Mac OS X Tiger out, Leopard back in

Why...

is this article here? Anyone that wants to upgrade will have already, and anyone else will already know that their apps don't work with it yet...! Are you being paid by Apple to round up the last few Tiger users?!

Non-compatible apps

Interesting. The only reasons I have not upgraded from 10.4.11 are (a) I always wait until x.x.4 comes out, as I do not have time to trouble-shoot earlier releases, and (b) the issue regarding non-compatible apps.

The cost of upgrading to Leopard is not the OS purchase itself, rather the cost of Adobe CS4 when it comes out and, possibly, Office 2008, although Neo Office seems to be more than enough for my needs.

So I'll take a look at Pixelmator, but that still leaves me needing a replacement for InDesign. Any suggestions? Is iWork Pages 08 comparable? I've not tried it.

Puzzled by the Office incompatibilty comments.

I'm still using Office v.X and it appears to work just fine on Leopard.

my experiences

Hi Tony

My experiences are a little different - but then I started from a different place.

I got a new mac Pro in September last year and as I knew that Leopard was on the horizon, I only loaded up those apps that were essential to my work i.e. Appleworks, FMP6, CS3 and iWork 08.

No problems with the system at all.

My wife came back from the US the day after Leopard was launched and brought me a copy, and Aperture 1.5. (cheaper than buy them here!)

Did the upgrade and started playing. The only thing that I didn't really like was the translucent Dock and the almost invisible glowing balls. A few days later I found an app called TigerDock, and that got my old dock back.

The only problem I expereienced was with Safari. When I closed it, instead of closing it would always put up a message to the effect the "Safari has unexpectedly quit" - however, in every respect i appeared to have closed properly, history, cache & coockies all appeared to be correct. This behaviour still continues - even with all the latest updates.

Time machine has not given me any problems at all, it has been rock solid - working to an internal drive.

As you say, Quickview is a godsend - I only wish it would work on Appleworks files - I have thousands of Drawings created over the past 10 years. Annoyingly, iPhoto work won't work with AW drawings either. (whereas Extensis Portfolio on my old mac works with whatever I give it to catalogue). It doesn't work with IDD files either.

One thing that did surprise me, when using the coverflow concept for browing files, is that the icons have full transparency. That may have been in Tiger but I think it's new - possible this Quartz Composer thing (or whatever).

Here's a trivial something which I've discovered that many of my clients have not yet found, but really makes jaws drop. Go to the screensaver control and scroll down and select the pictures folder. On doing so 3 new buttons appear under the preview window. Pick the one on the right - that looks like a grid.

Activate the screen saver and wait.

It pays to have a well stocked iPhoto library.

Cheers

Ivan

I haven't done the latest security update yet, I'll wait a few more days and monitor the boards to see what's happening first.

@Tony Smith

The upgrade price for InDesign is somewhere around £180 — less than the price of one Eee PC... you can even pay that same price to upgrade from PageMaker.

It's still lots of money though. That said, crusty old InDesign 2.0.2 (the version before CS?) works perfectly, albeit slowly, under 10.5.2 for me.

Ragtime?

Not sure if it is Leopard compatible, but Ragtime might be a possibility for replacing InDesign.

http://www.macupdate.com/dev.php?id=9792

I also have no idea if it is any good or not.

Depending on how much capability you need, another alternative could be Swift Publisher from BeLight which takes a more iApp approach (again, I have no experience using it):

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18896/swift-publisher

Same bouncy-bounce

I did the same upgrade-downgrade-upgrade. In my case, the initial version of Leopard was just too slow on my G4 MDD/1.25. Plus the ancient Radeon 9000 I was using had no support for any of the CoreImage goodness. Two updates and a less ancient Radeon 9700 later, and I'm back to using Leopard. Slick as snot on a door-knob now, and stable enough to run for weeks on end (months maybe?). And I should mention that Time Machine is the first backup utility I've ever used on a personal computer.

Also, Just as a general OS X observation, each update to a version of OS X tends to make the OS seem more responsive, going back to 10.1.

Leopard + Time Machine..

