Got my hands on Leopard this morning, and spent a big chunk of the day upgrading my various machines. On the whole, I’m very pleased. Almost everything is working smoothly, and to my great surprise the OS works well on my aging PowerBook, which has a mere 768MB RAM and a 1.67MHz G4 processor.

My list of observations, problems and gripes is quite short:

• I can’t find any way to get a Smart Folder to search a particular location - it will only offer me the default search locations (the entire hard disk, or my home directory). This is a pain, because I’ve been depending on Smart Folders for keeping my work organised. If anyone’s found a way round this, please let me know.
• The new unified look for windows and the Menu Bar is nice, but a little bit too dark for my liking. Icon-laden toolbars look odd now, as if the icons are struggling to show themselves against the dark metal background.
• Spotlight is loads better. It’s faster, and is giving me the results I want each time I search. I’m going to spend a few days using it as a full time alternative to Quicksilver, just to see if it’s up to the job.
• I love the addition of Wikipedia to Dictionary; and the inclusion of Dictionary results in the Spotlight results pane
• Conversions in Calculator! Nice. (Is that even new? I’ve only just noticed it.)
• Spaces works well; I’ve tried third-party virtual desktops before but didn’t get on with them very well. I like the way that Command+Tabbing to an app that’s in a different Space quickly flips you to that Space, smoothly sliding the contents of the current Space out of sight.
• Photo Booth’s snazzy backgrounds don’t work quite as smoothly as I’d hoped; but I like the new videoclip recording feature - that might come in useful.