Last Friday I got the latest version of Apple’s operating system product: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Luckily, I got it without having to make the lines up that were in some Apple Stores, and with a price discount of 10% thanks to having previously reserved it in my nearest Fnac store.

First thing you realize when you get it is the packing. As usual in Apple’s products, the box is impressive, especially the 3D hologram printed on it. The box, about the size of a double disc CD, contains a single installation DVD, a “Welcome to Leopard” booklet and two apple stickers.

Mac OS X Leopard

As I don’t have any backup unit, I decided to upgrade my Tiger instance, rather than erasing Tiger and installing Leopard from scratch. The upgrade process was very easy, although it took me longer than expected, about an hour and a half, but it completed without any problems (I hear that some people are reporting problems). In the first hours I noticed more spinning pinwheels than usual, but now everything in general is running much faster than it did on Tiger, something that worried me at first. Most of the applications I use work fine with this new version, or in most cases, simply updating the version is enough, except for OnyX, which doesn’t run on Leopard.

I won’t list all the new features, you could find them at the Apple website, but I want to mention some of them:

  • Cover Flow: presents files as horizontally scrolling images of their contents. There is a pretty funny easter egg when you try to display a Windows network computer: it shows a BSOD.

    BSOD

  • Spaces: multiple workspaces, each of which can contain particular applications or file windows.

    Mac OSX Leopard Spaces

  • Stacks: lets you view the contents of a folder rapidly from the Dock.

    Mac OSX Leopard Stacks

  • Time Machine: an automatic backup system that allows you to easily go back in time to recover anything. Unfortunately, I don’t have an external drive, so I’m not able to test it.

And that’s all for the moment. I’m sure there will be more exciting features that I will discover in the future. If you find some features useful, don’t hesitate to comment them in this blog.