A weekend With Leopard

Well, I'm just about back up and running with Leopard on my MacBook Pro.

I've got Spaces set up, I'm digging it. It's a bit less refined than some of the third party offerings, as far as transitions, and customizations, but in general terms it's very good. Very smooth, incredibly intuitive to use.

There's always something I forget, when doing a clean install. Some little piece of data or something that I forget to back up.... Without fail that happenned this time, luckilly I was saved in all counts. Mainly because I did a full disk image of my old Tiger install, down to the system settings.

1. Address Book. I forgot to do an export... Shame on me, yes. Luckilly if you replace the entire address book directory in application support, the next time you load Address Book, your're good to go.
2. iCal. Not as easy to recover. Data exists in Application Support, however I found that the best source of recovery data in this case was my iNewton.
3. mySQL. This was lame on my part. Navicat supports back ups, and while i did make back ups of two DBs, the rest I had not. Nothing mission critical, mainly PITA stuff that now I gotta figure out how to get from MS SQL into mySQL. great fun.

All in all three minor inconveniences, not so bad. I'm going to have to wait to play with Time Machine :( since I don't have a drive of sufficient size. It's kinda lame, that I can't make use of NAS drives, since I've got half a terabyte in the basement. Thankfully drive space is so cheap I picked up a 250GB WD external for under $100, so when it arrives Time Machine can do it's thing.

I can't wait for my other mac friends to get Leopard installed, so I can try out the latest iChat. Looks very promising.

Tom and I might get a lot more work done if we can see what each other is talking about. Of course that would mean he'd have to carry his Mac... I can dream

So far I've only had one app not work, and I knew going in that it didn't support Leopard yet. CandyBar promises a Leopard version soon, can't wait.

Hopefully MySQL will address a few minor issues with Leopard as well, so that I can start/stop it like I used to via the preference pane, vs leave it running 24/7 like I will be doing.

The "stacks" thing is ok. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. I used to have 4 "Dock Folders" that I used to house common apps that didn't need their own exclusive dock space, now those folders are stacks. kinda weird, might take some getting used to.

All in all, minor problems aside, Leopard is quite nice. Some one said, and I agree It's Evolutionary, not Revolutionary. Very fitting.