I bought a mac a couple of months ago after years of using windows. It was hard to get used to and Windows for Mac was a bit screwy, but I’ve installed Leopard today and now it all works wonderfully. and through Boot camp I can still hold onto those things I like in windows. Now I’m very happy.
Deb
Like a fool, I installed Leopard on the first day - and got lucky. The install went beautifully (I had a bootable backup in case it didn’t), and all my critical apps - MS Word, Scrivener, RapidWeaver - worked.
No hassles at all, thank heavens.
Biggest advantage after almost two weeks of Leopard: speed. Almost everything happens faster. I had printing slowdowns in Tiger, they’ve vanished. The Finder is faster. Everything’s faster. “Speed” is my choice of killer feature. 
Also -
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I love the new Finder and Cover Flow, I’ve been able to browse folders and toss old material. And I’ve found lots of nuggets and treasures I’d forgotten I have;
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Time Machine - brilliant!
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Spaces. Not as useful as I’d hoped, but helps my workflow.
What disappoints me?
Spotlight. I was hoping that Spotlight would work like Google. Instead, I’m finding that for me, it’s not working as well as the Tiger version. Sad.
My favorite search utility, HoudahSpot doesn’t work in Leopard, and hasn’t been updated yet, so there’s no help from that quarter.
As a work around, I’ve created some Smart Folders in the Finder, and these are superb, so they do (most) of the job, and I’m not unhappy.
If I were giving Leopard marks out of ten, I’d give it nine.
So, I’m pleased I installed Leopard, love it, and wouldn’t go back.
Cheers
Angela
Ouch! 
What exactly does that mean? I’ve read Spotlight was improved, and now you say it was better in Tiger? How do I have to imagine this “disimprovement”?
For me, Spotlight is one of the cornerstones of working with my Mac.
I’ve been using Leopard on a new MacBook for the past couple of days, and I love it. I’ve even gotten to quite like the translucent menu bar 
Spotlight is much faster and more useful, for me. I’d also be interested to hear why Angela thinks it’s worse - I almost never used Spotlight under Tiger because it was so slow, but the speed increase under Leopard, coupled with the new boolean search and launching shortcuts, means I’m using it a lot more now.
Andreas, have you tried Quicksilver? If you rely on Spotlight so much, you might find QS does a better job…
Yes, I have tried Quicksilver, mostly because everybody strongly advised to do so - but I am afraid i still not got the point of it. For what is it supposed to be good? Just to launch applications? Thanks, I don’t have that much, and the dock is enough for them. To control applications via keyboard? I was always fiddling around with the commands, there were just never the ones I was searching for, or I did not understand what these commands meant to be… It was, in a word, annoying, and I don’t use it anymore.
I use Spotlight to search in my assembled materials, downloaded stuff, text parts, informations of all kind. For that, it’s indispensable; since I switched to the Mac, I do not put as much effort in folder structure as I did before, because of the possibility to search all across the hard disk. Is it possible to search with Quicksilver? I wasn’t aware of that.
Absolutely, yes. It’s one of the principal reasons why QS is so valuable as a Spotlight replacement (the other being the actions you can then perform on a selected object).
Depending on where you tend to save documents, you may need to adjust the “catalog” preferences to ensure QS will search the right folders, but once it’s set up it’s a lot more powerful than Spotlight, mainly because it learns what you’re looking for the more you use it.
(For example, I’m working on a script called SKELETON KEY right now. It’s location is ~/Archive/Writing/In Progress/Scripts/Skeleton Key/Skeleton Key.scriv, so it’s fairly buried in the heirarchy. But all I have to do is fire up QS, type “ske”, and it finds the Scrivener document immediately.)
If all you’re using Spotlight for is searching for documents, then to be honest I think the 10.5 Spotlight will serve you just fine.
On the other hand, if you want to see what QS can do, here’s a grat video by its creator where he explains what it is, why he created it, and what it can do:
I’ve found that the new spotlight is so fast I haven’t even bothered installing Quicksilver yet. It pulls up applications when you search almost as fast as QS and seems to remember the most frequently launched ala QS as well.
Congrats on the new MacBook, Antony. I’ve had mine for a year and it is a workhorse. Leopard actually seems to have really helped to speed things up as well.
Yeah, Spotlight has definitely become a good launcher in Leopard. But I use QS for so much more - copying, deleting, moving, looking up phone numbers, launching URLs, running javascripts, controlling iTunes, etc - that I couldn’t do without it 
The MacBook is superb, so far. If all I did was write, I could easily see it becoming my main computer. (But I also do a lot of design work, which demands a larger screen, so no danger of getting rid of the iMac just yet )
Thanks for the video link. I have to admit this is impressive. Maybe I should indeed give it another try. (Although it’s rather the speed of thinking that’s the problem, not the speed of accessing data… 
)
I probably won’'t be using Leopard for a year or so, when I’ll probably upgrade my 2005 PowerBook to a MacBook. But I’m curious to know whether 10.5 brings any significant changes to TextEdit. What have you early adopters discovered?
