So, now that I have my shiny, new Mac OS X Leopard system, I can report on what is and what ISN’T working. First of all, let me say that I will not report on the new features and look of Leopard. There are hundred of people doing that on their websites. What I will report on is how Leopard impacts how I work and what I do everyday.
So, first things first. Safari and Firefox both work fine and Safari feels quite a bit snappier in Leopard than in Tiger. I did some quick testing with Adobe CS2 and here is what is working fine: in Photoshop, I scanned come images with my Epson Perfections 2450 scanner via firewire. I did some simple retouching to the image with Photoshop CS2 with no problems. I also created some graphics with Illustrator CS2 with no apparent problems. I didn’t push anything by using any strange filters or obscure functions. I then took these elements and used them in InDesign CS2. Again, all went without a hitch.
I had to pay some bills (and amazingly I still get bills even though I use Leopard so it isn’t that life-changing!) so I fired up Quicken. I still use Quicken 2003 only because it does what I need to do and I saw no need to upgrade. I only use it to balance my checkbooks and I don’t use it for any online transactions. Again, Quicken worked fine. I even reconciled my bank statement manually with no problems.
Next up, I tried to sync my Sony Vaio (a Palm OS device) with my Now Up-to-Date. This is always a tricky scenario and is my most constant source of problems on the Mac. It seems that any changes that I make to my Mac causes this combination to have problems. And my Leopard install was no different! I put my Vaio in its USB cable and pressed the sync button. The syncing software went to work (amazingly as this is where it usually fails!). About 30 seconds later, the sync was finished. I looked at my calendar to see how it went. It had not gone well! The sync had duplicated EVERY event in my calendar from the beginning of time until the end! And there is no easy way in Now Up-to-Date nor in the Palm OS to delete duplicated events. So I spent the better part of the next hour deleting all the duplicate events!
And it gets worse. Next I tried to test my backup software. I use Retrospect and am VERY disciplined about my backups. I backup all my files to external firewire drives everyday. I also backup some network shares that sit on a Windows 2000 server and the volumes are mounted using either SMB or Appletalk. Leopard handles network shares quite differently and the volumes are not mounted on the desktop like they were in Panther or Tiger. Now the shares are in the sidebar as a “sub-item” of the server that sits in the sidebar. It is harder to explain than it is to see it in action. Well, because of the way the shared volumes are handled, Retrospect can’t see the shared volumes. So they can’t be backed up! Also, my backup is scheduled to kick off at 4 am. Since Leopard, it hasn’t kicked off as scheduled yet. I am investigating a workaround to this.
In my next report, I will outline some printing problems I have been having with my Epson printer.
