The 3D Dock sucks. Much hash has been made about why it sucks, but sometimes the gestalt view of the layman is the most telling. On first boot, on my Macbook with the glossy screen, there were so many glares and reflections - some real, some virtual - that I couldn't distinguish... well, anything. It's a visual trainwreck. Using the defaults command to make it 2D is better, but still aesthetically inferior to the 10.4 dock. I guess I'll be browsing at leoparddocks.com.
The translucent menu bar is irritating. Not so much that I want to pluck my eyes out, but it's harder to read and it doesn't even look cool. It's just pointless.
And the thing with the folders in the dock is insane. How can that be a useful idea for anyone, anywhere? I was looking forward to the Downloads folder with the fanout effect, but that shapeshifting icon thing was just too irritating and I had to take it out of my dock. Please give me a haxie to disable that.
I like the unified look, but I still hate the rounded recessed buttons of Apple Mail compared to the metallic raised buttons of, say, Safari. If you open Apple Mail, Safari, and iChat, and set them side-by-side, guess which one still doesn't look "unified"? If someone with clout at Apple is in love with those recessed buttons (El Jobso?) then why haven't they had their way with other apps like Safari? At least then we'd have the "unity" in "unified".
On the other hand, Apple Mail, traditionally a performance dog since at least 10.3, is much more snappy in Leopard. Props for that, but I always thought that Apple Mail in Tiger, with its weird buttons and poor performance, felt like a stepchild compared to the other bundled apps. Now at least it feels like a peer, even with the odd buttons.
The system as a whole feels much faster, even if it isn't - but I think it really is. Windows drag smoother, minimize faster, Dashboard loads faster (remember in Tiger, the first time you'd go to Dashboard after a reboot, and everything would strain as all the widgets loaded at once? No longer noticeable.)
Quick look is awesome. PDFs, Word docs, text files, source code, movies, iChat transcripts... get a look at any of them without having to open an app. Is there a hotkey for toggling full screen mode without going to the mouse?
Cover flow of directories: Originally I wrote "meh. Not for me." but I take that back. If you're not a big iPhoto user, as I am not, you probably have some folders full of images that are not being managed by iPhoto. Cover flow + quick look is a fun and convenient way to browse those folders.
When you select Show All from a Spotlight search, you now get a real Finder window and not some bizarre supernumerary window. Hurray!
To many people (but, admittedly, probably not most people) Spaces is more of an overdue item than a gee-whiz item. Unix, X11, virtual desktops, old-timers, here's a nickel, blah blah. I used to be a big fan of virtual desktops, so much that I used and loved DesktopManager when I first switched from Linux to OS X. Then when Tiger came out, it broke DesktopManager. After that, I learned to make good use of Exposé and learned to live without virtual desktops. Time will tell if I re-incorporate Spaces into my workflow or not. Binding applications to specific Spaces is cool, and the way that Spaces works with Exposé is cool. I'll probably try it, but I don't automatically assume I'll keep it.
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