I brought a new kitty-cat home yesterday and I don’t mean the fuzzy variety. I purchased my very own copy of Leopard from my local Apple Store!

I did debate going last to the Apple Store last Friday night at 6pm, when they launched their latest and greatest operating system, but I hate crowds and I hate people and quickly thought better of it. Besides, did I really need a free tee-shirt?

When I bought my first iMac, nearly 3 years ago, it came installed with Panther, but a few months after that, I upgraded to Tiger, which I ran on all my Macs until yesterday.

Tiger is a great OS, stable, easy and intuitive to use and it brought me 2 and 1/2 years of computing bliss. Leopard appears to be the next logical step in the development of OS X.

The “300 new features” Apple keeps touting is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but over all the changes appear to be welcome.

I spent yesterday upgrading my 3 main systems, my new 24” iMac, my MacBook and my Mac mini. Each system took around an hour and I upgraded, rather than clean-install or archive-and-install. Apple software tends to be stable and trustworthy, plus I had the weekend’s field reports online to warn me of potential installation hazards.

One of the issues flagged up by the first installers, was something called Application Enhancer, a 3rd party framework, utilised by some 3rd party software. This framework causes a conflict in the installation which bricks your Mac, leaving you with the dreaded blue screen of death! Updating to the latest version of Application Enhancer will prevent this and if its too late, there are fixes posted on the net which show you how to remedy the situation.

Only one of my Macs, the Mini, had AE installed and I caught it before upgrading, so no worries there. The Mini was the first system I upgraded, because at a year old, it’s the oldest of my 3 systems.

The upgrade was a breeze, the installer walked me through a few screens, rebooted from the DVD and presto-change-o, it rebooted into Leopard, with all my original settings and files right where I left them.

After that, I did the iMac, which was extremely quick, around 40-45 minutes from start to finish. I followed that up with the MacBook, which took a little over an hour.

As each system booted up into Leopard for the first time, I had the chance to explore the new system. The first thing you notice is the login screen has a new background, the Leopard desktop photo. That makes a nice change from the plain blue background, though I know there’s a simple Terminal command to change it.

The systems all boot up faster under Leopard. I don’t really know how Apple do this, it was the same with Tiger. Applications also seem to launch faster and in general all three systems seem slightly more responsive.

I like the new look, the change in folder icons, the slightly translucent menu bar and the redesigned dock, all work very well. The Stacks concept is also very cool; when you click on a folder in the dock, the contents are quickly revealed for easy access. Put your Application folder on the dock, if you haven’t already and you’ll have a very quick, easy way to launch any App you have installed. It’s simple and clever.

Speaking of simple and clever, the new-look Finder window is much better too. The sidebar has been reorganised and is much more useful, with groupings that make exploring your hard drive and other computers on your network that much easier.

Coverflow, a feature added to iTunes last year, is now part of the Finder and it makes browsing through files a painless task. Even better is QuickLook, which does exactly what it says on the tin - select an item, hit the space bar and you can see just what’s inside the file, whether it’s a text document, spreadsheet or video - it’s all preview-able!

By far the most useful new addition to the Finder is the screen-sharing function, something I do quite a bit with my Mac Mini.

My Mini is connected to my LCD TV and I use it primarily for media, music and video. When I want to download something on BitTorrent, I normally control the Mini from my iMac via an open source program called “Chicken of the VNC”, but I don’t need to use that any more, because a better, version of it is now part of the OS.

The screen sharing is fast, faster than Chicken of the VNC, but by far the best thing is it can reproduce my Mighty Mouse’s right click. I could see how this function would be of use to people with family and friends who have Macs, you can effortlessly control their machine and show the person on the remote Mac how to do something, without too much trouble. If you have more than one Mac on your home network, I’m sure you will find this a useful tool.

The other major change I’ve noticed while using my Mac Mini is the completely redesigned FrontRow. The user interface now matches the Apple TV, it’s more responsive and reacts to the remote control faster. It’s also organised more logically and you have finer control over media playback. This is a very solid and welcome upgrade, especially for me because I use FrontRow so much.

Another welcome change is the new Downloads folder, which is a new category of Home Folder. It lives on the Dock and I’ve already set up my BitTorrent client to use it. It means never having to hunt around for a downloaded file again, that’s a very good thing!

In general, all of my Apps are working well, as is everything on all three computers and I’m liking everything I’ve seen so far.

I’ve yet to get my head around Spaces, the virtual desktop tool, though I can see how it would be useful to manage and run groups of related applications. I need to experiment with it a bit.

My one disappointment so far is Time Machine, which I haven’t set up yet. I upgraded to the new Airport Extreme last summer, in anticipation of Leopard and Time Machine, because of the AirDisk function. AirDisk is the ability to attach a USB hard drive to the Extreme and have it function as a network attached storage (NAS) drive and use it for Time Machine. Apple touted this function right up until recently and then all references to it disappeared.

I’m guessing that the functionality is still not working properly and at some point, it will be added back to Leopard. I hope so, anyway. Until then, it will only work with drives attached to each Mac, locally and that makes it just too involved and expensive. My plan was to have one central drive working with Time Machine on all 3 Macs and I’m probably going to wait for this feature before setting up this great new automated back-up system. It’s a minor disappointment and one I am sure they are working hard to address.

If you’re considering an upgrade to Leopard and any of the new features appeal to you, then go for it! It’s solid, stable and adds lots of cool new features to your already very cool computer! Apple will continue to tweak Leopard over the coming years, with bug fixes and new features, just as they have with Tiger.

Rumour has it that Tiger is due for an update as well, which means Apple will continue to support it for some time to come. That means there’s no rush to upgrade to Leopard, but there’s nothing stopping you from taking that next step in Apple’s OS evolution! Follow in the hippy’s footsteps and you’ll be running the most advanced operating system in the world!