Leopard developer preview

Installed the developer preview of leopard onto an external drive yesterday.

Bullet points shall convey my thoughts…

• It feels faster than tiger, which is surprising because my iMac is a 32bit core duo and leopard is stuffed full of 64bit stuff.  It might feel faster because I hadn’t had a chance to stuff the drive full of crap.  But still, peeps with 32bit mac’s need not worry about a speed hit.
•  I was underwhelmed by the features.  I’m hoping i’ll be pleasantly surprised by hidden nuggets, but right now i’m not holding my breath.
• Finder is hugely disappointing.  Quickview is good, but despite the iTunes-esq appearance the rest of finder still just feels like finder.  It just isn’t a shell you expect in 2007.  There’s no paradigm shift.  No breadcrumb bar.  No tagging.  No editable extended attributes support.
• Yeah quickview is pretty nifty, it opens files incredibly quickly, even things like spreadsheets open in a flash, and I was impressed that it showed tabs for the different sheets in an excel spreadsheet I tried.
• Spaces is going to come in useful for those times that I leave an app on my TV and don’t fancy turning it back on just to drag it back to the main desktop.
• Time machine is so so easy to set up and it works well.  However, I choose a network location.  Then went back to leopard today and tried Time machine and it complained that it hasn’t been set up.  Reason was that I hadn’t yet in that session visited/mounted the network location.  So you still need to be careful of that, and create automounts for network locations.  Which I might add finder still offers up no help for.
• So yeah, I get the feeling network support ain’t going to be any better in leopard.
• The new dock looks nice and flashy at first, but it didn’t take long for my eyes to grow tired of it, it looks a tad cluttered.
• Still no way to turn off display outputs at will.
• Apple seem to be moving away from having pop-out sidebars for setting attributes.  Such as in iCal.  Now when you create a new event you double click it and a nice looking floating palette emanates from the event.
• The menu bar doesn’t look any better in real life than it does in the screenshots.  Even worse, when you click an item the drop down menu is more opaque than the menu bar and looks completely out of place.
• And that’s all the weather.