loonyblog.

Apple released OS X 10.5 (Leopard) last Friday, and as with any Apple upgrade, I sucked it up and upgraded, even though I don’t particularly care about any of the new features.

Here’s how things went down. I got home from work and figured I’d start the upgrade process and head off to temple with Heather, safe in the knowledge that it would be done by the time I got back. It didn’t quite work out that way.

I’m not sure what happened, exactly. I ran the installer and it started upgrading when it suddenly decided that it couldn’t install on my MacBook Pro’s internal drive. Upon restarting I was amazed to discover that it had somehow managed to do something horrible to my hard drive…bad enough that Apple’s disk utility (also known as fsck) couldn’t repair it. So I went off to temple knowing full well that my system was horribly fscked up, so to speak.

After appeasing my god for another week, I returned and got to work un-fscking my machine. Unfortunately this required booting in target mode off my Mac mini and running DiskWarrior 4. DiskWarrior is an indispensable tool, and I can’t recommend it highly enough, but it also happens to be extremely expensive ($100), and I wasn’t in any position to negotiate.

To make a long and not terribly interesting story short, I repaired the disk, rebooted to make sure everything was back to normal (it was, it booted into 10.4 and everything), and began the instal process again. This time around I did the good ol’ Archive and Install method, which worked fine, although it took a long time to complete.

So after all of that, I was successfully booted into Leopard. And you know what? I don’t like it. My first impression can be best summed up by saying WTF DID YOU DO TO MY DOCK APPLE? Seriously, WTF is this? They turned the dock into a 3D reflective surface for no particularly good reason. Instead of the functional arrows they used to have to indicate a running program, instead we now have little LED-like dots. And don’t even start with the silly looking road stripe separating the folders/trashcan from the rest of the dock. The dock returns to normal if you put it on the side, so hopefully it’s only a matter of time before someone manages to hack that into a bottom dock.

Once I got past that, I noticed that my menu bar was suddenly this awful, awful purplish-gray color. Who came up with that? It’s a terrible eyesore. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a way to get it to go back to being just black and white.

Some other gripes are that all my beloved haxies are currently broken, which makes generally using my Mac a less comfortable experience and I want my large icons back on my sidebar in finder. But what about the new stuff? There’s not much here I really care about. I turned on Time Machine for no particular reason (I already do full daily backups), stacks is a terrible feature in its current implementation (frankly the old system worked better), webclips are for the dashboard I already don’t use, and spaces is a feature I recognize as being awesome but not for me. And cover flow in the finder is a silly feature that I can’t imagine any practical use for.

It’s not all bad. I love the new features in Front Row, which I’ll actually use, since when I travel I’m all about Front Row. Some apps definitely seem to be faster, particularly spotlight. Quick look is kind of cool, although I doubt I’ll really use it more than once in a blue moon. But I’m surprised at how many features are just unnecessary cosmetic changes that can’t be changed back.

Ah well. I’ll get used to it eventually. That’s the thing about Apple OS releases. You might not want it, and you might not need it, but if you’re gonna use the system and keep your apps current, you really have to upgrade, so suck it up and take your medicine. By contrast, I haven’t upgraded my Windows machine to Vista yet, and have no plans to do so for the foreseeable future. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but there you go.