Taming A New Cat

I finally decided to take a plunge to upgrade to OS X Leopard.  So last Friday, I went over to Pavillion KL and visit Epi Centre.  I got myself a single license pack of 10.5.1 Leopard, and rushed home.
I have everything prepared so I went on to install Leopard on an external drive and ran Migration Assistant to transfer all my user settings from my old Tiger system.  It went almost flawless. The install took me over 4 hours – it could have been faster had I installed it on my internal drive.  I installed on an external drive as precautionary that if anything goes wrong I can always switch back to my old system.

First Impression

Everything worked well after installing the latest updates.  This new cat seems tamed enough for me that I decided to completely drop my Tiger system in my internal Macbook HDD the next day.  Leopard has a lot of new features that had me adjust a bit but the learning curve is quick.  I like the new interface particularly with the new panes in System Preferences. The subtle eye-candy changes was just a clear reminder that this is an entirely new cat.

There is a lot more under the hood that I have to discover with Leopard’s new features.  Time Machine for one is a welcome addition – the animation just blows me a way.  Navigating thru the timeline is like a scene in the first Matrix movie when Neo ‘zoomed’ into a roomful stack of weapons.  Quick Look is an easy way to preview any documents without opening the application – pressing Spacebar while navigating Finder’s browser pane was just right.

The Upgrade Itch

XCode 3 and the addition of the iPhone SDK is what I anticipated the most.  I’ve heard a lot of improvements and new tools available for developing applications for the Mac.  I’m starting out to explore development in a Mac.  Having been into Java development for quite some time now, I want new skills for a challenge.

I’ve planned the upgrade since Leopard’s public release last October, but I have been hesitant.  I have heard a lot of users having problems: slower than Tiger performance, kernel panics, etc.  What finally pushed me over was my decision to try out XCode.  I’ve seen a lot of articles on the web and I’m so impressed with the feature set of the new development IDE that I can only get to try those if I switch to Leopard.

Living day to day with Leopard

Using Leopard is not much different than Tiger.  You still do the basic stuff the same way with the old cat.  Switchers won’t worry much about getting noob-ed.

I’ve been using Spaces quite a lot.  I created 5 spaces to separate applications for web surfing (browsers and Yahoo Messenger), System Preferences, Photography Workflow (Aperture, iPhoto, ImageBrowser), Media (iTunes), and Development.  Clicking on applications on the Dock shows a slide-in/out animation when crossing difference spaces.

Final thoughts:

I can’t believe how smooth the upgrade was.  This is my first upgrade when I switched to a Mac last year.  It cost me a standard USD 129 for a single-user license, not like the USD 269 to USD 399 for a Vista Ultimate Upgrade or Full Version respectively.  The Migration Assistant really works without the need to reinstall every application and reconfigure Leopard the way I configured my Tiger system.  I’m glad I’m on a Mac.