Apple announced, as expected, a release date for Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. The date is October 26th, 2007 in case you missed it. Since everyone on the internet is a guru, and therefore, so am I, I will give you plebes reasons to upgrade to Leopard. But, first let me qualify myself worthy of such preachery (gurus can make up words).

  1. I’ve been using Leopard since January 2007, since I’m an ADC Member, and I have early access.
  2. I’ve been using it on my primary work machine since September 2007.
  3. This is the internet, and somehow you found this post to read, therefore you don’t know any better..


I’m going to assume that the build shipped to us ADC members, has been updated and will not be the build that will be released to the masses, there are still bugs in my release, but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of the August release, and very close to stable.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, here’s my list:

major features missing on the Leopard page
I’m not sure why, but Apple didn’t mention these things, and came up with a rather lame list of “300″ new features (seriously, mentioning Tabbed Terminal 3 times doesn’t make it 3 separate features).

  1. PHP 5.2.4 : Tiger has shipped with PHP 4.3.X for ages, and I always had to upgrade manually, no more.. But.. this build of PHP doesn’t come with PDO MySQLi drivers.. it’s weird ( The PHP Info from Leopard ).
  2. Apache 2.2 : Comes in handy with PHP etc..
  3. Python 2.5.1: This list may be getting too geeky for some.. Sorry. I don’t remember if I installed Django myself, or if it’s part of the OS though..
  4. Subversion: Yes, Subversion (1.4.4) is now part of the CLI .. not Finder yet, but it’s a start.
  5. Mail.app : Apple’s mail client finally supports the ability to subscribe to individual folders on your IMAP server. warning: This is buggy in my release, but the functionality is there.
  6. iCal: It’s better, hard for me to put my finger on this, but it’s definitely better.

major reasons for me to upgrade.

  1. Speed: Even in beta, Leopard is considerably faster than Tiger on the same hardware. Full 64 bit FTW.
  2. Spaces: Virtual Desktops make it to OS X natively, albeit 10 yrs late, but they’re finally done 99% right in OS X, I still have 2 gripes.
  3. Network Sharing: If you thought sharing drives in Tiger was easy, Leopard makes it stupidly easier.
  4. Quicklook: This is again a simple thing, but it’s done very well and it’s very fast.
  5. User Management: The ability to change a user’s home directory, and unix group etc, are much easier than in Tiger (right click the user’s name easy).
  6. Spotlight: It’s much faster, and works as an app launcher just as well as Quicksilver.. no chaining though, so I still recommend QS, if you use QS for more than just an app launcher.
  7. VPN on Demand: It finally works, this never worked for me using PPTP..
  8. Notes and Todos: The built in Notes and Todos feature of Mail.app makes me wonder what will happen to all the GTD apps out there, I don’t see a need for them anymore. The notes can be made into Todos, which can be given due dates, which automatically puts them in calendar..

My list of things that can still be improved upon

  1. In Spaces, give me the ability to send a window to another desktop by right clicking the title bar, and sending it, not invoking spaces fancy pager.
  2. Make the PHP distribution better.
  3. Safari / Keychain need to support x509 certs better..
  4. GPG should come as a default install, and Mail.app should have it.