Tech Friday: Apple Leopard OS launch nears

Posted By on October 19, 2007

1st Apple MacI’m a long time Apple Macintosh computer user and am currently running the Tiger OS 10.4.10 on my desktop, although am running Microsoft Vista on my notebook. It is interesting to see what the creative folks at Apple are bring to the table next … no doubt it will continue to be a blend of “form and function.” The current change coming in about a week is an operating system release called Leopard. For any computer owner, an OS update is often a time to worry; it means learning a new interface and unfortunately the frustrating glitches when working with existing software. My question is whether or not to take the early leap and install Leopard?

Over lunch today I watched Apple’s web-based Leopard presentation and was impressed with a couple of items. The most important addition being something called “Time Machine” which makes backing up your computer easy and restoring something even easier. This feature, in my opinion, would be the number one reason to upgrade. (it uses a large low cost generic external harddrive to archive your entire computer) The second thing that impressed me was the improvements to the impressive video conferencing software packaged with the Apple OS called IChatAV. The improvements that I thought were attractive were in the productivity area; for example when partnering on a document, project or presentation. The ease of being able to talk and share all kinds of documents, videos and presentations immediately and ‘live’ to actually working on a document located on the desktop of your coworkers computer was nice. Its certainly a great feature that would be helpful in finalizing a presentation or document between parties located a distance away. The video chat component also had some cool enhancements … like allowing you to replace the background of your chat window with something other than your surroundings. (a kind of like ‘green screening’ … the demo looked near perfect)

Finally the challenge of ‘doing the upgrade’ looks to have been simplified. According to the presentation, it a few clicks and the walk away; in about and hours your Tiger OS mac will restart in Leopard with all your programs and data. Sounds good … but is it worth the $129?

Comments

  • Alex Hausman

    I’ll be one of the early guys to give it a shot. I’m looking forward to also upgrading to the latest iLife package as well. Have you given that a ponder yet?

  • Alex Hausman

    I’ll be one of the early guys to give it a shot. I’m looking forward to also upgrading to the latest iLife package as well. Have you given that a ponder yet?

  • http://www.myarchive.us RichC

    Alex,

    Then you’ll have to keep me posted on how it goes?

    I have too many old computers sitting around and need to whittle my way down to a couple. I do like the current Mac Tiger OS with XP on Bootcamp, yet still have one G4 running OS 9.0.4; I can’t keep myself from still running Windows 2000/XP/Vista varieties regularly. I do have Linux on an older machine and would probably use it more if it had a bit more processing power and memory.

    The new OS looks good, but I’m still struggling with the bad taste of upgrading to Vista too soon … but now after a good half year all is well.

    I’m not an iLife nut since the Mac is really just an Adobe Creative Suite and Final Cut Pro machine for me. (sadly the lack of a quad processor is keeping me from really enjoying it) Keep me posted on your upgrade.

    RichC

  • http://www.myarchive.us RichC

    Alex,

    Then you’ll have to keep me posted on how it goes?

    I have too many old computers sitting around and need to whittle my way down to a couple. I do like the current Mac Tiger OS with XP on Bootcamp, yet still have one G4 running OS 9.0.4; I can’t keep myself from still running Windows 2000/XP/Vista varieties regularly. I do have Linux on an older machine and would probably use it more if it had a bit more processing power and memory.

    The new OS looks good, but I’m still struggling with the bad taste of upgrading to Vista too soon … but now after a good half year all is well.

    I’m not an iLife nut since the Mac is really just an Adobe Creative Suite and Final Cut Pro machine for me. (sadly the lack of a quad processor is keeping me from really enjoying it) Keep me posted on your upgrade.

    RichC

Desultory - des-uhl-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee

  1. lacking in consistency, constancy, or visible order, disconnected; fitful: desultory conversation.
  2. digressing from or unconnected with the main subject; random: a desultory remark.