Today I had the opportunity to try out the latest beta of Mac OS X Leopard. My boss had just arrived yesterday from WWDC in San Francisco and he installed the WWDC Leopard build on our G5 in lab. I am happy with the way Leopard is coming along. I find myself wishing I had Stacks in Tiger right now because they truly are useful and helpful. I am extremely happy that Apple made the decision to get rid of the brushed metal interface and made the entire operating system look and feel the same.
That is one of the things that bothers me about Tiger, is that going from one application to the next, the interface is different on each. By that I mean that some applications have the brushed metal interface, while others have something closer to what is featured in Leopard.
One thing I hope is still being worked on is the Finder. At this point in time, I don’t believe there is any reason that the Finder shouldn’t have Tabs like Safari, so you don’t have to have multiple Finder windows open. I am someone that finds myself often having multiple Finder windows open, whether it be to move/copy files or just browsing multiple folders at once. So having Tabs inside the Finder would be awesome.
There are a lot of little details that I noticed(I will only cover one). One thing that I liked is located under the Finder Preferences. When you are under the Sidebar tab to select what items are displayed in the Finder sidebar, the “Computer” icon now has an icon that represents what kind of Mac you have. In other words, if you have a G5 or Mac Pro, it has a Mac Tower icon. If you have a laptop, it has a laptop icon.
I did notice a few glitches with this build, but it is far better then the previous builds I have tested and I can’t wait for the final release that is going to be released in October.
