My observations after spending a whole day now with the new version of Mac OS X, “Leopard,”:

• I really hate the translucent menu bar. For my background I use the Propaganda tiles, switching every 15 minutes. Some of those backgrounds make for a pretty ugly menu bar. It’s just a little too transparent for me. I’d like a slider to adjust the opacity, or, at the very least, a checkbox so I could turn the effect off completely. There’s OpaqueMenuBar, but it crashes on my machine. The new black Apple logo and Spotlight logos are very nice, and the slight embossed look is also welcome.

• The system menus (pull-down, pop-up) now have rounded corners (for pulldown menus, just the bottom two corners), and have had their opacity reduced. So far, I haven’t found them to be too transparent to be a problem, like some have reported. In addition to the translucency, there’s a bit of a blur applied on the layers behind the menu. (And the menu bar, too, for that matter). This effect I really like.

• Love the new look. A bit darker (I’ve always been a graphite person, myself, anyway. My first modern Mac was a graphite iMac), and finally some consistency. There’s still ugly stepchildren, but finally the mix of brushed metal, white plastics, and ‘unified’ toolbars is gone. Deo Gratis. The extra shadow on the foreground window, and the more pallid look of the background windows is also very nice. I would still like a third-party utility to fade or desaturate background windows, though.

• The new Dock is as bad as everyone feared. I don’t leave mine at the bottom, anyway, but, oh, man, is it awful. The first thing I do on a new Mac installation is install Quicksilver. If I used the Dock at the bottom, I’d have a new first thing: The noglass tweak to get rid of the pseudo-3d Dock. With that tweak (or the default when anchored to the sides) I think the Dock looks nice and clean, perhaps even better than Tiger, now with a nice outline, rounded corners, and the bright white LED look for active apps. Nevertheless, even today, NeXT and WindowMaker had a much more useful Dock.

• Speaking of the Dock, iCal’s new icon is fantastic. Along with how useful iCal can finally be, the icon in the Dock now properly shows the current month and date, even when not running. I can’t tell you what a difference this seemingly insignificant change can make.

• Along with iCal, Mail.app is now really useful. It’s hard to say right now if I can entirely switch over from mutt, but I’m going to try. It’ll take some time for me to get used to not moving through messages with the vi keys, and not editing messages with vim. But the integrated ToDos and notes, along with an impressive speed bump (at least right now) puts it in the running. I’m going to give it a shot.

• Speaking of useful, Spotlight can now be utilized as an effective tool. It was way to slow to be useful on my Powerbook under Tiger. When I moved to the MacBook Pro, it was faster, but still not as useful as I had hoped, and I kept noticing when it was indexing. With improvements that comes with a second-generation product, as well as calculator and dictionary integration, Spotlight’s finally a usable part of Mac OS X.

• Time Machine has been the most hyped feature of Leopard, and it deserves it. It properly began to back up both of the internal hard drives on my MBP when I plugged in my half-terabyte FW800 drive and clicked yes on the Time Machine prompt. The first backup is very slow, though, much slower than an rsync. I excluded the second drive from it for now, and will put it back in the mix when I can devote some time to it. Just the thought of not having to think about backing up is so freeing. I’m very happy to throw my scripts away, and take the recurring task off my Newton. I was concerned about what would happen when my external drive (which stays on my desk at work) is disconnected, worried that it would be unhappy, or worse, I’d get hourly prompts that Time Machine failed. No need to worry; Time Machine does the right thing, silently waiting until the drive is back. Given how Time Machine actually does its job, it’s easy to see why this works so well.

• Spaces is a fine implementation of virtual desktops, and is sure to get finer now that it’s part of the OS. As with the Dock, though, I still prefer the implementation we had years ago with WindowMaker. The muscle memory of switching workspaces feels good again.

• So far, all my apps seem to work just fine; Missing Sync needs an update, that Mark/Space has announced, but, other than that, no issues to report.

• Though I never do upgrades on my own machine (for me, it’s backup home, reformat & clean install, reload apps, restore home), the couple upgrades I’ve done have been smooth and error-free (we bought a Family Pack, 5 licenses for less than the cost of two).

All in all, this is a worthy upgrade. Time Machine alone is worth it; the rest is just really good creme filling. I can’t speak to the hordes of upgrades for developers in this release. Indeed, even with all the good stuff users are getting, it really looks like Leopard is an upgrade for the developers. We can expect some incredible apps coming from the talented developers for the Mac, with all the new tools they’ve now got available.