I use Logic on my Mac, and decided that I just wanted my Logic folder backed up. Annoyingly, there's no way to specify 'Just this folder', I had to tell it not to back up every other folder. Also, I didn't want it to do backups automatically, so I have Time Machine turned off in System Preferences (that just turns off automatic backups, not Time Machine itself), and the menu bar icon enabled. Clicking the menu bar icon allows for a 'Back Up Now' option, along with showing the date and time of the last backup.

Also, I'm not a heavy user of it, but I do have Photoshop CS3 installed and working okay on 10.5.2. In fact, I've had no Leopard-specific problems with hardware or software - with the possible exception of Pro Tools with my Mbox, which I haven't actually tried just yet.

Alternative applications

You could get VMWare, install Ubuntu as a virtual machine, then use some of the Linux apps: Scribus (for DTP), The Gimp and Xara (for Graphics), and of course OpenOffice for all the Office-type stuff.

Scribus is also available for OS X

http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/22952/scribus

You don't need Linux per se.

NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org and the GIMP also run on OS X (either natively or in X11).

However, the free OSS VirtualBox virtualisation environment is a better choice than VMWare/Parallels if all you want to do is test out a Linux distro on OS X. If you find you need more capabilities, you can always purchase VMWare or Parallels at a later date.

Oops, Scribus is currently PPC only

My bad, the current version of Scribus is not an universal binary. The Linux version might run better.

@ @ Adrian

Hi, Tony...

I don't know if you know this, but you can do live partitioning in 10.5 Disk Utility. Just go into the partition tab for your external drive and resize the main partition, then click the [+] button to make a new volume/partition in the space you've just freed up. Click 'Apply' and (after a brief wait while it thinks) you're done.

The latest development versions of GIMP run natively (no X11)

Not ready for prime time yet, but development builds of GIMP run natively in OS X without a need for X11.

Webster Phreaky - full time troll

Hi Webster Phreaky aka Keith Benicek.

Maybe you should spend your time better by getting a good job instead of trolling Apple postings and getting fired.

Who needs them

"So, out went Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop CS and InDesign CS and a couple of utilities."

Och sure it should be a doddle to replace those puppies.

Ecclectic melange...

"..and the ability to look inside documents just by selecting them and hitting the spacebar"

Well slap my thigh; I never knew that! That's really neat thanks:-)

Time Machine doesn't work with File Vault. It only backs up the whole 'partition', a bit like Entourage with its massive database files. This renders Time Machine useless for laptop use (where the data needs to be encrypted in case you -- OK, I -- loose the laptop [again])

Save some money, don't buy Office 2008. It corrupts files and has more bugs than is normal for Microsoft software. In fact it's more buggy than IE! I've experienced corrupted files and general shagged formatting of files from previous Office versions. 'Downgrading' to Office 2004 increases performance and reliability, not to mention compatibility.

That probably explains why Office 2008 is only £100/$200 for three licences; even Microsoft aren't that callous!

I can't see why anyone would upgrade to CS3 at Adobe's eye-watering prices. Especially given the cross-Atlantic price differential. I'd love to upgrade but I'm damned if I'm paying them that much.

I generally like Leopard. I'm particularly pleased with the spotlight search where I have a <cmd><space> shortcut to type the name of the file/program I want. Don't need Quicksilver now.

X11 Installed by Default

Under Mac OS X 10.5, X11 is installed by default as it is required by Terminal.app.

Unfortunately, the shift from the X Org version of X11 to the XFree86 version did cause more than a few problems. These weren't fixed until the release of Mac OS X 10.5.2 and this week's security update. If you are running any Leopard release prior to Mac OS X 10.5.2, you need to upgrade your system.

For those of us that migrated to Mac OS X because it had Unix under the hood, GIMP isn't a problem because there was never a version of Photoshop released for Unix.

NeoOffice or OpenOffice supplies the tools needed to handle documents sent to you by your colleagues with Windows-based systems.

I just got a Mac Pro (2008). I selected VMWare Fusion for my virtual environment as it allowed me to create a Windows XP virtual machine from a running system. This got me around a problem with only having a Windows XP Pro OEM install disk because I had designed my own system. The old system went to the hazardous waste facility last week.

