Liveblogging The Leopard UpgradeLiveblogging The Leopard Upgrade

My wife and I just got back from geek date night: A visit to the local Apple retailer to pick up a copy of Leopard, along with some other schwag, followed by dinner at Souplantation. We like to live large, my wife and I. I'm about to jump in to upgrading this system to Leopard. Bookmark this page for the thrilling play-by-play.

Or, rather, hopefully, the not-so-thrilling play-by-play. Thrilling would mean that things go wrong. We're hoping for boring here, where everything goes smoothly.

In addition to the Leopard family pack ($199 for up to five Macs -- we only need two), I bought his 'n hers EZQuest Monsoon Firewire/USB 2 Hard Drives, with 320 GB capacity ($179.99 each). I've really been haphazard about backing up. It's past time for me to start a regime of regular, verified backups. It's especially important to have your system completely backed up when doing a significant operating system upgrade.

We did our shopping at Crywolf, the local Apple specialty store in San Diego. They gave out free stuffed leopards with the purchase of a Leopard upgrade.

The leopard had a tag on it with a picture of a tiger. The salesman said the tiger was upgraded to a leopard. He seemed to have told that joke many times before, and was pleased with it. I liked it too.

The store, which is not all that big, had 25 people in it at about 7:30 pm tonight, making it full but particularly crowded. I only had to wait a couple of minutes for service.

In addition to Leopard and the disk drives, I also bought one of the new iMac keyboards that Apple released this summer ($49).

Next step: Hook up the hard drive and install SuperDuper, a popular Mac backup application. I'll let you know how it goes. SuperDuper is not yet fully Leopard-compatible, but it'll back up my hard drive before I upgrade, and that's all I really care about today. If the upgrade goes horribly, horribly pear-shaped I'll be able to boot the iMac on the external hard drive, not missing a step of work.

But it won't go horribly, horribly pear-shaped. Everything will go smoothly. Right?

Right?

12:30 am Pacific: Backup complete -- two hours for about 81 GB. While it was working, I watched an episode of The Green Hornet, starring Van Williams and Bruce Lee.

1:50 am: Well, that was all right! I'm coming to you now from my slick new Leopard installation! Total elapsed time 1 hour 15 minutes. Actually, it's not quite done -- it's downloading two software updates in the background. Software updates? On the first day of availability?

TextWrangler, my text editor, works. Quicksilver works. Camino works.

I have several image files on my desktop. Before they were just static icons, now they're thumbnails of the images themselves. Neat. That's one of two major differences between the look of Leopard vs. the older Tiger. The other, of course, is the three-dimensional Dock; icons on the Dock now look like they're standing upright on a transluent shelf, whcih reflects whatever is above it -- I can faintly see the reflection of the text I'm typing here in the shelf below. If I had a background image on my desktop, I'd see the reflection of that as well. Neat.

2 am: I spoke to soon about Quicksilver -- it doesn't call up the menu items in the current application anymore. At least, it doesn't work in TextWrangler.

I'm going to play with a couple of more things here, and then call it a night. I'll close out this blog post, and start a new one tomorrow (or, rather, later today) with some first impressions.

Have you upgraded to Leopard? How'd it go? What do you think? Share your impressions below