I’m a web developer and photographer, and I’m moving to Leopard full-time after a week of testing on my PowerMac G5. My critical apps that work with 10.5:

• Aperture (update to 1.5.6)
• Coda 1.0.5
• BBEdit 6.5.3 (I know, 6.x is a dinosaur… but it’s a solid, capable dinosaur)
• Transmit 2.6.2
• Photoshop CS3
• Firefox 2 and various developer extensions

Have you moved to 10.5? Waiting for an app to be Leopardized?

Apple updated Aperture to version 1.5.6 on October 26th.

Besides stability tweaks and modifications to make Aperture work smoothly with OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, changes include compatibility improvements with iPhoto, iLife Media Browser and with reliability when recovering an Aperture Library from a Vault.

Run Software Update to get the update.

If you add a To Do item when offline, Mail.app might crash repeatedly when you go online, with no way out of the crashing loop (!).

I found the solution to this nasty Mail.app crash here.

Start Terminal application: it’s in Applications/Utitlities/ folder. In the following, do not type the quotes, just type what’s in the quotes.

Go to ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-email_address@mailserver/.OfflineCache like this

"cd ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-email_address@mailserver/.OfflineCache“

and list the contents like this

"ls -al“

Then delete all the files with numbers, like this

"rm 1“

WARNING: this worked for me. If you’re not comfortable with any of this, don’t do it. Back up the .OfflineCache folder first if you’re uncomfortable, but brave.

OS X has never had a mouse tracking setting I can use with any accuracy. Leopard’s no different.

I don’t remember pre-10.2 or OS 9, but certainly with OS 10.2 and newer I’ve turned to IntelliPoint 6.22 For Mac. I use MS mice so there’s no problems with hardware/driver compatibility.

So what’s my problem? It’s the rate of acceleration the Apple driver gets all wrong. It’s like it has two speeds, slow and fast. You move the mouse very slowly — no problem. Move it quickly — no problem. But going through the mathematical line that separates these two states causes a jump in cursor speed akin to a Dodge Charger 440 launching on a 1/4-mile run.

No amount of fiddling with tracking speed in the OS X Preference Pane helps.

And — just as annoyingly — it works the same way when slowing. The MS mouse driver has a much more linear speedup, and it makes for faster mousing.

The following by AppleSwitcher member Comandante was taken from the AppleSwitcher Mac Forum thread Hands-On-Leopard.

I’m going to look at this Pro migration path tomorrow from a web developer’s perspective: Coda, Firefox 2.0.0.8 w/ extensions, Parallels w/ XP, BBEdit etc.

As with any upgrade, take caution if you use your Mac for a living. I’ve installed 10.5 on an external drive, and will use that as a sandbox to test the applications I depend on.

I have installed 10.5 Leopard in my G5 Quad backup. So far I see a number of improvements and some minor slowdowns (Disk Utility takes longer to repair disk permissions, for instance). The Network control pane is vastly improved, allowing the setting of permissions of individual-designated users (a la AppleShare) for the first time. This is great news for schools and corporate outfits. Safari and Mail run much faster (actually like they were supposed to run since their creation), Spotlight runs orders of magnitudes faster doing searches but only after it has rebuilt its database, which could take, say up to an hour in a large hard drive (>400GB).

Printer SetUp Utility has disappeared from the Application/Utilities folder and is now located in the System Preferences as the control pane Print & Fax, as is Dock. Other new control panes include: Exposé & Spaces, Time Machine (a backup system-level system that I have not tried yet) and Widget Manager (allows to turn widgets on/off). Airport menu now shows locked (and thus unlocked visible networks) with a padlock next to the network SSID.

Warning: I have not tried to print to any of my three printers nor have I tried to use Aperture, Photoshop, Quark or any other elaborate environment that use calibrated ICC profiles for printing. This will come over the weekend when I can get round to futz with it.

So far the review is positive with the cautionary above.