Leopard: Worth the upgrade?
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007I’ve been on holiday the past seven weeks (I know, lucky me!), so the Leopard launch has somewhat passed me by. The reviews seem generally positive, but is it worth forking out the AUD $158 for the upgrade?
Here’s what I think of the major new features in Leopard – bearing in mind I’ve never actually used it 😉 :
New Finder: I actually like Finder in Tiger, though I know a lot of folks complain about it. The new Finder features do sound like they’d help me find things quicker. I love the idea of browsing files in Cover Flow mode, though I’d like to see how well it performs in practice. The new sidebar looks like a big improvement, as does the new Spotlight – finally, boolean searches, and, from what I’ve read, it’s a lot faster too. Tempting to upgrade just to get a decent Spotlight frankly.
Quick Look: Decent previews of files without having to open them sounds like a great time-saver, though again I’d like to see how “quick” it is in the reality of a cluttered hard drive like mine. Though Apple naturally shows off this feature with movies and photos for the wow factor, I reckon it’ll be most useful for previewing PDFs for me. Would upgrade for this feature if it turns out to be genuinely useful.
Time Machine: Great to see a decent backup feature finally built-in to a desktop OS, but it’s nothing you couldn’t already do with rdiff-backup if you’re technically minded (though TM is of course much prettier and works on a per-app basis too). I already use rsync to do my own backups and am perfectly happy with that, so I wouldn’t upgrade to get TM.
New Mail: Stationery – meh. I use plaintext email, thank you very much. 😛 Notes could be a useful feature, especially if they sync with my Palm notes through Missing Sync, but I feel they’d be better in iCal. I like the ability to access them via IMAP though. To-dos in Mail seem a bit frivolous too, but then again, iCal’s RSI-inducing interface sucks so badly that any other way of entering to-dos would be a blessing. Faster searches and RSS are nice improvements, but again, not sure they’re worth forking out for. (more…)