Many of my tasks, at Orbeon or personal, involve PDF documents:

• Sending invoices to customers (no way we are sending Word or Excel documents!)
• Archiving, viewing and searching documents scanned with the ScanSnap scanner
• Viewing faxes received by email
• Saving online articles for reference, further reading or printing (until we get good e-paper I prefer to read long articles on good old dead trees)
  

I was already using PDF a lot on Windows, but that required installing a free viewing tool (Adobe Reader) and a paying PDF printing tool (Adobe Acrobat).

When I switched to the Mac back in 2006, I appreciated right away the built-in ability to view and print PDF documents without buying a third-party tool. But Leopard adds even more to the mix:

• The new Quick Look feature in the Finder and Mail is not perfect, but excellent nonetheless: just press the space bar (Finder) or a button (Mail) and you have a super-fast preview of almost any document or attachment, including PDF. You can even scroll down multi-page documents and keep the preview open while navigating to other documents. (To be fair, OS X should have had this for years but better late than never.)
• The new Preview allows you to insert, delete, rotate, and reorganize pages in a PDF document and save the result.
• The much improved Spotlight automatically indexes PDF documents for (almost) instant content search.

Windows XP has nothing of the sort built-in. Vista has XPS, which sounds cool but, no matter how good it may be, is today nowhere as widespread as PDF and that alone does not make it a viable option for me at the moment. Leopard definitely wins this one.

And by that, I don't mean that it beats the crap out of Microsoft Windows, I really mean that Mac OS X application windows sometimes disappear when you use Spaces. You can't cmd-tab to them anymore or otherwise see them again. They are not just minimized or hidden, they are in no man's land.

I hit this over the last few days, and I am not the only one. See this discussion: Disappearing windows in spaces.

The workaround of disabling Spaces and then re-enabling works for me, but it's quite an annoyance to have to resort to that as you need to move windows to their proper space again for applications which aren't assigned to a particular space.

Windows Explorer has long had an option to show the path of the current folder in the title bar of the window. This is a very convenient feature which was lacking in the Finder so far.

Leopard now has something similar. It's called the "Path Bar". I stumbled upon it by chance when doing a search with Spotlight: the result window had this funny path at the bottom. It turns out that you can enable it for other windows by going to the "View" menu and selecting "Show Path Bar".

The Path Bar may even be better than just showing the raw path in the window title: you see icons and can double click on path elements. So yay for a useful improvement in Leopard!

Here are a few of my issues with it:

• It crashed at least once.
• It feels quite slow, certainly slower than the Windows Remote Desktop, for example. Maybe because it's based on VNC and sending around pixmaps all the time?
• The clipboard is not automatically shared. You have to send it around explicitly. This means that you can't just copy and paste a URL around without going to a menu inbetween (or click on an icon).
• I restarted my wireless router with a screen sharing session open. The session just hung and was not able to pick up the connection again. I had to restart the screen sharing session.
• The "New..." connection menu entry just opens a dialog with a single text field. There is no way to browse from a visible computer on the network. Annoying if you just had to close the connection (see aforementioned problem) and just want to reopen it. You then have to go back to the finder.
• If you show the toolbar (with three miserable icons), you have a "Fit screen in window" option, which it turns out is the same a the "Turn Scaling On/Off" menu entry. Mmmh, did anybody at Apple even looked at this app?

I wouldn't say Screen Sharing is useless, but this is a version 1.0 and it shows.

Since Apple still doesn't think that supporting a free, fast, unemcumbered, lossless audio codec is a good idea, I had been using Play on Tiger. Unfortunately, it is broken on Leopard. Version 0.2 doesn't start anymore at all. The good news is that the author is working on it. In fact, the latest builds (using r1057 at the moment) at least start and seem to, well, play, but I don't seem to be able to import anything into the Play library, for example.

As good as Play will eventually be on Leopard (and it is likely to remain a much more lightweight alternative to iTunes), Apple really needs to support FLAC. Who needs the Apple Lossless format anyway? So go Apple, put an engineer on it for a few days and support FLAC already.

Last night, I figured (completely irrationally) that I would take the jump and upgrade to Leopard. Here is my first feedback after one day of work with it:

• I got the infamous "blue screen" upon restart during install. I followed option C and luckily thing went smoothly after that. I don't know yet which app installed ApplicationEnhancer.bundle.
• As I already knew, Java windows don't play nice with Spaces. All the Java apps remain stubbornly in the first space and won't move. Also, if you are in a space other than the first one and cmd-tab to a Java app, nothing happens: you have to explicitly go back to the space containing the Java app. It's not a showstopper, but it should be fixed.
• IntelliJ has some random problems with the tabs in the files section: they sometimes, behave erratically. This is annoying and I hope that IntelliJ >= 7.0.2 will fix this. It seem that changing look and feel may work around the issue, but IntelliJ then looks utterly ugly.
  
• Parallels seems to run fine, except that Windows drives don't show up in the Finder.
• I had no immediate obvious issues with Firefox, Thunderbird, or Tomcat.

So I can't really say "so far so good", but it seems like things should be workable.

I am hereby (13949712720901ForOSX) casting my vote for Java 6 on Leopard. But even more importantly, I am asking Apple to realize that good communication is of the essence.

As much as I dislike Windows, I wouldn't have bought a USD 3000+ Mac Book Pro without Java on it, and many people I know wouldn't have either. I wouldn't be considering using Macs at home, or thinking about getting some of my family members to use Macs, if I wasn't using one daily in the first place. So you see, there is a little bit of a snowball effect here.

It is very important for us developers who use Java to know that Apple fully supports it, and plans to fully support it in the future. Delays in the release of new JDKs on the Mac are already annoying enough. Not even knowing whether we'll get those new releases is unacceptable.