Like most Apple users we pre-ordered a copy of Leopard and took delivery of it on the 26th October. I upgraded Tiger to Leopard that evening and despite the initial horror of having some fairly big changes to the UI, I’ve decided it’s not so bad.
Something I didn’t like was the new style dock – it has a shiny effect on it (see image below) which makes it harder to see what’s running. I figured that it wasn’t too much of a problem since I have the dock set to auto-hide and if I need to see what’s running, I can always use Cmd-Tab.
I also wasn’t keen on the new style Applications folder and Downloads link in the dock. I’ve not investigated thoroughly, but I’d like something like the Start Menu in Windows XP where things that you’ve run recently appear in the menu in preference to just in alphabetical order. If you have several frequently used apps that begin with a letter near the end of the alphabet but they’re not used frequently enough to make it worth keeping them in the dock, you always have to click Applications and then “12 more in Finder”.
What I ended up doing was removing these shortcuts and just using Spotlight to locate the app instead. This has the advantage that there’s less clutter in the dock and also that I can find apps that are installed in subdirectories without having to open the subdirectory in Finder.
Something I like about Safari 3 is that if you start filling in a form on a page, and accidentally click on the close tab button, it’ll actually ask if you’re sure you want to close it because you’ve entered text on the page.
There are plenty of other interesting features but I’m still finding them all so probably more to come another day.