Saturday, October 27, 2007

Leopard: First impressions

Alright, so Leopard has arrived! On Friday I wiped the harddrive of my MacBook and eagerly installed my new OS. I this post I will present some of my thoughts about it, based a couple of days usage.

The good:

  • It's very convenient that so much quality software ships with the OS. Built-in svn is nice even tho I prefer Git, since a lot of projects use it. I really wanted the Ruby support to be good. But it turned out that I pretty quickly had to change it with a custom install via MacPorts. The built in Ruby simply refused to install the ruby-postgres gem. I gave the exact same params to extconf.rb with the custom Ruby in place, and it just worked. I had to install PostgreSQL 8.2 from source by the way, since the port for it is broken at the moment. Its still very nice that the OS ships with a up to date Ruby tho.
  • Spaces are cool, even tho I don't like everything about their behavior. I really want to disable the animated gliding that occurs when you change between spaces.
  • The new finder feels much better to use.
  • Safari have gotten a bunch of updates as well, I especially like the new search function.
  • Its faster than Tiger.
The bad:
  • Transparency which you cant turn off. God, I hate transparent windows.
  • The new terminal isn't as good as expected. I switched back to iTerm pretty quickly.
  • The new dock is way too heavy on the eye candy for my taste.
The ugly:
  • A lot of port breakage, but thats to be expected I guess. And most of them get fixed really quick.

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