In his 4.5-star (out of 5) review of Leopard, Edward Mendelson (pcmag.com) maintains that Leopard is “by far the best operating system ever written for the vast majority of consumers, with dozens of new features that have real practical value.” Mendelson “found Leopard to be startlingly fast, brilliantly streamlined, and packed with conveniences an
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Those of us who ran out to buy the newest version of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard this weekend had a choice: piggyback the upgrade on top of your current installation of Tiger and keep all your data and applications, or wipe the hard drive and start sparkly clean and fresh (but without any apps or data). As a Windows user, I tend towards a clean install, but Mac commentator John Gruber says:
Arguments that there is something mysteriously dangerous or deficient about the default upgrade procedure—and that you should do a clean install instead, followed by tedious hours manually migrating software and data and preferences from your old installation—are voodoo.
Adam just jumped right in and did the default upgrade, but I hit that Options button to head down the erase and install route. What about you?
If you are planning to do a clean install, make sure you mirror your Mac’s boot disk on an external drive. If you’ve got a Boot Camp partition and you’re really anal, run that sucker through Winclone first. Before you install Leopard, disconnect all your external drives.
It’s also a help to jot a quick inventory of your most important applications, and make sure you back up their preferences (like your TextExpander snippets) or Firefox profile. To be super safe, download all the apps you’ll need to reinstall before you wipe your hard drive, and make sure you’ve got all the discs you need to reinstall the non-downloads, like Microsoft Office or Photoshop. Much to my chagrin, after my clean Leopard installation, the Quicksilver download site was MIA, and lack of Quicksilver seriously cramps my style. Like Gruber, I also believe in Murphy’s Law. With good reason.
How did your Leopard installation go? Let us know in the comments.
(Via Lifehacker.)
Mac OS X only: So you erased your hard drive to install Leopard, and now you’ve got to load your Mac up with all your essential software. I kept a detailed inventory of the downloads I hunted down all over the internet to load on my Mac this weekend, so I thought I’d save you a few clicks. Here’s a list of 20 (mostly) free apps with direct links to their download pages.
All downloads are free except when otherwise noted. In alphabetical order:
Adium (download) (more info)
iSquint (download) (more info)
MagiCal (download) (more info)
TextWrangler (download) (more info)
The Unarchiver (download) (more info)
Note: The excellent SuperDuper! isn’t yet fully Leopard-compatible, or else we would’ve included it here—and it’s boot cloning capability is still very useful, even with Time Machine. We haven’t yet tested Carbon Copy Cloner on Leopard.
For more great Mac downloads, see our Top 10 free Mac downloads and Top 10 Mac utilities. (Note: a few of the apps in these lists are now obsolete due to new Leopard features, but most are still useful.)
Other more expensive, specialized licensed downloads and box software I installed included Parallels Desktop, Quicken, DEVONthink Pro, Photoshop CS and Microsoft Office.
(Via Lifehacker.)
dailyApps shows you how to install Apple’s new Mac OS X (Leopard) on a PC…
Well its been only a day since the Mac OSX Leopard was released officially by Apple and the hackers have managed to create a patched DVD that everyone like you and me can use to install Leopard on PC’s without having to buy a Mac. Please note the tutorial that I am going to post is still experimental and things might not work the right way simply because it is still early days in hacking Leopard to work on PC’s. Well if you don’t mind your PC getting screwed then go ahead and try out this tutorial.
HOW TO - Install Leopard on your PC in 3 easy steps - Link.
(Via MAKE Magazine.)
If you want a blowout, a blowout is what you’ll get. Just as we did for Microsoft’s Vista, we’re serving up an unboxing of Apple’s latest operating system hours before it’s slated to go on sale. Thanks to the wonders of on-time early delivery, a certain individual managed to unbox his copy of Leopard already, and he’s got the pictures to prove it. Click on to the read link to see what’s waiting for you later today, but don’t expect anything out of the ordinary, okay?
(Via Engadget.)
You’ve seen the glossy Apple OS X Leopard videos and feature lists, but installing the real thing on your own machine is never goes without a few surprises. This is live and totally unfiltered—which means you’re going to be seeing everything we’re seeing as we play with this OS. Here’s our first hour with Leopard..
Tin Man is a miniseries coming to the SciFi channel in December. It is a complete re-imagining of the world of The Wizard of Oz. A dystopian urban fantasy world. Be sure to also check out “The Infinite OZ” at the link; it’s a very impressive flash presentation. This could possibly be one of the best films/miniseries to come to TV this year.
Ian Scott
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