Seven cool features of Leopard that might get stubborn friends to upgrade

I'm afraid you'll have to delete reason #7. Safari v3 is available and works beautifully in Tiger (I just used the new "find" feature to see if anyone else had posted about it). Not to mention Windoze. The only feature in Safari v3 that is dependent on Leopard is the "web clip" feature.

@Chad: I'm not willing to start a war here, but just to make things clear - I deal with Macs since my very first Mac Plus was produced, so it's like... 20 years? I have seven personal Macs from all possible generations sittin' around here, so patronizing me will not work. By 'relatively new' I meant 'the newest of them all, which looked like it could make use of the newest OS'.

I've been thru buggy OS'es and it's not a surprise for me. A surprise is, that Leopard is in a lot of ways less functional (graphics gimmicks aside) than Tiger. The removal of the Bluetooth features from Address Book is yet another example of Leopard's "advancement". In Tiger, I could click the phone number and dial it, or send a text message. In Leopard: I can not.

But back to the network things: I don't give a flyin' !@#$ if something works somewhere else. It doesn't work for me (which is unfortunately the most important factor in my personal judgement) - and it used to, in Tiger. I adore your complex and functional network, but you haven't told me how did you worked your way through the bug in Network Preferences' WINS pane... Are you sure all your Leopard Macs are broadcast their proper WINS name, as it is set in "Sharing" prefpane and not the automatically generated MAC!@#$%^&&* ?
Are all your Macs in their proper workgroups (not the default "WORKGROUP")?
Do they use the proper WINS server?
How did you add the WINS server, if a known bug in the Network prefpane makes it impossible do save the IP address of a WINS server? Did you use the manual workaround? A hundred times on a 100 Macs?
It's a sacrifice indeed.
And no, Leopard will not properly save the WINS IP address even if DHCP has broadcasted the WINS IP to its clients, as the Leopard needs to have the network location manually changed from 'Automatic' to anything else, to be able to save WINS info. So while you might be able to browse the SMB network, your network is becoming a mess.

If I wanted buggy, hyped up, feature overkill....I would have gone with Wintel crap. Each version of the Mac OS gets fatter, sloppier and full of features that are absolutely useless to all but a few über geeks. How about just releasing stuff that works, doesn't break what already works and stop ramming useless features down everyone's throats?

Everything is great! Except for "Mail" messages not being indexed for an entire message body search in Spotlight. Maddening.

Add me to the list of people with SMB problems. Leopard totally broke what had been working under Tiger. Shares would not show up automatically. When they did show up, copying files off the network shares was like downloading files over dial-up from 15 years ago. Except I think my 14.4 modem was faster.

I fought with Leopard for a solid day before it occurred to me that I shouldn't HAVE to fight with my OS; that's a Windows thing. That's what I wanted to avoid by getting a Mac in the first place.

So I trashed Leopard and put Super-Duped Tiger back in place and wow, everything worked again. Imagine that! Networks shares that work. Network file copying at ethernet speed like it should be. SuperDuper made it a snap to go back and that's really the only positive thing I have to say about Leopard.

I'll try Leopard again when the live beta is done, mid 2008 at this rate.

So bad, I ran screaming back to my Super Duper backup of Tiger.

The

"but I, for one, welcome my new robot overlord."

Loved the Simpson's reference!!!

"And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords".
Kent Brockman - Deep Space Homer

Stationery. They are templates. They are not immobile.

Okay, whew. Thanks for the clarification, Victor.

I was trying to figure out if Apple was making a conscious effort to do "official" GTD with Mail.app (I haven't installed Leopard yet). It sounds like that's not the case, but that people might find it useful in implementing a GTD-style workflow. I think the distinction is important since I tend to run from GTD like a frightened school boy on the first day of kindergarten.

Again, thanks for the clarification. I'm both glad you find it useful, and glad that it's not really GTD.

Cheers,
FL

I'm having an awesome time with Leopard. I've encountered 2 problems. One is a case where Finder crashes and Apple is working of the issue. The other was my first Archive & Install didn't work. Though I suspect this was largely to installing it on the way home from the Pasadena store that night - w/ bad traffic. So I did an erase and install and the used migration assistant. It was nearly flawless! (I have a bootable backup). I also did and upgrade on my sis's MB and it was flawless.

I've had LESS problems w/ SMB in 10.5 than with Tiger. There are some bugs, yes, but Leopard is perfectly stable. Also things like Mail not recognizing int. dates: that's not a bug. It should be there, yes, but that's technically a missing feature.

Also I think it's these modifications and hacks that are causing things. Leopard is no small upgrade. There are lots of DEEP system changes. My MB (1.33 yrs old, w/ stuff) vs. my sis's MB (3 mo old, student only) and her's runs better, not just because it's newer. (They're relatively the same speed only difference is 2.0CD vs 2.0GHz C2D). It's the stuff that is on my system. In system folders- not my users folder.

Fritz, what I'm saying is that Mail is now a little more tuned to what someone who would practice the tenets of GTD would need, as opposed to earlier versions. I have, in fact, read Allen's book, and I try to use GTD myself. GTD isn't about a particular piece of software, it's how you USE that software. Before, MailTags was really the only way to coax anything resembling a GTD workflow in Mail (which is why I never used it for work purposes-- that and the fact that gmail didn't do imap). But now I can see a barebones framework for actually implementing GTD using Apple tools. Before, it was largely a kludge. I'm not just using the term for effect.