zerolight

Anyone else changed their Leopard icons? I’ve been running with a mixture of Agua Leopard Folders, iCandy, and the default Leopard icons for a few months now. In fact, I’ve forgotten what the original folders look like. I’m even using them at work on Windows XP! These Agua icons, as below, are available here.

I tweaked the 2D Leopard Dock which I thought looked ropey, to make a smokey version of Tiger’s dock. I’ll live with it for a little while to see if I prefer it to my smokey 3D dock.

I’m a big fan of Apple’s new OS X Leopard, even of the glass menus and the 3D dock. I do however quite like the smoke look that’s popular in Mac applications these days. So with the help of Fireworks I set about smokifying the 3D dock.

Apple launched the latest revision of it’s excellent OS X operating system last night. Does it live up to the hype? Yes. And No. The problem is that OS X Tiger was an almost perfect operating system, so much so that even Microsoft’s Windows Vista did little to close the gap. Whilst Leopard pushes further ahead of the Windows platform with some useful new features, and a lot of polished eye-candy, it still feels very much business as usual if you’re already using Tiger. Almost anticlimactically so.

Yet beneath all the familiarity, there’s still a lot of great new features. Time Machine is probably it’s crowning achievement, providing a fantastic piece of technology to ensure your data is safely backed up to an external HDD. Most of the new features concentrate on perfecting the user interface and improving your work flow. You can read up on them all here, and check out some screenshots in my flickr set.

Is it sad to get excited about a new OS? I can’t wait for the new version of OS X from Apple. Check out the preview here. I’m loving Time Machine, the new Desktop – especially Stacksl, and QuickLook and the new Finder look interesting.