TextEdit, the shell application on top of the rich text system—let’s just say it took me a while to even find anything new! It’s pretty much identical to the Tiger version. I think the only new feature is “Prevent Editing” which is nice for distributing read me files I guess. The text engine hasn’t really been addressed. There are some new import and export formats.
The text system in general, is probably the most disappointing thing about Leopard.
Amber - exactly. I think I said the same a few posts back, or it may have been somewhere else. This has been especially disappointing to me in terms of Scrivener. Tiger brought bullet points and tables, but both as buggy as anything. The problems with bullets and tables haven’t been addressed in Leopard. And the only noticeable addition from a user-perspective is grammar checking (which I turn off anyway - can’t stand it in Word, for instance). There are some under-the-hood improvements and fixes, but ont much that a user would notice. Some are postulating that now that Apple have Pages, they are less interested in making the text system more powerful as they wouldn’t want to help competition, but I’m not so sure that’s true as, as far as I know, the team working on the text system is quite different to the one that works on Pages. The weird thing is, the text system engineers seem brilliant (from their responsiveness on the dev-lists), so I’m not sure why there is not a more noticeable bump in the text system. Personally, I would have liked to see a “page layout” view (not that Scrivener would have used it, but it would be good to see one without having to put it together manually all the time), improved RTF and DOC import/export (which at the very least supported images - I think it is very poor that they have implemented brand new .docx and .odt exporters which have exactly the same limitations - no images! - as the older exporters), hidden text support, bullet point and tables improvements and a few more public methods for the latter, too. Oh well…
Best,
Keith
Thanks, Amber and Keith. But darn. The Apple text engine was really in need of an overhaul. Since I use Bean, which has really added quite a few features in recent updates, I wasn’t even hoping for new features in TextEdit so much, as I sort of like its minimalist feel. OK, I did hold out a secret desire for maybe a live word count display (although there’s freeware that’ll do the same thing to TextEdit) and a couple of other additions to bring it near to the old AppleWorks word processor or WriteNow level. And of course improvements to the Apple text engine would have perforce enhanced Scrivener and other apps dependent on it.
I hope you’re right, Keith, that it’s not about Apple trying to encourage us to buy Pages; spiffy as it in some ways (better than MS Word, for sure) Pages is overkill for my needs, not to mention its deficiencies as enumerated on this forum and elsewhere.
Oh well. Guess I’ll just keep using the excellent Bean, which now has just about everything I need in a writing application – and, just as important, almost nothing more - as the default app. for my rtf and text files. I found out about it here and recommend it to everyone. (I have Mellel but was confounded by its interface and stopped using it some time ago, after improvements in Scrivener and then Bean make it unnecessary for my uses.) Of course, Scrivener is much more than just a writing app, and will ever remain the indispensable program on my Mac.
On the other hand, from a developer’s point of view, there is a wealth of improvements. There’s a good overview here:
mattgemmell.com/2007/10/28/get-r … th-leopard
Scrivener has loads of code just dealing with the toolbar, for instance. It also use a class I coded myself just to manage different views. The image view is my own. I’ve had to customise table views and outline views just to provide contextual menus. I had to modify the split view to get it to look like the one in Mail. Custom buttons all need several images. I would need very little of that code if I was just starting out in Leopard. It even looks as though I could get rid of a lot of the corkboard code using the new collection view to handle a lot of it. Of course, it doesn’t help much when you have to remain backwards-compatible with Tiger, but in a couple of years when I start thinking about 2.0, there is a lot in Leopard that will make my job easier…
Best,
Keith
We’ll be on 10.6 “Civet” by then.
But you’ll have a book in hand.
Pip pip!
Full Screen mode in Scrivener + new Aurora background in Leopard with 75% black tinting on the background using Scrivener’s slider?
Priceless!
Well, I just upgraded to Leopard. I like it, except for a couple of things - you can’t close the Sidebar without also closing the Toolbar, and you can’t have a folder in the Dock that isn’t a Stack. Plus the Stack icon being whatever is first in order in the stack is annoying…for some stacks it could be nice, but for others I’d prefer to have a custom icon. Oh, well - just nitpicky stuff.
The ability to change the icon grid spacing makes up for the downfalls. 
Will this help?
or straight from here:
I just did an upgrade install the Saturday or Sunday after the release day. No archive. Install was flawless. Finally rearranged my external drive location so that I have Time Machine up and running. Backed up my XP boxes over the network to the ext. drive attached to the MacBook. Then I proceeded to back all that up to Mozy.com online. I now have three copies of everything important.
I have had no significant problems with Leopard. I am printing to my Lexmark printer attached to a Windoze box over my wireless network (NetGear wireless router). I love stacks, especially the download folder. My desktop is cleaner than ever.
So far my fave feature is QuickLook - click a file, hit space bar, voila - THEN, while the quicklook window is open, just click on another file and its preview will show up in the existing window. Genius.
TimeMachine is cool visually - hope I never need to use it though