After the Upgrade to Leopard: Tips and Information

Today I upgraded my MacBook Pro from Tiger to Leopard, and I thought I would share a few of the things that I noticed or came up against.

• The upgrade took just over an hour from start to finish.
• Mail Act-On, Mail.appetizer, Letterbox View & Mail Badger bundles for Mail.app are all disabled because they fail to work with Mail.app 3.0.
• Aaron Harnly is working on a fix for Letterbox View for Leopard. (see update below)
• Quicksilver will display the QS icon in the dock even though you have that option turned off, unless you upgrade to β52 or higher. (The front page says “Download β51″, but it’s really β52)
• Tiger used to use 500MB of RAM off a fresh reboot, Leopard only uses 300MB out of 2GB.
• Running Monoligual after the Leopard install gave me 1.8GB back.
• Many non-Apple dashboard widgets have odd visual bugs, most likely due to the new Safari 3 HTML rendering.
• Dashboard (DashboardClient process) would hang after the Leopard install. I traced it down to Jud Stephenson’s Adsense Widget, it doesn’t look like he maintains it any longer. Removing it fixed the Dashboard freezes.
• Dave Nanian says that SuperDuper! 2.1.4 won’t do a proper backup on Leopard, people in the comments claim otherwise. I’m going to believe Dave on this one; seems we’ll have to sit tight for an update.
• It’s really hard to distinguish which applications are open with the 3D dock. Following this tip allows you to have a 2D dock, when the dock is on the bottom of the screen.
• AppFresh would crash everytime I started it in Leopard. Deleting ~/Library/Application Support/AppFresh/PersistentStore.sqlite would allow it to start, but checking my apps for updates returns an error: “Operation could not be completed. (NSURLErrorDomain error -1100.)” I haven’t figured out a fix for this yet. (see update below)
• Every user’s crontab is wiped out after the upgrade, so I hope you dumped them to a flat first (ex. crontab -l > crontab.backup)

Update: Oct 26th,2007

• The Preference Pane for MySQL 5.0 doesn’t work, start it from the Terminal with the following command: “/Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM start”

Update: Oct 29th, 2007

• MarketCircle’s Billings application, which I use for to time track and bill freelance customers, has a beta build out to fix Leopard compatibility issues. The new version is 2.5.2.
• Many of the Mail.app bundles can made to work by following the instructions in this thread. I’ve gotten Mail Act-On, Mail.appetizer, Letterbox View working using the trick in the thread. Mail Badger is still very broken.

Update: Oct 30th, 2007

• Graphics and instructions to replace the 3D shelf dock with a “Smoked Glass Dock” has been release. It looks much better than the one that ships with Leopard.

Update: Nov 1st, 2007

• AppFresh works properly if you delete ~/Library/Application Support/AppFresh & /Library/Application Support/AppFresh directories. Thanks to commenter, Will Kerr for pointing that out.

Update: Nov 7th, 2007

• It looks like Dane Harnett has beaten Aaron Harnly to the punch and released a leopard Mail.app plugin for WideScreen mail. It has more features than Harnly’s original Letterbox bundle for Tiger’s Mail.app.

I will add more tips and information as I come across them.

Tags: appfresh, apple, billings, crontab, dashboard widgets, dock, fix, fixes, leopard, letterbox view, mail act on, mail badger, mail.app, maill.appetizer, monolingual, mysql, quicksilver, superduper, tips, upgrade