Speaking of getting ready to switch to Leopard: I’m this close to upgrading my MacBook, even though it’s a beta and it shouldn’t be trusted and I don’t even know if it’ll expire at some point — I wouldn’t install it on my production iMac yet (tempting as it may be), but I can afford to lose all the data on my laptop and reformat the drive if something goes wrong.

Random list of what I like in 10.5: The new Dock. Spaces (although I have no use for them on a MacBook with 512MB of RAM). Cover Flow. Network machines listed in the sidebar, with transparent connection to their individual share points (I did read the description, but had no idea how cool it was until I used it). The UNO look without the bugs (with UNO, windows without toolbars lack the one-pixel black border below the titlebar). Pressing Space for Quick Look. Automatic icon previews. Multi-threaded Finder (I crashed a big Copy operation by setting the computer to sleep; the progress window was stuck, but I could still use the other Finder windows! Fancy that!). Placing important RSS feeds in my inbox. An activity pane right in the Mail.app window instead of the old palette. Safari 3 (didn’t check to see if the old bug with HTML in textareas had been fixed, though — I don’t type posts on my MacBook) and the way inline search results pop up. Themed, tabbed, semi-transparent Terminal windows. Interactive size display on Shift-Cmd-4 screen captures (so very convenient to get 450-pixel images right away instead of resizing them for this blog). Alex’s voice. Help Viewer no longer being a separate application (although I wish it were a regular window rather than a palette), and searchable help and menus.

Random list of what I dislike: The semi-transparent menubar (and its square corners). The new titlebar stoplights (I hoped they were temporary, but according to the latest screenshots they haven’t been fixed in the following build). Finder windows not remembering view modes. And… and… well, that’s all I can think of so far. Yeah, I really can’t wait to have the final version to install on my other Macs.