Leopard at first sight

Tomorrow. Available Today.

The Leopard – Mac OS X 10.5 major release we all have been waiting for is finally released and I was happy to receive the Leopard + iLife’08 family pack from UPS 4 hours before the official 6pm launch.

So how is it? Generally – I really like it. I like the new features, the new look, the overall improved performance – especially Mail.app updates as most probably I won’t have to use MailTags. But most probably I will start really liking Leopard only once these functions will become stable and some will actually start working.

And this is exactly what this post is about – things we were (and still are) expecting from Leopard, that don’t work or just don’t work right.

First of, I would not expect to see that kind of view while editing Apple’s original mail rules in Mail.app:

Could you please save them for me with the [OK] button? Thanks!

OK, this is some really minor thing (my screenshots are no better), there were few more interesting ones. For example:

• iMovie HD that came with iLife’08, just did not work out of the box on Leopard – it just crashed before even loading
• iPhoto is still crashing while mangling photos or trying to create some more advanced album
• iPhoto effects and adjustments are way too slow comparing to the previous iLife
• iDVD, GarageBand and iWeb are so far the most stable ones, but most probably this is only because we did not attempt to load them.

Right, after iLife updates were installed, it became slightly more stable and iMove started working, but I was really expecting it to work really good out of the box on Leopard.

A2DP support. It sort of works, but really – “sort of”. I mean – on my first attempt to use iTunes playback directly to my stereo headphones, I started hearing something. Something really mono, but still – something. Unfortunately after few seconds playing with the headphones, computer became totally unresponsive and I had to restart it the hard way. I don’t know if Mic works – while testing it with skype, Mac also got into “bad situation”, so I did not want to “try” A2DP anymore.

Time machine over AirPort. Some time ago there were plans to make it work, but so far, it just does not. Hopefully, it will be fixed soon.

Command+Tab for X11.app and Firefox. This is a really bad one – switching between some applications, particularly Firefox And X11.app, that I use for my Konsole with Command+Tab just don’t work. OK, for Firefox it happens occasionally, but for X11.app – that’s permanent. This is not good.

Mail.app plugins. It was rather unexpected too, but none of the Mail.app plugins I have used, not even Mail Act-On that I like so much, work anymore. But I don’t blame Apple for that, although it should’ve warned me about that before installing Leopard (maybe it was somewhere in the license agreement? ).

SMS over Address Book. “Apple have removed all the Bluetooth SMS & Calls functions from Leopard’s Address Book v4.1..”. Too bad, I really liked the feature.

There’s a number of other minor bugs and missing features and I really hope them to be fixed soon. Actually, to keep track of all them, I’m submitting them right to apple via Apple Bug Reporter. Well, at least I was, before I got this:

What Leopard bugs or missing features are you suffering from?