People! Settle down now! It’s no big deal…

Not since the release of the iPhone has so much noise been made about Apple. I am talking about Leopard, of course. It’s out now and you can get it from just about anywhere. Over 2 years ago, I wrote a great big review of Tiger. I’m not gonna do that for this release. Why not? Because it’s being covered to death by a lot of professional software reviewers and honestly, I have very little to add.

Far and away the best review I’ve read (and really the only major one worth noting) is John Siracusa’s from Ars Technica. He goes into quite a bit of detail and manages to shine light on many of the more technical underpinnings of this release. He also spends a fair bit of time ripping apart some of the UI elements.

well, I don’t find the look all that bad, to be honest. Much has been made of the translucent menu bar and the slanty, 3D dock. Y’know what? I kinda like ‘em! I also like the translucent menus with the rounded edges! The new, subtler shadow on the windows? I like them too. I even kind of like the darker look on the new folder icons, though I will concede that there are some contrast issues with the icons on them.

So far I’ve installed Leopard on 2/3 of my machines without any serious hitches. It did crash once during an upgrade install on my Dual G5 PowerMac, but after the panic wore off and I recuperated, I resumed the install after a reboot and it went through without a hitch. Performance is decent on both that and my MacBook Pro. I would even go as far to say as it’s “Snappy”.

Application compatibility is decent with some issues with Adobe apps. Bridge and Photoshop work though and for now, that’s enough for me. I haven’t had a chance to run any music apps other than Reason on them, but I expect Logic Pro will work just fine (and will probably upgrade to 8 soon anyway). I would say so far that compatibility is better than it was in Tiger initially. At least it seems to be. I’ll post findings as they come up.