Ongoing Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Notes

There is a lot of great information out there about the Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") release already. I installed it last weekend and have continued to take a few notes during the install and now that I've been using it for a couple of days. You may find something useful or new here.

I did a full clone backup with Super Duper first, letting it run overnight.
I did an "upgrade" install. It took an hour or two to run. One reboot and it was done. No problems upgrading.
The iCal icon now displays the actual date, even if iCal is not running.
The iCal month overview looks like the iPhone's.
The Terminal app now has tabbed sessions, and a much better color/font theme setup. Very nice. However, there is something weird going on that sometimes causes the text to be colored incorrectly, rendering it invisible (if I drag the mouse back and forth over it to select it, it becomes faintly visible).
The Mail.app junk filter learning seems to have been reset.
The "fan" mode of Stacks is problematic when fan trails off right edge of screen.
You can drag an item in the "fan" directly to the trash.
Custom folder icons in dock do not appear. In fact, the way folders in the dock are displayed seems like a big step backwards. They are difficult to distinguish. Although you can get the icon to display by creating an alias and putting it in the dock, it will still lack the right-click navigation feature that was in 10.4.
The Console app has blue/white alternating rows. However, these do not appear when displaying my log files. I'm not yet sure why that is.
Code folding with grayscale gradations in XCode. This looks like it could be a nice navigational tool when trying to understand ugly code with too many levels of curly braces, or just when trying to clarify indentation.
Safari-style "find" bubbles in XCode makes locating the found text easier.
The in-line error and warning bubbles in XCode are nice. They make it even easier to see what is wrong where.
All normal XCode projects worked fine as-is. The one exception was an application that I'd been building with Qt 4.2.2 binary libraries. I'd been putting off updating to the Qt 4.3.2 source. That solved it, although when building Qt I had to disable the mysql plugin module, which caused a "wrong archicture" error during "make" phase. But I don't use mysql from Qt, so I didn't have to figure out the root cause.

% ./configure -universal -debug-and-release -sql-no-mysql
% make
% make install

Quick Look is fantastic for browsing files' contents in the Finder. This is not the gimmick I thought it would be.
Non-factory-installed applications that worked fine as-is:
  • NetNewsWire 3.0/1130
  • IntelliJ IDEA 6.0.5 (6.0.6 was released quite a while ago, as was the major new 7.0 which we've not yet upgraded to)
  • Transmit 3.6.1 (3.6.2 is available now nonetheless)
  • svnX 0.9.12
  • Cisco VPN Client 4.9.01 (0030) didn't even require a re-install as it did for me with 10.4.
  • Final Cut Express HD 3.5.1
  • Contour Shuttle 2.1 (USB input device controller)
  • Garmin Training Center 2.0.2 (well, it behaves no worse than before :) )
Non-factory-installed applications that had issues:
  • Word 2004 11.3.8 crashed attempting to print. (2x) After that it seems OK.
  • Parallels... tbd. Got a timeout, but I was doing other stuff at the same time.
  • Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1 crashes every time. Well, this is a 2002 "vintage" application, running under PPC Rosetta translation anyway; and Adobe has indicated that Photoshop CS2 and earlier (e.g., 7.0) won't work on Leopard. This is a $200 upgrade, fair enough for a heavily-used five-year-old product.
Lost my old printer assignment, had to set it up again. Easy if you know the IP address!
Spotlight is now usable as a quick app launcher.
Spaces won't let me add IntelliJ IDEA to a space as an Application Assignment.
Things generally seem snappy to me.
Stacks seems like it will work well for the typical user's "downloads" folder, as an easy way to find the most recent downloads. But as the new model for keeping folders with lots of stuff in the dock, it doesn't add much. In Tiger I would usually just click the folder to open it. Now I will just command-click to open it without doing the Stack presentation.
Album Art screen saver is nice; but it has an odd red color cast to it.
There are new (to me at least) iTunes visualizers. "Lathe" looks very nice. Did you know that the "f" key toggles a framerate display, and the "i" key displays the track information for the built-in visualizers?
After all this time, Mail.app finally responds to Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End keys in the message list.