Well, I finally got my copy of Leopard yesterday morning. On Friday, FedEx mistakingly (although, I don’t know how because I receive about 10 packages a week) delivered my package to 140 MYSTREETNAME AVE instead of 140 MYSTREETNAME STREET. The nice elderly couple that got the package delivered it to me, since FedEx wanted to wait till Monday. Thank god. I was so excited, and then the let down of FedEx and their delivery issues.

It’s been 24 hours since the install was completed on my 12″ PowerBook. I won’t be installing on any of my real production systems until I verify that all the software required for my photo workflow is working correctly. The 12″ PowerBook is an essential system, however, primarily for email, web browsing, generating estimates, etc. Much of this I estimate will be stable.

I did a complete Erase & Install, as there was a lot of junk on the machine that I could easily get rid of. I backed up my home folder to an external drive before doing so. Now I can pick and choose what I need to the system. The entire install process took about an hour.

Getting my archive of 30,000 emails from MAIL on my Tiger machine to Leopard was as easy as a drag and drop. Thanks to .Mac all my mail accounts were easily created, bookmarks were sync’d, iCal brought up to its state before formatting the drive, address book in sync and passwords were saved.

iTunes took forever to import my 36GB of music. There should have been an easier way other than import to do this, and there probably is…

I got an error when trying to install Office. I believe it’s just a problem with the actual installer, rather than the software. I’m sure a work around will come up for this quickly.

I haven’t tried to install Adobe Creative Suite 2 (YES CS2, I haven’t upgraded to CS3 yet as upgrading on 10 systems is quite costly) yet, although I have seen mixed reviews about its performance. Phase One has publicly announced that CaptureOne 3.7.7 will not install on Leopard, however one user on their forums said that it is only a problem with the installer. He dragged and dropped the application files from an archive of his applications before installing to the applications folder and it worked perfectly. I may try that just to test performance, but until CaptureOne production ready and stable I cannot move my production systems over to Leopard just yet, it is too essential of a tool for me to ignore. For those using the Beta of CaptureOne 4.0, it is working and confirmed by several on PhaseOne’s forums.

Even on this OLD 12″ 1.5Ghz PowerBook G4, I find that Leopard is running very smooth and FAST. I had expected some of the new animations to run poorly, but it has turned out to be exactly the opposite. Everything in general is running much faster and smoother than it did on Tiger… Of course, some of that performance increase may have to do with the fact that my most recent install of tiger was about 2 years old.

About the author

Kevin Michael Reed
Kevin Michael Reed (Google+, Facebook) is a fashion & beauty photographer and producer/director based in New York City and Los Angeles, CA. He is the President/CEO of RedFOG Visual Media, a production company in New York City, and a partner in Passion of Photography, Inc, a company dedicated to teaching photographers and sharing our passion through charitable causes. Kevin has lectured and hosted workshops throughout the United States and the world teaching photographers the business and creative sides of photography. (Kevin's Fashion & Beauty Photography Portfolio can be seen here).