Bad Kitty

So I installed Mac OS 10.5 Leopard this past Saturday. I actually wish I hadn't. I should have waited a month or two for Leopard-compatible versions of some of the applications I rely on to be released. The two big ones are:

• SuperDuper! - I use this to do full backups of my system. The makers of this product currently recommend that you not use it under Leopard until they release a Leopard-compatible version.
  
  
• The Missing Sync for Palm OS, which I use to synchronize my Palm PDA. It seems to work, though I get a couple of cryptic error messages in the sync log. I haven't noticed any data going missing, but I'm wary of relying on it until they release an update, so I've stopped syncing for now.
  

Not as critical is Inkscape, which refuses to launch because it believes that X11 is not installed on my Mac. Someone in this thread discussing the matter has claimed that a Leopard-compatible beta of Inkscape has been released, but it turns out to be an Intel-only build, and I have a PowerPC Mac. (I say "not as critical" because I haven't used Inkscape since I discovered, and fell in love with, Intaglio.)

So, I feel that upgrading to Leopard is premature at this time, if you have any apps that you rely on which are not yet Leopard-ready.

But aside from that, what about the experience of using Leopard itself? Well, as others have posted their lists of Leopard annoyances, so too shall I list mine.

1. Classic is no longer supported. Yes, I already knew about this, but there seems to be no good reason for it, at least on PowerPC Macs. There aren't any classic apps that I was relying on under Tiger, but I did have a couple of older Mac games that were fun to play once in a while. And to add insult to injury, the Leopard Finder can actually recognize a Classic application, and will draw its icon with a circle-with-a-line-through-it stamp over it. If you try to launch a Classic app, Leopard will put up a message box telling you that Classic isn't supported.
   
   
2. A folder will not remember what view it should display with when opened, unless you check a checkbox in the folder's preferences. I first learned about this change from the Leopard review at Ars Technica, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be.
   
   
3. If I use Fast User Switching to switch to another account, when I switch back to my account, the desktop picture changes to the default outer space picture. This only happens if I have my desktop picture set to change at regular intervals, which I do.
   
   
4. Suppose I have a Finder window open, showing a particular folder's contents. If, while that window is open, I move the folder to another location, the window changes from showing the folder's contents to showing the contents of the folder it was just moved out of!
   
   
5. Spotlight doesn't index everything by default. I used Spotlight to search for a file that I knew existed somewhere within my Documents folder, and I panicked for a second when it wasn't in the search results. I then found the file by digging through the folder hierarchy manually. Moving the file out of its folder and then back in again caused Spotlight to notice that the file existed, and it immediately appeared in the search results. I tried to fix this by forcing Spotlight to reindex my drive, but that didn't work. I did this by adding my drive to the list of excluded locations in the Spotlight preferences pane, and then removing it again. This did seem to cause Spotlight to delete its index and then recreate it, but it still didn't index the entire contents of my Documents folder. So the current workaround is to manually move files around so that Spotlight notices them.
   

While those first two items are clearly intentional changes, the last three are apparently bugs, and thus have some hope of maybe being fixed in a system update. But I won't hold my breath.