When I returned to the Mac 2 years ago I thought that the days of Sad Macs and Bombs were well and truly behind us. However, with the most recent release of Leopard I must admit that like others I've been suffering from Apple serving up an operating system that isn't fully cooked. We could list out a full range of excuses that resulted in Apple opting to ship an OS that had a number of bugs in its witness the recent spate of security patches and updates to address wireless issues for Macbook and Macbook Pro users. Overall, I think that the improvements introduced in Leopard apart from Tiger while the 350 features listed on Apple's sight in some cases seemed fairly small I've found a number of pleasant surprises that have been useful including:
- Preview - a beefed up version of the built-in viewer means that you can now easily annotate PDF documents and do basic image manipulation without having to dig into Photoshop or another app.
- iChat - the addition of an improved iChat theatre for sharing pictures, movies and slideshows during a video chat is a definite bonus along with the ability to enable a remote user to take control of your Mac without installing Chicken of the VNC.
- Automator improvements are fairly notable as the number of built-in commands supported has grown and you have the ability to record a series of tasks as you perform then. Also the ability to create automator actions that more heavily leverage the web is a real bonus.
What I've found frustrating is the on-going battle between my Macbook Pro and our D-Link router where the Mac intermittently seems to lose the Internet connection despite being only twenty feed away from the router. I've also experienced a series of snags when running Firefox and while it works most of the time I'm seeing the spinning beach ball of death more frequently than I did under Tiger (which was an extremely stable OS). I have no doubt that Apple will remedy the bugs that were introduced by the changes in Leopard. Here's hoping that we'll get the release of 10.5.2 at Macworld in a couple of weeks or shortly thereafter!
