magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

I upgraded to Leopard today, which I had until only moments or so ago been simply calling version 10.5 because I can never keep straight exactly which big cat they are naming the OS after these days. And for all my high-horse proselytising whenever anyone I know would complain about the ills of their Vista upgrade, I ran into huge troubles. It's almost certainly because I've installed who knows how many non-standard extensions, drivers, and hacks over the couple of years that I've had this computer. And I've largely, in less than half a day, got pretty much everything back in working order. (Notable exceptions being various Native Instruments music software packages, which probably would have broken even if everything else had gone smoothly, and should be working after a reinstall.)

But still.

Difficulties aside, I do like Spaces, although it will probably take some personal retraining to integrate it into my normal workflow. And Cover Flow view in the Finder is nice, although ultimately I'm not sure exactly how useful on a daily basis. I don't have a new big drive to run Time Machine backups yet, but I think that's really the versions killer app. I'm still amazed that it's taken until now for a major OS to come bundled with an intuitively simple, yet powerful backup solution. I've already been using the new Safari feature for months. (I do love the dynamic tabs and search highlighting.) I don't really expect to ever use the new Mail features, although maybe with IMAP support I'll boot it up and check them out at some point. And I'm sorely disappointed that the iChat video effects don't work PowerPC hardware.