Bah! This big cat has worms!

[viktor_haag]

OK, I am indeed running a dot-oh operating system version. Leopard may be ready enough to have shipped out the door, but the days of Tiger's latter day stability are gone. Leopard is packed front to back with niggly-piggly little rough corners and glitches.

The latest I've noticed? Suddenly Safari has stopped actually reporting to me when my RSS feeds have new content. Without reporting this information to me, Safari's usefulness as an RSS aggregator drops by easily an order of magnitude.

Other things noticed;

• Microsoft's Beta version of RDC is even more unstable under Leopard than it was under Tiger (no big surprise there, I guess), and the previous more stable version seems to have glitchies grabbing the focus and inserting its menubar when it should

• Microsoft Office complained in a tedious manner that all my fonts were corrupt, so I had to remove them all and then re-install them back in dribs and drabs with Font Book to get the MS apps to be happy again

• After burning a CD, the OS loads the new audio CD onto the desktop, but iTunes itself doesn't load the CD into its left hand list, and it gets all hinky when you eject the disc from the finder

• The Terminal app still (now?) can't use proportionally spaced fonts properly; I can't remember if this is actually a new bug, or just a shocking behind-the-times lag (heck, even Emacs can now use proportionally spaced fonts!)

• When I now try to send out an email message with Emacs there's a five to ten second delay while it desperately tries to open a connection to our SMTP server (this delay didn't exist in Tiger); I haven't been able to figure out what's causing the delay

• Don't get me started on what they've done with the dock; I can't imagine how this one got let out the door (if you really want to get me started, scroll back in my recent posts to see what I think of the new "stacks" UI feature...)

• Everynow and then when you download a DMG and attempt to open it, it actually gets mounted, but you can't see it in the Finder. (Tip: try using CMD+SHIFT+G to open the 'go to folder' dialog, and type in /Volumes as the Folder to visit; from there, you should see the mounted DMG, and the Finder may even then notice the mounted volume and *pop* open a window for you... sigh...)

• (neu!) It seems that the new FSEvents framework comes with behaviour implications that are different than in previous releases, and also have introduced a number of rough corners: trash empties that don't get noticed immediately, for example; the above mentioned mounted volume glitchies; mounted volumes that get unmounted but still appear on the desktop for some time, etc, etc, etc. The new FSEvents framework is good, sound technology, necessary for supporting TimeMachine, but something this fundamental is bound to ship with new wrinklies exposed, and so far, they do seem to be hanging out...

I now eagerly look forward to the upcoming comprehensive dot-one and dot-two updates.

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

I finally got my copy on Halloween.

Given your issues, I'm tempted to leave it in the shrinkwrap a bit longer.

::B::

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

If you have no burning need for features (and the only ones that I can think of, really, are TimeMachine or increased compatibility with Windows networking environment), then I would definitely postpone your install until the first comprehensive update is available. I wouldn't be surprised if that's out by the end of the year. If you lean heavily on Office, you might even want to wait until Office 2008 is available (however, other than the font and RDC issues, I haven't noticed anything else bad with Office compatibility).

You might want to read the Ars Technica review (http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars) for a full examination of Leopard.

Also, you should probably be wary of running in a mixed Leopard/Tiger environment, especially around Syncing data through .Mac... (but I think your laptop is your only Mac, correct?)

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I just have the one MacBook laptop (I never did get around to repairing the old one) running. I do use Office extensively (Powerpoint and Word) because of interchangeability with everyone else I work with in the office.

I may wait until my vacation or after (two weeks) before futzhing around with archiving and updating.

::B::