaces and Time Machine, can be had in one form or another with third-party add-ons. Even so, having those new features and the many smaller but significant improvements to Mail, iCal, the Finder and other programs are reason enough for many to justify the $129 price of admission,” Hutsko reports.
“The users who will be most impressed with Leopard are those new buyers saying goodbye to Windows and hello to Mac for the first time. For the rest of us, Leopard’s sum of parts adds up to an even better experience with an already excellent operating system,” Hutsko reports.
Full review here.
Dear Mr. Hutsko,
You will find your pink slip in your inbox on friday.
Love,
Mr. Ballmer
Just my $0.02
I hope that by “PowerPoint presentation” he meant “Keynote presentation”!
“Leopard’s sum of parts”
Coming this fall on FOX, “Big Cat Autopsy” with guest stars Siegfried and Roy and that guy that played Simba in the Broadway production of the The Lion King.
Man the packaging it came in was an experience. I spent hours staring at that hologram.
Not unless my pink slip gets to him first…
After testing it out for a few days on an older machine, I installed it on my wife’s laptop and she loves it. She likes the way it looks. For me, I love that Quick Look. I haven’t configured Spaces yet, but that looks like a promising feature.
JadisOne, just curious about your older machines specs, and did Leo make it run snappier?
Leopard breathed new life into my “Kernel Panic” G5 2.3 Powermac. It’s like a new machine!
On my MacPro QuadCore 3 GHz, it is fast, but has locked a few times…not those gentle reboot locks either, but that pull the plug and pray variety.
On my MacBook C2D, it’s smooth as glass. No hiccups.
Overall, a great advance.
If only he could provide us with a link to a 3rd party Time Machine solution…
That alone is worth Leopard’s price tag.
Another moron reviewer.
Next.
I hope that by “PowerPoint presentation” he meant “Keynote presentation”!
“PowerPoint” while it is a registered trademark, has become the generic name for computer generated presentations. Kind of a like a certain brand of facial tissues whose name begins with a “K”, or a brand of photocopiers whose name begins sith an “X”, or a search engine whose name begins with a “G”, or a ….
That the name “PowerPoint” has become generic can be taken as an insult to Microsoft.
Leopard made my 8-core MacPro fly even faster than before! Photoshop now opens about 3 times faster than it used to. I see speed increases across the board. I think Leopard is much more tuned for multi core processors than Tiger was. I’m totally sold on Leopard. WOW!
>If only he could provide us with a link to a 3rd party Time Machine solution…
No problem: rsync is already built into Tiger. All that’s needed is a small wrap around script that hard-links previous backups as source for new ones. Couple that with a cron job and you’re set.
Bonus: rsync perfectly works over a network, where Time Machine still has its issues.
If you insist on the spiffy 3D animation, Time Machine is required, else there are plenty of similar solutions on the net.
ah, sweet irony – MSnbc giving leopard big praise.
i agree with the headline quote – leopard has been absolutely superb. i like the new interface guidelines (i know some people prefer aqua, which was also nice), and i haven’t run into any bugs (other than a garageband 3 bug, which i think apple fixed, but i wouldn’t know because i upgraded to ilife 08). this along with the macbook i recently acquired has equated into the best computing experience i’ve had in my 20+ years in front of computers (not counting the nostalgia of playing commodore 64 games as a kid). =)
the only complaint (so minor, though!) is that the UI seems a TINY bit more sluggish at times – 2.16ghz macbook with 1gb ram. it’s barely noticeable, but i bet apple will pep it up in a point update anyway.
i sound like such a fanboy right now, but i really can’t help it – leopard is fantastic.
The new ‘Help’ app is AWESOME. It even shows you where commands live in the menu.
I have not upgraded yet due to my current workload unfortunately, but plan to soon. As a graphic designer, I’m very interested in Font Book’s new auto font activation feature among the obvious and not-so-obvious other features. Apparently the new Font Book got good marks from reviewers.
Anyone run GoLive CS2 ok on a G5 under 10.5? I heard it runs ok on a MacBook (intel). All my newer Adobe stuff should run fine, but just need first-had real world info on GL before upgrading.
>No problem: rsync is already built into Tiger.
Let’s see, figure out how rsync works, create a wrap around script, setup a cron job after I figure out how to do that in terminal, or just plug in a hard drive and flip a switch in preferences..
Yeah, your method is just like Time Machine.
Hard core code geeks really need to get down off your high horses and come back down here with the normal users.
Interesting coincidence, my MDN magic word to post this is “death”.
Anyone here remember how to “nice” Folding@Home? It seems to be running at ‘0’ priority, rather than at the ‘+20’ that was intended. While this helps it dig through the medical data more quickly, it locks up memory just as effectively.
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I’ve found a solution to “What’s in the Stack”: a Pages document named “aa” with the contents in BIG, bold letters. Of course, that takes up ‘fan space’ … oh, well.
System Preferences, then iTunes, locked up on me. Force Quit generated fatal errors (send this data to Apple? … YES) but did not force an exit. Had to reboot. Well, didn’t HAVE to – except that I wanted my resources back.
Dave
I got Leopard and iLife 08 at the same time. I could swear it is a new machine!
Runs snappier, apps open quicker, but really there’s a certain je ne se quais (excuse spelling) that just makes the whole computing experience actually elegant!
I love the screen saver that uses your photos to make a photo mosaic of other photos. Some couldn’t believe that the screensavers were called features among the 300, but I’m a fan.
Also I thought iChat had much improved color and depth when I chatted last night with the folks. My favorite is to shift-apple 3 and take stills of the family while talking. I’ve gotten some of the best shots of my sister in London and her 1 year old.
Still, I miss resolution independence, full system automator tasks and recording, wireless time machine and zfs. I’m betting on a new OS next fall.
Oh, “Alex” the new voice is creepy-cool. Some folks at my church can’t read as well as him, which got me imagining a future where computers do all the reading in churches… Won’t happen, but interesting to think about.
@Shogun
The spelling is “Je ne sais quoi.”
You are welcome.
Here’s a test: I just loaded Leopard on yesterday onto my MacBook Pro 2.33 Gig, 2GB of ram machine. I immediately set up Spaces and began the initial backup for Time Machine.
Just for a lark I decided to try and play Call of Duty 2 on one of the spaces… while everything else was still up and running, including the Time Machine backup.
It worked like a charm without any degradation in performance on COD 2.
I am really impressed. The Spaces feature is totally awesome.
And the ability to open up custom widgets in Dashboard from a web page is simply amazing. I never really used Dashboard before this, now it is one of my favourite features.
This version of OS X is a killer!!!!!
Is Quicklook the same as that shareware/freeware thing ‘Milky Way’ ? (google) You can click on a picture and it just pops up in the finder without having to open anything.