Leopard!!!

Installed it last night and have been playing with it since....  I've read quite a few comments about it in other blogs, both good and bad; so far, I like it.  I've had a couple of hiccups with some apps, but they were easily fixed by either downloading up-to-date versions (oops... like Adium - updated from 0.89.1 to 1.1.3) or by typing in "Leopard 10.5" and the name of the app in a Google search and most of the time finding the answer to the problem and fixing it that way.

Front Row finally works with iPhoto (it never did under Tiger) but I can't work out how to turn off, let alone change, the muzak that accompanies the slide show, and just for once neither the net nor the help menu has been much help...  Not that I use Front Row much anyway, just to watch DVDs from my bed; so in the end it's a minor annoyance and not a major peeve.

I went through the list of 300 changes (on the apple site) and tried them out on my own set-up, and learnt a lot on the way:

1. In iChat, when you change the background to a video (for example, so it looks like you have an aquarium behind you, you really need to be sure that you're wearing different coloured clothing to what the back ground originally was (photo shows a dark background and a dark singlet...) or it gets a bit confused... and you end up with fish or whatever where nature never intended (you have to imagine that the fish in the background are actually a movie and they swim around behind you as you talk).

2. Stacks opening up from the Dock will only fan if the Dock is positioned at the bottom of the screen... But the Download Stack is a blessing, in that it gets my downloads folder off my desktop and still keeps it in a very accessible place (refreshing desktop icons uses a fair bit of processor power, and although that's probably less true nowadays than it used to be, why push it?)

3. Safari is a whole lot better, and I've changed back to it from Camino... for the moment...

4. Quick look ROCKS!!!  I can see the contents of a Word document without launching Word.  I can scroll through a movie or a song and see if it's the one I was looking for without launching whichever app I need to open it.  All good.

5. There don't seem to have been any improvements to Speech Recognition and Speakable items, but as my computing life doesn't depend on them it's no biggy - I guess one day someone in Cupertino will notice that what was revolutionary in 1993 (Plain Talk) is a bit passe now and it's one area of the Mac that could use some serious updating.

Well, that's my initial impression, 24 hours after installing...