Lessons Learned
Last night I stupidly installed a beta of MacOS X 10.6, the most recent one to come down the pike. I say stupidly because I neglected to run a backup before the installation. I though it'd be a cinch to make a backup after the fact, because while there are a few apps which don't like 10.6, most 10.5-compatible apps seem to work the same. Not so with SuperDuper, my go-to tool for making backup images of my hard drive. The drive with the 10.5 installer on it is a bit of a pain to set up (it won't be so in the future, but this won't happen again) so I decided to take a step back in time to 10.4. No-go. SD wouldn't run correctly under Tiger. So then it was time to drag out the drive the 10.5 installer lives on and set it up. I'm happy to report I was able to install 10.5, run the backup and then reformat the internal drive and do a proper nuke & pave.
The moral of the story is, no matter how sure you are that things will be OK, be sure to do a full backup before playing with beta versions of MacOS X. They may be buggy and unpredictable.
That aside, I am very impressed with 10.6's progress. Applications seemed to launch faster, even old, bulky ones like FireFox 2. The UI seems to be a little different as well. There are lots of little things which I can't adequately describe to you which have been changed, some for the better others for the worse, and some which make no discernible difference. Menus appear now to be completely opaque, which is fine. 10.5's menus were much more opaque than 10.4's. Transparent menus never made much sense to me in general (as transparency in UI elements can lead to things looking more cluttered than they actually are, confusing the eye and causing general mayhem) so it's not something I'll shed any tears over.
If everything worked the way it was meant to, and I've no doubt that this will be the case by the time 10.6 actually launches this year or next, I'd've stuck with it. As it is, I'm back here in 10.5-land for the foreseeable future, and you know...that's really not a bad place to be.
The moral of the story is, no matter how sure you are that things will be OK, be sure to do a full backup before playing with beta versions of MacOS X. They may be buggy and unpredictable.
That aside, I am very impressed with 10.6's progress. Applications seemed to launch faster, even old, bulky ones like FireFox 2. The UI seems to be a little different as well. There are lots of little things which I can't adequately describe to you which have been changed, some for the better others for the worse, and some which make no discernible difference. Menus appear now to be completely opaque, which is fine. 10.5's menus were much more opaque than 10.4's. Transparent menus never made much sense to me in general (as transparency in UI elements can lead to things looking more cluttered than they actually are, confusing the eye and causing general mayhem) so it's not something I'll shed any tears over.
If everything worked the way it was meant to, and I've no doubt that this will be the case by the time 10.6 actually launches this year or next, I'd've stuck with it. As it is, I'm back here in 10.5-land for the foreseeable future, and you know...that's really not a bad place to be.