Leopard

No I don't have Leopard (the next rev of Mac OS X) yet. I want to upgrade my powerbook and I'm waiting to see if a new MacBook Pro will come out soon. Also it's probably good to wait for 10.5.1. While they sold 2 million copies in the first weekend (and I'm not sure I really believe that) they also had reports of people getting blue screens (!) during upgrade. It turns out that most of those (if not all) were due to people running an extension library from Unsanity called APE that used private APIs. I usually avoid things with names like "haxies".

As usual the Ars Technica review of Leopard is extensive. The big new user feature is Time Machine which will make backups easy. I currently use SilverKeeper to make a complete (bootable) mirror disk on an external drive. I try to connect and run this weekly but sometimes its as long as a month. I was looking forward to using Time Machine with a drive connected to an AirPort Extreme, but this isn't supported.

Leopard has a lot of smaller features that sound interesting and in aggregate I'm sure make for a very nice experience. But it's also something I can wait a little bit for. I'm interested in the Spotlight improvements allowing boolean searches and some of the new Finder improvements (particularly coverflow and quicklook). I'm also interested in the new system-wide To Do service and some of the iChat features.

The development tools and libraries also improved a lot so I expect lots of 3rd party apps to make use of them and do really interesting things. There are also a bunch of security improvements but reports are that they need some work. You're still safer on a mac than you are on a Windows machine, but things should be better in an update release. Oh and doesn't anyone care about the Firewall in the computer? I use the one in my wifi router and don't run them on my computer.