Well, it's been a long time coming, but Leopard has finally hit the streets, or at least made it's way via FedEx priority overnight to my apartment. Of course I tracked it the whole way from Illinois to Pittsburgh, but that's just part of the job when it comes to new products from Apple. I'm in the process now of getting things up and running again, but I plan to update this blog as tinker with Leopard. I'll try to primarily focus on things I like, things I dislike, some of those surprises that I didn't expect.

The Good

• New dock - It's amazing from a bells and whistles perspective. Takes a bit of getting used to, but worth the time and energy to update it.
• Safari - Love the tabs and the fact that you can disconnect them from the main window to create new windows.
• Spaces - Downright awesome. I've been waiting for this for quite some time, living with VirtualDesktops in the meantime.
• Terminal - Tabs and better themes, what an improvement. I customized the "Pro" theme myself.
• Notes in mail - I've been using the Stickies.app for quite some time to manage small todos. Now that it's directly integrated into mail, that makes my life a little simpler.
• iChat tabs - Finally, iChat comes with a tabbed interface. It's about time Apple!
• Rails support - Since you all now realize this site is written in Ruby on Rails, you won't be surprised to hear how happy I am with Apple's inclusion of Rails in this release. Not only that, but they've also included a buttload of gems such as Mongrel, Redcloth, etc.
• Coverflow and Quick Look - I haven't used this feature extensively, but I definitely think it will help from a productivity standpoint. When searching for documents, I'm always having to open like 20 files before I find the one I want. With Quick Look, I can just browse content as it rushes across the screen and if I want a deeper look, just click the spacebar. Very cool feature.
• New screensavers - There are a handful of new and stunning screensavers that augment Flurry, quite well.

The Bad

• Open safe files - Yeah, Safari still sets "Open files safe for downloading" as a default, which I personally disagree with.
• Stacks - Sweet, but I haven't quite gotten the hang of it from a keyboard navigation perspective. I initially wanted to be able to double-click to reveal the main folder in the stack, but not sure you can do that.
• Installation - Seems to take longer than Tiger and the install dialogs seem a little disjoint.
• iChat accounts - Sigh, I would use iChat if it would support integrating multiple accounts into one window. I'll place this on my iChat wishlist.
• New folder icons - Dull, boring, and otherwise uninteresting. I guess I like them better than those ugly old blue folders though.
• Password plus - Broke like Mike Tyson's face. They state they dont' have a copy of Leopard and couldn't test on their site. Funny, it's been available for developers for months. They will be updating soon, or so they say. Nice job DataViz.
• PGP - Busted like all get out. Expecting a beta release sometime in November. Another poor case of Mac support. Update, they now have a beta version available at http://beta.pgp.com.
• Rails support - Having Rails incorporated into Leopard was a big step, but it didn't much help me, I had to update all the gems and spend a few hours hacking my way through getting RMagick installed.
• Now playing preferences - Seems somethings is wonky with the way the Brandon Fuller's Now Playing plugin for iTunes stores preferences. Since upgrading to Leopard, my preferences for Now Playing are not being saved. An updated version is now available that resolves this issue.
• Parallels broken - There are numerous reports of various issues related to Parallels working in Leopard. Man, this bit me hard tonight when I tried to do a Ubuntu Gutsy install and to the error "CPU too old for this kernel".
• Firewall - The firewall in Leopard is both misleading and insecure by default. It selectively permits traffic to certain services even though you configure it to "block all incoming connections". For instance, I had it set to block all. I have MySQL and Mongrel running. When trying to connect from an external sytem to my Mac, it denied connections to MySQL, but permitted connections to Mongrel. That's not what I mean when I say "block all incoming connections". I had to use WaterRoof to create a custom set of rules. However, the rules seemed to go *poof* after a software update reboot.

The Surprising

Terminal memory - I had previously been using SSHKeychain to remember the passphrases to my SSH keys. Prior to installing this on Leopard, I was testing an ssh connection to one of my servers to discover that I was automatically prompted to enter my password in a dialog, rather than right in terminal. In addition, it gives you the option to save it in Keychain.app. Goodbye SSHKeychain, you were a good friend though.

Blank screensaver - I typically lock the screen when I'm away from the computer, but haven't always been a big fan of having to do so by activating the screensaver. While it is certainly some eye candy, why waste the cpu cycles if you don't have to? I've always wondered why there was never a way to just blank the screen, but now you can, w00t! 

Advanced firewall - In previous versions, you could enable or disable the firewall and configuration options were limited. Now you can use application-based packet filtering. I can't confirm this actually works effectively, but it's at least there now. 

Expose in Spaces - How about this for a small Easter egg. When you have zillions of windows open scattered across multiple spaces, you can look at all your spaces and use expose to reveal your windows. Very helpful little feature which I've already used several times.

Subversion baked in - I've been using Subversion as my source code revisioning tool for quite some time, but in Tiger I had to install it manually. Seems like Apple got good feedback and included it in the base install for Leopard. One less package to install, hoo rah! 

Self-signed certificate support - I use plenty of self-signed certificates for mail, web, and other services I run internally on my network. Tiger lacked a good way to set the trust of these certificates. Most of the time, you would have to obtain a copy of the certificate and then import it manually into Keychain. In Leopard, there is a little option that allows you to set the trust which takes care of all the heavy lifting for you. 

Fandango widget - No more "movies 15213" in Google anymore, now I can just click my little widget and display all the movies playing in my area. This may not be the most amazing surprise, but it sure saves me plenty of clicks. 

Installer changes - I noticed that Apple updated some of the interface screens for Installer. After an install is complete, it will now clearly scream and shout a screen that tells you it succeeded.

Quick look keyboard shortcut - Talk about convienent, select a file and press "Apple + Y" or just the spacebar to open the quick look for the file. 

Identity preference - Well this is certainly different. I have multiple certificates I use for things like S/MIME and client-side authentication. In versions prior to Safari 3, when you visited a website that required a client-side certificate, you'd be prompted with a dialog on which certificate you'd like to use. No more, it just fails, well, unless you find this hidden feature that allows you to set what Apple calls an identity preference. You can select one of your personal certificates and set it to be used with a specific URL or email address. Not sure I like this, but I was very frustrated when I couldn't figure out why my client-side authentication was working for my website in Safari and Mail.app wasn't picking up on my S/MIME certificate. The menu item is buried. You must select a certificate and right-click to get the "New Identity Preference" dialog.