Well, I’m not entirely sure why there were all these lineups at Apple stores, waiting for 6pm. I had ordered a copy of Leopard the day before (around mid-day, even), and was a little surprised to see that it said “arrives by October 26”. Sure enough, the FedEx guy arrived the next *morning*, carrying the box. By early afternoon, Eastern time, I had upgraded my MacBook Pro. My impressions? Find the review (which is more than one, really) that says “nothing earth-shattering/not going to change your life/evolutionary, not revolutionary” and “a whole bunch of little things that make things tighter and faster”, and you’ll be where I am.

Things I Like:

• Spotlight’s overall improvments
• Finder’s new sidebar (especially with the shared section, and the fact that it takes less space)
• Cleanup of the Preferences panel and options – especially the new networking panel.
• The new interface for FrontRow (well, new to me anyway – I don’t have an AppleTV box). I especially love it for navigating shared content – an amazing improvement!
• Most non-Apple applications “just worked” after the reboot

Non-Apple Things that “Just Worked”:

• VMWare (upgraded to the latest beta, which was for Leopard)
• Firefox, Thunderbird (although I’m giving Safari and Mail another go)
• Skype, Adium, Colloquy (I would have been surprised if these didn’t work)
• Audacity
• Growl
• DropCopy

Things that Didn’t Work:

• synergy, the daemon for sharing a keyboard and mouse from one system across many (I use this at work across 4 machines), crashes (the client – I run the server elsewhere) when run.
• My favorite screensaver, Fenetres Volantes, doesn’t run (although the new “Word of the Day” is nice!)
• Very Little!
  

Things I Miss:

• The ability to name desktops in “Spaces”, and optional transitions (just eye-candy, no big deal).
• The hack of dragging your “Home” folder to the dock, and, when clicking on it, getting the menu-like way of navigating your directory structure.

Overall, it’s a nice update, and one I feel will make non-power users and new users feel more at home. I’ve read that as more apps go 64 bit, along with some of the tweaks in the behind-the-scenes code found here, things should be generally faster. While I’d like to say I’ve seen that, I don’t think I’ve used the system enough yet to say if that’s true.

Update: found a couple more things that need fixing: VLC no longer recognizes the Apple remote, and SMC fan control doesn’t seem to be working(even after trying to re-pair it).

Update #2: Updated SMCfancontrol to v 2.1.2, and that fixed the issue.