So yay. I’ve picked up a copy of Mac OS X Leopard from the UGA bookstore and installed on my PowerBook tonight.

Observations so far:

• Archive and Install worked much better than I expected. All my stuff, even all the applications I’ve installed, is still there; the only thing that was really affected was what I’ve compiled into the Unix directories (/usr/bin, etc.).
• Surprisingly, despite what Apple says, Photo Booth will run on a G4 with an external camera. The frame rate is atrocious, but it runs.
• Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator CS2 all launch, though I’ve encountered a few random unexpected crashes after launching. Not sure if this is because of incompatibility, preferences getting zapped during the Leopard install, or both; I’ll have to investigate later.
• Spaces. Seriously, why hasn’t OS X had virtual desktops until now? VirtueDesktops was OK, but felt a bit kludgy; this seems to work far more… Apple-like. I particularly like how you can manipulate windows on the ‘overhead’ view and drag them among desktops.
• Safari 3.0 final seems to load much quicker than the beta version. And it doesn’t take ages to display my bookmarks menu (one of the other big annoyances I had with the beta).
  • On that note, a Java chat that I sometimes visit seems to run more snappily as well. Not sure if that’s because of Safari, Java, or a combination of both.
• How am I only now getting to checking e-mail? Oh, wow, you can sync notes and To Do lists with an IMAP server. This could be very useful for a scatterbrain like me.

I’ll probably be posting more here as I discover more about Leopard. I still haven’t installed Xcode yet; right now, I’m trying to move the archived Tiger install to an external drive before I even think of installing anything else, but it’s going very slowly (and with good reason, since it’s 10 gigs or so).

I also need to clear up enough space on my external drive to try out Time Machine… automatic backups, whee! Yet another thing that will be incredibly useful in the long run once I’ve got it set up…

Edited to add: Ooh, it’s always the little things that really make a difference. Y’know how on the newer Mac laptops you can right-click by holding down two fingers on the trackpad? That wasn’t possible on PowerBooks and iBooks in Tiger…but it is in Leopard.