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My copy of OS X 10.5, known as Leopard, arrived yesterday. (I do wish Apple would drop the cat-nickname thing; I’m starting to lose track of which is which.) I haven’t yet summoned the enthusiasm to install it; I decided that doing so qualifies as work so I’ll postpone it ’til a weekday. New versions of OS X have always been a mixed blessing. While they contain nifty new stuff and some number of fixes to broken old stuff, they always contain broken stuff (new and old) as well. I’ll be interested to see the refinements to the Dock; the Dock has always struck me as uncharacteristically badly designed, so I’m glad to hear that they put some work into it this time. I was looking forward to the automatic backup mechanism. All of the PCs in the house back themselves up automatically every day, and I’d really like to have a similar utility on the Mac. Unfortunately Apple may have botched their attempt; Chris tells me that it requires specific things of the hard drive and it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to use one of the numerous generic USB hard drives I have lying around. The screen sharing thing would be useful if it were cross-platform, but apparently it’s not. Too bad they didn’t follow Microsoft’s lead of several years ago with Remote Desktop, which is built in to Windows XP and there’s a Mac client available for free. The Spaces thing might be useful, although at first glance it appears to be very much the same as any other “virtual desktop” mechanism that has been available on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and even MacOS 9 for years. The enhancements to Mail are features that every Outlook user got used to years ago also. I don’t use my Mac for email so I won’t even see ‘em. So, at least going by the bullet items, this upgrade really isn’t worth $129 to me.

We do know that Apple again broke something quite essential to my daily activities. We discovered this after Chris updated his iMac. There’s something about iChat in Leopard that prevents it from communicating correctly with other AIM clients. File transfers don’t work at all. This disrupted Audio Damage activities for most of an afternoon while we figured out what was going on and Chris found another client. (He ended up using Adium, I think.)