It’s a fair statement to say that I was ‘pretty excited’ about this latest rendition of OS X (like every other mac user). As with probably a lot of people, all th hype and excitement about it drove my expectations a bit high.

To my dismay, when i finally installed it on my computer i wasn’t greeted with a drastically new OS that was going to change the way I interacted with my computer. It seemed to be pretty much the same. A transparency here, a shadow there, new icons, but more or less the same. Additionally, I was faced with compatibility issues with some of my most used apps (KeepPassX, Adium, and VMWare). This was definitely not what I had envisioned. Luckily a few Google searches and downloads fixed all my issues. Still, issues resolved, this was not the experience I had signed up for.

Fast forwarding 3 days, and having read more blog posts, played around with the functionality, my opinion has changed a bit. While this release isn’t the most amazing thing ever, it’s pretty solid in very subtle ways.

First and most importantly I think that the file-sharing/browsing interface is 1000 times better than before. Second, spotlight seems to be a lot faster than it used to be. Third, I like cover flow; I’m not sure how useful it really is, but I like it.

Here’s in my opinion the best (and most concise) blog posting talking about the noteworthy features of Leopard. And below the link, are my personal favorites:

Engadget: All about Leopard: gallery, apps, impressions

• Launching apps with Spotlight is tremendously easy, they come up instantly, and separately from the rest of the search results. It’ll still try searching the index for matching files, though.
• Use command + y (or just hit space) to Quick Look things. It’s like command + o (which simply opens files) except way faster.
• iChat: Screen sharing works really well. Fighting for the mouse is always fun, too.
• Network settings are much more simply laid out, especially when it comes to managing multiple connections and their settings. Looks like Apple realized that a lot of people have more than two network connections.
• ZOMG: the keyboard manager differentiates between different keyboards’ modifier keys. No longer do you need to swap the option and command keys every time you use an external PC keyboard. This alone is reason enough for us to switch.