@ Webester

"Hope you enjoyed tossing $149 down the drain, again. Running Linux, means never having to go BACK(wards)."

You cannot go backwards with Linux because there is nowhere to go to, as it is still at the start. Linux is now where SunOS was 15 years ago, and until the desktop will be based on X11, it will always be 20 years behind compared to OSX.

Technology improves and evolves, and Linux is most a re-implementation of things appeared on other platform ages ago. The Gnome Desktop is still a joke compared to the Old Classic MacOS and, yes, even Windows.

Leopard, issues??? not here!

most odd, I did a clean install of leopard on my Powerbook G4 1.67SD

then installed CS3 and Office 2004 no problems with any of it... :) been running fine since a week after original release...

I must also be in the minority as I quite like the translucent menubar, 3d dock and stacks!!!

Compatibility...

I wonder when the difference between the two macosx-es is just a minor version number, how could they make them incompatible so much? It's like the difference between win5.0 (windows 2000) and win5.1 (windows xp). Different graphics but the same os. The last time apple did a real os change was switching from macos9 to macosx, it was like switching from win3.1 to win2000. But since then the kernel is the same. And companies selling software just want everyone to buy everything again. No matter how buggy it is, but at least linux keeps the compatibility with applications from the '60-ies and bsd unix versions even keept the whole os compatible for over 40 years now. Compared to this the macosx problems and vista's "not even compatible with itself" approach is a big step back from what we seen in the past.

@ Rens

You are confusing an upgrade to the OS with the change between CPU type.

Given the complexities of switching from PPC to Intel, it did just work™ .With the exception of a few legacy apps (particularly games) not working in Rosetta, the whole process *was* seamless. However, that happened at the level of Tiger, and not Leopard, and also well over a year ago.

Fwiw, the problems with Office and CS are entirely of Microsoft's and Adobe's making. Apple had been telling them for years that they needed to drop their legacy coding environment (and hence code) and get with the programme but they wilfully ignored the warnings before it was too late. If they had been using XCode sooner, instead of for just these latest releases, then these problems would not have existed.

So what should Apple have done? Crippled their OS for the benefit of two laggard developers thus making all others suffer, or push on and forget those two developers, especially as they are both ones that have shown scant regard for the Mac platform and its users for years?

Now, onto Leopard - it has a number of bugs, many very annoying. It's embarrassing that they released it in the shape it is in (10.5.0). However, compared to what else is out there, it is still a much, much better OS and that includes Tiger.

@ tempemeaty

OSX 10.4/10.5 compatibility is more in the vein of Windows 95/98/me compatibility, or Win2000/XP compatibility than say, Vista and Vista SP1 compatibility... OSX 10.4 to 10.5 is not a "Service pack" like most windows people expect when they see a point upgrade, its a feature set change... Just like there were some teething problems between them, they're fairly minor when you say compare XP to vista.

@rens

Just how many software packages did Microsoft break with Vista (including a number of their own)? WHENEVER a new version of an operating system comes out it will break application software (mainly those that use hacks that they shouldn't have).

Running a complete copy of 10.4 inside of a VM is NOT a solution that Apple should have been looking at. Its one thing to do this to allow Windows and Mac code to co-exist (where there's going to be a low degree of interaction between components anyway) but even Microsoft have done nothing worse than the 16 bit windows subsystem, and that because 16 and 32 bit code won't co-exist otherwise.

Apple owns the OSX environment. They provide quite a lot of free developer support (I don't see MS giving full versions of Visual Studio away for free, and they've only recently started providing free cut-down copies). They gave folks plenty of warning that things were changing and that switching to the new IDE was the way forwards. After all this they offer 10.5 to the Mac buying public, who like it rather better than Microsoft buyers like Vista (Leopard is on a bigger percentage of Macs). It's therefore the job of software developers to build code that runs on the platform that their users are using. Conversely those users who NEED to run these programs have the option of staying on 10.4 (or XP in Microsoft's case), in which case they are giving no money to anyone.

re: Oops, Scribus is currently PPC only

The X11 version isn't, and I think they're concentrating on that at the moment. The Aqua version seems to have the same stumbling blocks as OpenOffice and other apps that *should* be able to be ported natively, although that's probably generally available development time.