Actually, I’ve been using Leopard for a few months at work, but when we got hold of the real thing I finally got round to cleaning off both my development machine and my laptop and doing a full re-install on both.

So far, I have to say, my reaction to it is very positive. I haven’t discovered many revolutionary changes yet (I haven’t played with Time Machine, although I think it could be just what I want), but I’ve found lots of small improvements and nice tweaks.

The interface changes are a bit dour, with the whole thing feeling slightly more corporate and less glam, but on the whole they have improved consistency which can only be a good thing. And everything feels a little bit slicker and smoother. It might even be faster, although sometimes that can be caused more by the overall spring-cleaning than by the new OS, so I’m not certain.

The biggest improvements so far are in the general area of networking. Integration seems to be a lot better, it’s much easier to just find and use network devices. Finally, all the PCs on our office network just show up instantly in the network browser, as do printers etc. The user and network administration has had some nice tweaks: single-use guest logins and sharing-only users are both neat additions.

Best of all, they’ve actually put a feature into Mail that I asked for! You can now choose a smart folder that Mail will use when calculating the unread count to put in the little red badge it shows in the Dock. This is excellent for me - I tend to have a lot of unread mail but I have one or two smart folders which filter out the stuff that I actually need to deal with right now, so having the red badge show only when there is something to look at in one of these folders is really handy.

Early days yet, but so far, so good.