Well, I've been running Leopard for two weeks now and I'm starting to see productivity benefits from it, which is about what I'd expect from such a major operating system upgrade.

At TSP, we've been through all of the system upgrades and have seen good ones and bad ones. Leopard is "on par" for Apple's generally good record of software upgrades.

The first week is fraught with inefficiencies that result from change - and I'm talking change in general. Like buying a new car or getting a new TV, things aren't quite where they were before. While many of the cosmetic or interface changes were made to make things more "sensible" for people that come to the Mac for the first time, those of us that have been using Macs for years will find that items in the system preferences have moved a little bit here and there. Luckily, one finds the new switches and toggles quickly and things are back on track.

Add to that the usual incompatibilities and it can make the first week downright annoying. So far, our list includes a few significant issues:

- VPN Tracker 4 doesn't work on Intel Macs
- Filemaker scripts with automated printing can break and need to be adjusted (for a large Filemaker database, this can be very time-consuming)
- Some not well-written Java apps can have issues with the Java version used in Leopard for Intel. In our case, this breaks our 3-year old credit card authorization solution on Leopard Macs
- OS 9 Classic doesn't run - not even on a Power PC Mac (it's not supposed to, just a lot of people overlook this when updating)
- Spotlight doesn't want to index my hard drives

Like I said around Day 2, none of these are show stoppers.

Of course, if that's all that Leopard brought, there would be no point in switching. But already, I've found that some of the 300 changes that Leopard has brought to the Mac have been helping me get work done. Here's some quick highlights:

Snappy Performance

Leopard is just more responsive. Whether it's restarting, updating icons on the desktop, or connecting to servers, things are just that much more polished. It's always been an annoyance of those of us that have used Mac OS 9 - the Finder in OS X has never been as snappy. I know that it has great new features like column view and, now in Leopard, icons that preview PDFs and Pages docs, but it all comes at a performance hit, even with machines that are easily 10 times faster than OS 9 generation machines.

Finally, Leopard Finder performance is getting to the level that it can keep up with me. That's good.

In addition, other features, like printing and spotlight are that much faster. In particular, printing has been really annoying, especially compared to Windows XP boxes. The one thing that Windows has always had over Macs has been printing speed - from "File... Print" to first page out. It's a combination of the printing system and the PCL language regularly used by Windows printers - but for an office environment, that extra 1/2-1 second for the print dialog box is really really annoying.

Leopard improves that, but honestly, it's still not as snappy as I want it to be. That being said, I don't know how much slower it really is compared to Vista for instance.

Spaces

This will be, I predict, the unsung hero of OS X Leopard. Spaces isn't a technical marvel, but it's a workflow improvement that, if integrated into your workflow properly, can make a huge difference to productivity.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, I read that multitasking can reduce your effectiveness on doing a task by 25%. So checking your email while working on a posting something to your blog, for instance, could in fact reduce your effectiveness of doing the blog post first, then checking email.

It's a matter of focus and giving your brain "elbow room" - to mix metaphors. Spaces does exactly that on your desktop.

When you make it work for you, it's brilliant. Mail and web surfing can be on one space while your project of the day can be in another - separating your desktops into two separate work areas. And unlike multiple monitors, these desktops are not visible at the same time (although your Dock and desktop items are always on every Space). You navigate through the 4 available spaces using a combination of the Control key and the arrow keys.

One of the coolest features is the ability to move something from space to space. Just take a window and drag it to the side of the window - and if your Spaces feature is activated, it will move that window to the other space. So if you need to move a web page from your "email and web browsing" Space to your project Space, just drag it to the right border of your window.

Honestly, it's hopeless to explain this feature with screenshots or in words. You have to use it to see how it benefits you. But once you do, it makes a huge difference.

As Week 2 continues, I hope to find our users more gems in Leopard. I'll report them as I find them!