Leopard so far

This Thursday, I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It was a holiday over here, so I had four days (Thursday to Sunday) to work out the wrinkles in case something didn't work. I did the usual precautions: mirror the boot drive to an external drive, boot from the mirror to make sure it works, then shut down the computer, physically disconnect the external drive, and only after all this start the OS install.

I decided to give myself a chance to avoid reinstalling everything, and thus chose the "Upgrade" option instead of a clean install. After an hour of DVD consistency check and an hour of copying files, the machine rebooted and I was greeted by a working Leopard. It went incredibly smoothly.

I proceeded checking whether everything works. First on the list was Cisco VPN Client which I need for work. I was sceptical, as the Cisco VPN client integrates tightly into the system, installing kernel extensions for networking. To my very pleasant surprise - it worked! Next was ssh, which also worked. VMWare also works, no problems there.

Then there's some more arcane stuff:

An unsupported printer driver for my Xerox Windows-GDI printer, cross compiled to a PowerPC binary from a Linux CUPS driver - works!

My heavily customized, start-on-boot MySQL setup - works!

There's of course no Java 6 yet, as discussed earlier, but the good news is Java 5 is at least upgraded from 1.5.0_07 (found in Tiger) to currently latest 1.5.0_13 in Leopard.

Eclipse 3.2.2 works overall. There are keyboard issues though. I.e. if I press Command+Shift+U ("Occurrences in File"), it brings up a context menu (to choose among "Identifier", "Implementing Methods", and "Throwing Exceptions"). However, both the menu and editor window receive the keyboard events for arrows, and when I hit Return, the context menu disappears altogether (without performing the selected operation), and the key is interpreted by the editor (i.e. inserts a new line...). That's one minor annoyance.

One of my pet peeves is also fixed finally: I can finally use the Return key to activate the "Allow" button in Keychain Access' "Copy to Clipboard" dialog. Oh, progress! Previously, if I didn't want mousing, I had to do Tab-Tab-Tab-Return. Still no keyboard equivalent to invoke the said dialog though... Also, the "new password assistant" palette now syncs with the password field, so I needn't copy/paste a generated password back to the main editor window of Keychain Access anymore. Yeah, small things, but they do matter.

Also, there was something amiss in my user account in Tiger - lots of programs forgot their license number when I logged off (Delicious Library and Disco most prominently), and it also lost my keyboard shortcuts whenever I logged off, so after a while I lost the habit of using custom shortcuts, as you can imagine... Upgrading to Leopard fixed both issues.

The system is noticeably snappier. Tiger had the tendency to stall under heavy load. "Heavy" is when I run a Terracotta server and two clustered Tomcat instance on the MacBook Pro, talking to a special Linux appliance running in VMWare, occasionally recompiling the code or interactively debugging from Eclipse. Oh, and running a BitTorrent client in the background to boot it. Now, Tiger did have issues with this even with 2GB of RAM, to the point of UI freezing up for 20-30 seconds whenever I switched applications with Command-Tab. Leopard tolerates such loads much better. I guess virtual memory management got smarter with regard to handling applications' working sets, and there are probably lots of minor kernel optimizations and reentrancy improvements. Overall, noticeably better. Lot less beachball sightings.

As for games: Diablo II works nicely even on an Intel mac (it's a PowerPC binary). Of course, only when you install it using the "carbonized" installer, the version on the CD requires Classic subsystem, which is gone from Leopard.

Age of Empires III has issues though. In single player, all is dandy, but playing in network is completely borked by network sync issues. Few seconds into a multiplayer session it'll say "Out of sync. Exit and try again". Truth be told, the other machine still had Tiger on it when my son and me tried it; I installed Leopard on it since.

After two days when I was sufficiently convinced that it works okay, I installed it on my wife's iMac G5 as well, and faced an interesting limitation. You know those custom iChat backgrounds Apple showcases as new iChat features? The ones where you can have the room behind your back replaced with a moving Niagara falls scenery? Well, you won't get them on a PowerPC Mac. I wanted to try it out for fun between our two machines, but the iMac's 2.1GHz G5 CPU is apparently not strong enough for them. Intel Macs only. Now, come on, Apple, I don't buy it. You probably just had a nice hand-optimized assembly with MMX and SSE instructions in there somewhere, and couldn't be bothered to port it over to PowerPC AltiVec. You know, the one you touted as being the superior vector unit. I think we're experiencing the first signs of PowerPC users falling out of grace. I don't want to sound dramatic, but I mean, I can maybe, just maybe understand a G4 not being strong enough for this task, but a 2.1 GHz G5? What about people with dual or quad G5s? This is a minor, but sad letdown.

Also, my MacBook Pro took on the habit of waking up at precisely 1:00:00 AM every night after the Leopard upgrade, without anything being set in the com.apple.AutoWake.plist file. Since 1 AM in my timezone (GMT+1) is actually midnight GMT, I suspected this to be some stray zero making its way into EFI or something. Pretty much, after I overwrote it by setting "Start or wake up every day" in Energy Saver to 9 AM, the phenomenon went away.

Well, that's it so far. I'm also fooling around with XCode 3. It's a very polished development environment, and I'm toying with the idea of creating some native Mac OS app. Y'know, just to unbox myself a bit from my "server side Java" box and try the "desktop app in Objective-C" world for change.