Now that I’ve been using Leopard (aka Mac OS X 10.5) for almost a year, I felt compelled to weigh in on its value. The most current version, at this writing, is version 10.5.4 and it’s been a trouble-free computing experience. I am very happy with Leopard, but the fact remains that I do not use several of its touted features.
Let’s take a look at some of the major features I enjoy about Leopard:
1) Spaces – now that the bugs have been more or less squashed, I am very happy with the built-in virtual desktop option.
2) Quick Look – worth its weight in gold for me. The convenience of quickly checking the contents of a file without having to open the application first almost completely justifies the Leopard upgrade.
3) Time Machine – extremely useful and has already saved me a total of 20 man hours. Being able to retrieve a file I accidentally deleted a few weeks or months earlier, is a boon. This feature has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.
Now let’s look at features within Leopard I never use.
1) FrontRow – on a desktop Mac, without a remote control, FrontRow is nothing more than beautiful eye candy. With a remote, there’s some potential.
2) Dashboard – I can’t remember the last time I installed a widget. I never use Dashboard. I would use widgets more often if they could be shared on the desktop. (I’m aware of Amnesty – but I want the solution built-in.)
3) iChat – I have never been able to use the video conferencing capabilities of iChat within Leopard. My parents are on a Leopard system as well, and we’ve never been able to get iChat to work with video or audio. We have routers on both ends, and I’m sure its something related to port-forwarding – but the fact that Skype has no such issues when it comes to video chatting while iChat does – makes iChat nothing more than a wasted application, IMHO.
What about you? If you’re running Leopard – what are your favorite features? What, in your opinion, are its most useless features? Sound off in the comments below.
-Krishna
I’m running Leopard on a G4 Cube… I love Quick Look and use the iStat Dashboard widget to check the temp of my video card. Time Machine is great and I use the Desktop Sharing to manage my kids computers (and occasionally see what they are up to in the basement). The Parental Controls work great for the kids and the faster Mail app and Safari (I came from 10.3) make the upgrade worthwhile – even for older unsupported Macs. Preview and TextEdit are also more powerful and useful (compared to 10.3).
I like iStat too – however, I use the menulet version instead of the Dashboard version. All in all, I think Leopard’s a good OS – it has many features that will no doubt find use in everyone’s day-to-day computing.