Leopard

Like 2 million of my closest friends, I bought a copy of OS X 10.5 over the weekend (actually, I pre-ordered it so it was waiting for me when I came home from work last Friday). I'm not going to go into a product review since there are plenty already out there, including some that explore the finer details of the new OS. There is a lot to be happy about. Yes, I've found a few bugs already, but they are nothing compared to what most people would probably expect from an initial release of an operating system (ever heard of Vista?). The improvements to the already excellent OS X 10.4 are substantial. The screenshot above is an example of one of the new features. It's a fairly old feature by UNIX standards (multiple desktops), but as usual Apple pulled it off with extra style. The transition between spaces is extremely smooth and you can view all of them quite easily with this all-in-one perspective. You'll notice than I'm running Safari in my first space, then iTunes in another, Windows XP full screen in yet another space, and finally Ubuntu 7.10 full screen in the final space. This is all running simultaneously in case it isn't obvious from the picture. I have to give credit to VMWare Fusion for making it possible to run both Windows and Linux, but on top of OS X everything feels as fast and responsive as if nothing else was happening on the system.

I'm more pleased with my iMac purchase with each passing day.