However, i am amazed at the accolades that Apple is getting for Leopard. i couldn’t wait to get my hands on it and had it on pre-order for months. But, i was amazed when i installed it how simple usability has declined with this “upgrade.”

Stacks, for example, removes the capacity to pull a folder (or an entire hard drive for that matter) into the dock and to be able to thereby easily navigate the subfolders contained therein. Stacks appears to go only one level deep, so the user has to open the folders to then dig into subsequent ones to obtain the file being searched for.

Then there is that silly Windows-like drive-bar that shows up in every single folder that is opened in the finder. Like this is necessary? Not only is it ugly, but it makes every single window far larger than it needs to be. In 10.4 this side bar could be hidden by a simple click in the folder window on its pane, but now, the only way to rid oneself of it is to collapse the entire tool bar (and it still has a habit of showing up). This annoying side bar causes folders to be entirely too large, ugly, and to take up screen real-estate.

The cover flow? Again, one level deep. And when clicked on, the folder that is chosen appears BEHIND the coverflow folder. How useful is this?

Time Machine? Although you can tell it what you DO NOT want it to back up, you can not tell it what you WANT it to do. For example, i can’t tell it i want it to watch specific folders on my hard drives to back those up rather than backing up the entire hard drive.

The download folder? Fine. But what idiot didn’t know how to designate a folder to place all their downloads into in the first place? Please.

This OS has lots of “pretty” features. But these features hardly increase ease of use, nor do they increase productivity. In my estimation, Apple has sorely screwed up with this outright UGLY thing they refer to as an “upgrade,”

I see nothing but improvements: shutdowns in less than 10 seconds (on my 2nd Gen MacBook Pro), starts up faster, less spinning beach balls, overall speedier desktop. I love it, and the vast majority of users out there have given it glowing reviews.

Sorry your experience is not better, but you can’t blame Apple for broken apps. Leopard is a major improvement under the hood. No one has put together an OS that runs in both 64-bit and 32-bit modes within the same OS. This is a huge development that most don’t understand. Apple’s history of OS development may not be perfect, but they have done everything they have said they were going to do in every release, and it simply amazes me how they can write these updates with a vastly smaller group of programmers than MSFT, for example.

Look at their history: flawless execution from Motorola 68K processors to PPC; very good transition from NextStep to OS X; virtualization of OS 9 (Classic) in OS X; smooth transition from PPC processors to Intel. Heck, MSFT can’t ship an OS that runs both 64-bit and 32-bit apps. They are seperate OSs. And the Object Oriented Programming in OS X is a huge advantage that few outside of Redmond know about, where all the tools (XCode) are included with every copy of the OS. MSFT doesn’t provide these free tools Windows and they don’t include all the APIs. They keep a lot of them for themselves.

OS X is an awesome OS, and Leopard is another great step in its development.

If you enjoy rambling surrealist lyrics, there is King Missile, I always liked “I’m Sorry.”

Frank Zappa’s “Dental Hygiene Dilemma” holds a special place in my heart.

For just plain aural weirdness I recommend “Battle Against Clown” from the soundtrack of the movie Akira.

There is of course the great Mr. Bungle. “My Ass is on Fire” is a wonderfully disturbing sort of weird.