After more time with Leopard, here are the positives:

* Crazy-fast, especially Spotlight. It has to be seen to be believed.

* Sharing network drives is much better – I would have paid the price of admission for this alone.

* Spaces is really cool – you can specify which space an application will launch on, so the micromanagement goes away completely. Apps like Aperture and Logic that really need a full screen devoted to them will co-exist with other apps on a single display much easier now, and all distractions go away as soon as I switch to their space.

* Reading John Siracusa’s excellent review makes me excited for the future – there’s a lot of potential under the hood, and I’m really looking forward to new displays with higher resolution in the next couple of years.

I did some work in Soundtrack Pro last night, with the laptop on my lap (running on the battery), and the work was fast and enjoyable. Good stuff, and I’m very happy with the result.

I ordered a Playstation 3…. and Rock Band.

* Took quite a while for the system to settle down after setting it up with .mac synchronisation.

* Still quite a lot of bugs but no show-stoppers yet. Worst one so far was (I think) an iDisk sync that went crazy, and created a 77Gb temp file in my Library folder. I was wondering why the system was running so badly, and the ‘You are low on space on the system drive’ message explained it. I force-quit the sync process, deleted the temp file and everything seems to be okay now. I still don’t trust iDisk synching at all though… roll on 10.5.1.

* Press F11 to reveal the desktop and then open the Spotlight search box – it appears mostly offscreen. Crazy!

* Time Machine is good, but needs a drive connected physically to the Mac, or a remote server also running Leopard. That means no NAS drives or Airport Disks… at least, not yet. I can’t run the iMac on Leopard until we’ve finished Crumpet’s animation in case something breaks our pro apps.

* Very disappointed in .mac – it’s just as slow and troublesome as it was back when I first tried it out 3 years ago. I don’t think I’ll get it again. Obviously Apple just aren’t capable of making a service that doesn’t suck.

…with a good dose of THE SWEARS!

Not safe for work (there be rude words, yo), but really interesting. One might even say, fucking interesting.