Putting the big cat through its paces

As I mentioned in a recent entry, OS X 10.5 went on sale last night. I ran up to the Apple Store after work to get a copy (and my free t-shirt, naturally :)) and got it installed last night. So far, I’m pretty happy with it.

What’s good:

• Everything seems a little snappier. Firefox, in particular, appears to be running faster than it used to… and in my experience, Firefox was the slowest of the various Mac browsers.


• Time Machine is a great idea, and I plan to get an external USB drive set up for that purpose. I’ve never been particularly rigorous about scheduled backups and that’s something I should probably change before I get burned by it.


• Finder improvements. Apple gave the Finder some much-needed “teh snappy” in spades. It’s much, much improved and much more pleasant to use. I’ve had it installed for a bit over 12 hours and I’m already finding QuickLook to be a massively useful feature.


• Spotlight. Apple put in a lot of work on Spotlight and the results are rather nice; it’s much faster and quite pleasant to use. I haven’t yet felt a need to reinstall QuickSilver since all I used it for was application launching, and I can do that easily enough with Spotlight now.

What’s not-so-good:

• 3D Dock. This doesn’t really affect me so much since I keep my dock on the right hand of the screen, but imo, it’s kind of ugly and the running program indicator doesn’t show up clearly.


• Stacks. I’ve always kept a reference to my applications folder in the dock so I can get at it quickly. With 10.5, that becomes a stack and I don’t think it works quite as well, especially because you can’t easily get at sub-folders like you could in 10.4. I’m not sure why Apple made this change.

All in all, I think it’s a good upgrade. And since no review would be complete without a screenshot of the new shiny: