Upgraded Mac to Leopard

Been getting more into the Mac recently. Did a clean install of Leopard (OS X 10.5) and it seems there are a lot of subtle improvements over Tiger. I held off doing this for a while since a lot of open source and freeware software hadn't been updated.

Seems more polished generally. Once nice thing is connecting to a Windows machine over a local network is a lot easier. Despite the apparent ease of a lot of things in OS X some things were a little esoteric, or half arsed. Generally, though I now seem to spend less time messing around trying to get things done. Quicksilver also seems somewhat redundant now as Spotlight has been added.

This is the last upgrade of OS I'll get for the PowerMac G5 I have. Apple are apparently on a big push to optimise OS X for Intel now and have dropped support for PPC. Not too surprised at this as the machine is starting to feel a little sluggish now and starting to think about upgrading, but not quite sold on the pricier Mac hardware yet. For starters, Mac laptops have relatively small screens for the price (although it helps with battery life). For a desktop replacement though you need a bigger screen.

Also got an external hard drive so I can use Time Machine. Now this is a great piece of software. Not only does it just back everything up transparently it also sets your backup schedule for you. And the presentation is excellent as well, screens travelling through space. Corny but well done ;-).

Haven't had to retrieve anything major (yet!) but it's nice having that feeling that everything is being backed up in case you have a catastrophic drive failure (which will happen eventually, and has happened to be twice before on PCs). Now to backup my Windows laptop I can just copy my documents onto the Mac and they'll be backed up. :-)

Just getting into using Spaces now. With four of them you have four desktops which is very handy for programming where you have web and document references open, a compiler and testing environment. Well you need one screen just for Xcode because of all the window clutter.

Another addition is Mobile Me although yet to try this. Unsure what I'd use it for at the moment. I use Google and Yahoo for my web storage at the moment.