How much do you LOVE Mac OS X Leopard?

The reports of problems with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard are starting to roll in: blue screens following installs and incompatible software. There's a good thread of reader reports on MacInTouch. And The Apple Core has give you plenty of advice beforehand to avoid both issues.

All that aside, a new version of the Mac OS is all about new features. A look at Apple's list of 300 new features shows a number of interesting capabilities that can be incorporated quickly into our workflows.

For example, Dashboard Web Clip, which lets you "clip out" any part of a web page and turn it into a widget, looks like a good bet for usability. Of course, Time Machine backup is at the top of my list. And I expect to integrate the Stacks application navigation into my workflow. (Note: I'm installing Leopard later today. I hear there's a good deal at the local university book store that will save me a few bucks.)

Take the poll at the bottom of the page: How Much Do You Love Mac OS X?

But I've found that everyone uses (or ignores) different sets of features in the OS. I hide the Dock and invoke it with a mouse move, while others like to keep the Dock visible. I have the corners of my desktop configured for Expose to move between documents and applications — I use this constantly. Other folks never use it.

That's one of the great things about the Mac: Apple provides lots of different ways to maneuver through the interface. If that's insufficient, then there are the third-party utilities that can hack the interface (some of which can screw-up the Leopard installation it seems).

Longtime reader David Schwartz offered the following observation about Leopard's changes to Spotlight:

With all the improvements noted in Spotlight performance, it's worth noting that the found files have very few options for sorting within the results window.

The only column choices are Name, Kind and Last Opened.

So you can construct a Find for all files larger then, say, 1 GB, but you cannot sort the resulting list by Size.

Or you can construct a Find for all files with name ending in .caf (Core Audio File, used by Logic) that searches across multiple folders and volumes, yet you cannot sort the resulting list by Location.

Unhelpfully, the "View Options" floating window reads "There are no view options for the "Searching This Mac" window."

Schwartz said that he appreciated the new arrangement of the Network Preference Pane, "but you still can't have AppleTalk active on more then one physical interface." And he liked that the unZip utility now opens a newly decompressed folder automatically for you in the Finder.

But how do you love Leopard?

Take a poll to let us know:

[poll id=74]