Diary Entry

We’ve got Leopard, what do you want to know?

Filed under: , ,

Today we snagged our copy of Apple’s latest version of OS X, Leopard — something one or two of you may be slightly familiar with. So besides all the stuff found on the 300 features page, besides all the stuff you’ve seen in the months of public betas, what do you want to know? We’ll be here to do our best in illuminating the whole experience for you during the crucial, painful next few hours wherein you’ve nothing left to do but wait patiently for launch and ask Engadget questions about the technical minutiae. Let’s kick this thing off:

  • Apple confirmed it: no backing up with Time Machine over the drives you have connected via USB to your Airport Extreme. Also, no Time Machine backups to SMB shares — AFP network shares only. Again, yes, Time Machine can back up over the network, but ONLY to AFP shares, ok?
  • When plugging in a disk Time Machine does its song and dance, but what we wanted to know is whether it requires you dedicate that disk for backup use exclusively. The answer: it doesn’t, you can go on using your external drive’s free space as you please, but Time Machine will also take advantage of selected disks for backup. And no, if it’s an HFS-formatted disk you’re plugging in, it won’t ask you to format it.
  • Classic support wasn’t killed for any technological reason, but because Apple felt that it was finally time to move on, and that support was no longer necessary. Sorry QuarkXPress 4 users!
  • Apple’s fancy new screen sharing is VNC based, meaning you can use it to connect to any VNC-shared system, Apple or otherwise. However you can’t use the iChat screen-share with anything but other Apple machines, despite being VNC.
  • Nope, there’s no YouTube in Front Row.
  • Sorry, syncing notes to your iPhone won’t work either. Well, not entirely. The notes Mail.app keeps are actually just HTML email messages in a special folder, and if you use IMAP it will sync that special notes folder to your server. So in theory, if you have IMAP and you access your IMAP email through your iPhone or other device, you can view / edit those notes. But no, they don’t sync to the notes your iPhone’s native notes app keeps.
  • Yeah, the R2D2 “Apple hologram effect” didn’t make the final cut, either. Help us Phil Schiller, you’re our only hope.
  • The upgrade took about an hour on our 1st gen MacBook Pro (2GB RAM); expect it to eat up another ~3GB of space.
  • Yeah, you can’t add drives to the dock You can still add drives and folders! It just doesn’t always work when we pull it over from Finder.
  • We can confirm Leopard supports A2DP! (It’s a little buggy, but it’s definitely working.)
  • More questions answered after the break.

Continue reading We’ve got Leopard, what do you want to know?

 

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!