Leopard: What you need to know The features A popular new feature called Time Machine automatically backs up your system, and lets you scroll through a visual representation of your system to certain points in time so that you can restore files from those backups. It is a pretty neat feature and is activated by simply plugging in a firewire drive. A feature called Spaces lets you organize and switch between multiple desktops much like the old Unix systems of the past used to do. With Spaces, you can keep clean desktop and then switch into working desktops for different projects. Almost all files in Leopard can be previewed quickly without opening them, and users can easily scroll through stacks of documents and see this on-the-fly preview. Leopard also cans automatically auto-activate
fonts as needed. The 300 new features are a lot, and there are many
other great ones — like Photobooth being able to take movies and
e-mail them, Text edit being able to open Word 2007 The problems As the November release approached, rumors were that Adobe still had not extensively tested the Creative Suite applications with Leopard. (Publicly, Adobe has announced that they would provide no Leopard support for Creative Suite 1 & 2 applications and would expect issues in these applications that would have no resolution. Regarding Creative Suite 3, Adobe stated that it would test and release any needed fixes for Creative Suite 3 applications as soon as possible.) Upon release, it became clear immediately that there were some issues with Creative Suite 3 applications. At this writing, Adobe is working a fix for important issues with the Acrobat portion of Creative Suite 3. Quark 6.x is not supported, but Quark 7.x will be supported. For new installs there appear to be less problems than for users performing upgrades. In fact, it is recommended that you reformat the drive and start over with a new user. With that being said, many of us would prefer to just upgrade our Panther and Tiger versions so that we don’t have to reinstall and reactivate all the applications we have, and reset all of our preferences. For many users who upgrade Leopard, it ‘sort of works’ but there have been major issues. I ran into many of these issues when I upgraded my laptop. Some of these issues tend to be changes related to major changes in the operating system, and some just appear to be tweaky issues. One of the first of these issues you may notice may be that all or most of your printers have vanished from your printer list. In Leopard, Apple has performed major changes to the print engine, and because of this, many of the prior print drivers no longer function. Whether there is an updated print driver available depends purely on what type of printer you have. For example, there was no updated driver available for one customer who was using an older laser printer. There was no driver update available for my Epson K3 printer, but it was scheduled to be released shortly (prior to publication of this article). In any case, be prepared to rebuild all of your printers when you upgrade. The next major issue reported has to do with permissions. This can be as simple as not being allowed to open a file, run an application, or even install an application even though you are logged on as an administrative user and should have permission to do anything you need. In my case, I was unable to load software, and run some common applications that I use frequently such as Preview. This is particularly an issue with upgraded users. The solution on my system was to create a new user and painfully move all my settings and serial numbers over to the new user. Another commonly reported issue is the inability to log onto Windows servers from Leopard. The servers no longer consistently show up when you browse the network, and many users report being able to login only by entering IP addresses (rather than browsing or UNC codes). While logging in by IP address solves the problem for some users, some cannot connect to Windows systems at all. In my case, Leopard began to run consistently once I rebuilt my printers, created a new user, and moved all my application settings and serial numbers over to the new user. Time down was about eight hours — and my machine is used mostly for email, Acrobat stuff, and other low volume activities. Bootcamp Strategy for upgrades Leopard is here, and eventually you’ll have to upgrade to it — especially if you use features like Bootcamp. It is not a necessary or easy upgrade, so for most of us, holding off on it makes the most sense. |
