Los Gatos Apple Store In The Dark: 1/160s f/1.8 ISO1600 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8, adjusted

Buying Leopard at the Los Gatos Apple store yesterday was not quite the smooth experience I had been expecting. I arrived about 45 minutes before the opening and found about 50 people in line. By 6pm there were a couple of hundred waiting, and the doors were flung open. Lots of cheering, clapping, and all that.

But not a lot of light.

The power for much of downtown Los Gatos has gone out about ten minutes to six, and there was no light in the store except the emergency lighting and the glow of iPods and laptops. And no cash registers, mobile credit card scanners, wireless networks, all the usual equipment needed to carry on business. So we were herded in in batches of about 20 while employees imprinted our credit cards by hand and wrote out receipts on paper.

I installed Leopard and the developer tools onto a spare partition on my internal drive. I ran into the problem of internal drives not showing up in the installer (fix: just wait -- it's checking the volumes. Or do what I did, fritz with Disk Utility trying in vain to make it appear). The first impression is that Leopard is smooth and fast. Animations have a snap to them. Things happen without delay.

I've been going through all my important applications looking at what needs updating and what is OK. SuperDuper isn't quite there yet. Nor is Transmit. M-Audio drivers are, as usual, way behind (and probably still buggy). My Wacom tablet is supported. Printers worked right away. I have to update Quicken, and I will update iWork and iLife. Photoshop Elements 3 is very old and may or may not work, but there are alternatives to that. OmniGraffle has a beta. Aperture has an update. NeoOffice is ready. Snapz Pro X is ready too. I'll probably move over to Leopard in a week or so.

The developer tools are greatly changed and I have a lot to learn there.

Tags: Leopard, Dark