I couldn’t help but notice that close to 70% of developers who attended foss.in had Macs with them. And half of them had even upgraded to Leopard, giving me a few glimpses of what Apple’s new operating system looked like.

I decided to upgrade to Leopard too, and got myself a copy from the iStore on M.G. Road. It cost me Rs. 6,200 which is (suprisingly?) a little more than the dollar-converted rate. Anyway, I decided to do a clean install after backing up all my data - it was the perfect chance to remove all the cruft in the system.

The installation went smoothly and the traditional multi-lingual ‘Welcome’ was simply stunning. Now I began installing the applications one by one:

  • QuickSilver: The first app that anyone would need. It worked with all the standard plug-ins on Leopard without any glitches. I did notice, however, that it wouldn’t launch any applications that you just installed (specifically, those that you downloaded; yes, Leopard keeps track of that!). You have to manually launch the application once (you get a dialog asking you whether you really want to) before it appears in QuickSilver’s catalog. Mildly irritating, but it’s a one-time thing for every app.

  • Macports: I compiled this one, also worked out-of-the-box without any problems. All the ports I used so far work fine, although I will expect some of them to fail (which isn’t a macports, but rather an upstream problem).

  • Adium/Colloquy: Clean install, no trouble. Imported old logs just fine.

  • iScrobbler: Version 1.5.2 wouldn’t post to last.fm for some reason, version 2.0beta works great (and has a bunch of new features).

  • VMWare Fusion: Works great, but it looks like you’d need some small tweaks to get the tools for Linux to work fine. I’m going to give Fusion a try for sometime to see how it measures up to Parallels (which is what I was using earlier).

  • Poisoned: This one doesn’t work on Leopard. It starts up fine, and gIFT appears to start but none of the networks connect. After searching the forums for a bit, I settled for FrostWire which works fine.

Let’s take a look at all the new features that caught my eye:

  • Tabbed Terminal.app! There’s no need to use iTerm now. I did, however, have to spend a couple of hours in trying to get the key combinations to work in a sane manner. This post proved to be very helpful, DoubleCommand didn’t.

  • Uniform interface. Finally. I was getting sick of the varied brushed-metal/grey/what-not styled interfaces. Leopard finally has a smooth grey across all applications. No need for UNO anymore.

  • Spaces. Eliminates the need for VirtueDesktops (Notice the pattern here?). Really nifty if you run a Fusion virtual machine in full-screen on every space and assign sane keyboard shortcuts to switch.

  • Stacks: Snazzy looking way of representing Downloads and Documents. You can add your own folders to ‘stack’. I like the new Downloads directory, I used to create one in Tiger anyway

  • dtrace. The all-encompassing debugger from OpenSolaris made easy. I haven’t used it for anything useful yet but I like what I see.

  • Mail 3.0. Slicker interface, and I really love the Mail Activity area which tells me exactly what Mail is upto - Mail 2.0 always left you wondering!

I haven’t had a chance to look at Quick Look yet, but that should be another thing to look forward to. All-in-all a good experience so far, but was it worth the 6 grand? I’ll wait and see.