#FF00AA

Installing Leopard on my iMac G5 was quite scary: the install remained stuck for more than an hour on “Time remaining: Calculating,” starting with an indeterminate progress bar followed by a stationary 0%. I hesitated to quit and start over as an Archive & Install, but the progress bar finally started moving.

Mail’s upgrade screwed up: three crashes while importing the old accounts, then an immediate crash every time I tried to launch the app. Removing non-essential files from the ~/Library/Mail folder (ie., everything but the mbox folders) solved my problem. I wouldn’t quite call it stable, though: even though all my plug-ins have been removed as advertised, pressing ctrl-< (which was my Mail Act-On shortcut) just crashes Mail instead of beeping to signal an unrecognized shortcut. I haven’t tried to compare with other key combinations because I get shivers down my spine every time my mail client crashes. (Yes, I do have backups — if I didn’t, I would probably have lost all my mail due to the botched upgrade.)

The new Finder’s idiosyncracies are going to annoy me even more than I thought. I spent two hours Cmd-J’ing every single folder in my WWW tree (and that’s a lot), but I’m still bitten by Cover Flow not remembering how much of the window I want it to take, or the Path Bar showing up in folder windows even though it makes more sense to only display it in the browser windows. Still, there’s good stuff with this new Finder, and I’m pleasantly surprised that icon previews weren’t too slow to generate on my iMac, even for big folders filled with pictures. And, as much as I was excited to get Cover Flow on my file manager, icon view with 128-pixel previews and a very tight grid is probably more productive in the end.

The Volume Logic dynamic compression plugin for iTunes doesn’t work anymore, which is all the more frustrating as its development has just been discontinued. I’m happy I never got around to buying it (because the 30-day demo never stopped functioning, heh, their loss), but very, very annoyed at having to listen to uncompressed podcasts again. Jesus fucking Christ, you goddamn incompetent morons, USE THE FUCKING LEVELATOR, IT’S FUCKING FREE, FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

There would be a link in the previous sentence, but you’ll have to use Google because Teleport (which lets me control the iMac with the MacBook’s keyboard, until I sell the latter) doesn’t work quite right with Leopard: for some reason, everything works except the Command key — actually, it does work in some cases (such as Cmd-arrows), but does not for most keyboard shortcuts. The developer is aware, so I hope it’ll be fixed soon, because that’s getting on my nerves rather fast.

I’m not sure I’ll really get around to use Spaces; I’d like to be able to assign windows to spaces based on title rather than just application (because I only use Transmit in one context, but Safari for everything; I just might end up using different browsers for different tasks) — but, really, I guess what’s standing between me and Spaces is the lack of an unused button on my mouse. Wait, adding Shift to my Exposé button would make sense; I’ve got to try that. Except, not Shift; that one slows down animations. But why can’t I just move my mouse pointer to the side of the screen (while pressing a modifier key) to move to another space?

All in all, now that the dust has settled down, that upgrade is actually even more uneventful than I expected — even if I had an external hard drive I could dedicate to Time Machine (yes, I plan to, but it’s not exactly a priority), there would still be nothing that would really change my daily workflow and interactions with my Macs. If I hadn’t been using UNO on Tiger, at least the new UnifiedForReals window theme would be a relief; as it stands, the most prominent change for me is the ugly, over-saturated window lights.

Maybe Apple should have manufactured some software incompatibilities so that the Leopard upgrade really felt like something was happening — it doesn’t feel right that all my peripheral drivers work perfectly well after an upgrade that isn’t much less important than XP-to-Vista. I know the system is actually a big step forward, and the new or updated third-party applications that will come out in the next few months will make every Tiger user jealous, but right now it feels a little like I’m coming down off a cocaine high.