Apple Leopard OS X (X.V?) Review

There are two kinds of Mac users; those who jump on a new OS release the second it's available, and those who decide to let the others test the waters for them before jumping in. Me, I've always been in the day-it-comes-out camp. So for the benefit of those who are on the sidelines, here is my initial review; a longer, more in-depth review will come soon.
The first thing people ask me is usually 'how easy/hard was it to install?' I've installed it on about ten systems so far without any issues - but all of them have been reasonably new machines. The only issues I've heard about have been related to Logitech drivers, and anyone who's had issues seems to be able to fix them by doing an 'archive and install' in lieu of an 'upgrade'. The installation process takes about 40-60 minutes (skip the disc verification!). At first, it takes the system a while to calculate the time remaining; then it gives you a large amount of time that pares down after a couple of minutes to something closer to reality. Once the OS is installed, you'll probably want to look in the Additional Installs folder and add components. One of the items I was looking forward to is in there; Dashcode, which helps you make your own widgets.
At first glance, most people don't even notice the difference between 10.4 and 10.5. The dock is very different, but it doesn't jump out at you, and the Menu bar is now transparent with a metallic Apple logo (versus the blue one in previous versions). Once you've opened a Finder window, the changes become more apparent - but still very familiar to anyone who's used iTunes or iPhoto. The Cover Flow view is not only pretty, but it's very useful; being able to visually sort through items enables me to find them much faster. It's very nice being able to see my networked drives in this view as well. It does take a bit of tweaking to decide how large/small you want to make the view; some areas are still easier to navigate via list view. One minor annoyance is that you don't seem to be able to arrow back and forth to switch to a different folder; it'd be nice to be able to use the left/right arrows like you can in column view.
I'll be covering more of the specific application features in the next review, but one standout is the new Spaces settings. I think anyone who uses this for a few minutes will wonder how they ever got along without it. I haven't really gotten enough files set up to get much bang out of the Stacks yet, but I can see how they could be promising.
The biggest disappointment with Leopard so far is a tie - one, for the breaking of certain Flash Player 9 features/functions (which should be fixed soon), and two, the horrible background effects in PhotoBooth and iChat. While the backgrounds may work okay in certain lighting/settings, I have yet to find a way to get it to work even halfway decently. Not a dealbreaker, but something that seems more like a public beta than a production-ready feature.
Stay tuned for the in-depth review coming soon!

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