Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

Yes, yes, all the cool kids installed Leopard a month ago and the big reviews are all done with.

I put off buying a copy because the G5 iMac at home has been going largely unused for a while — it sits downstairs in the living room and is occasionally used to check TV guides — but I finally got around to snarfing a copy this week with the idea of poking at Front Row and seeing if the TV-out support is any better than it was last time

I tried.Haven’t actually got around to trying TV-out yet. Front Row on Leopard breaks Perian’s support for subtitles — lovely — but the playback of VIDEO_TS folders is nice stuff and if our TV could take VGA it’d be a no-brainer to use the iMac for that. S-video… not so sure. Converting VGA->YUV Component seems to be a bit of a dark art with several rather expensive options available, and it may be better to simply wait until we replace the TV with something that has DVI/HDMI inputs and get a Mini instead.

As to the rest of Leopard… Loving Spaces. It’s a nice implementation of virtual desktops. Safari 3 seems to be doing OK so far, rending some sites (like Bigpond Movies) that have given me a little trouble on Firefox with no problems at all.

The new Terminal is shiny, and I wish I had a Leopard-capable machine at work for that alone. Why there isn’t a usable tabbed terminal on Windows that doesn’t cost a bunch is beyond me — I’ve resorted to a Gnome 2 install via Blastwave into a Solaris zone then running gnome-terminal via the Cygwin X server.System generally is fast.

Not a fan of the translucent menubar but am getting over it. The dock is less stupid on the side of the screen, I believe there’s a hack to make it do the same thing at the bottom but I’ve always preferred it on a side anyway.

My one real complaint so far is that writing a DVD seems to result in occasional system pauses. Could be the media I’m using, or the application, don’t recall it happening on Tiger.

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