Last month my Ruby OS9 found itself sharing the house with a 20″ Tiger.
While my OS10 learning curve is slowly flattening out, I continue to be frustrated and annoyed by the delays to directives from my mouse. (clicking a bookmark into action, manipulating text.) And often enough a sublime laid-back copacetic outlook is not enuf – I find myself bailing out and coming back to the darned click-on action.

Nonetheless, about Winter solstice time, I expect that a spotted Leopard will muscle striped Tiger aside. Poor Tiger. Poor Ruby.

You mention: “but without a remote I’m not sure how useful it would be”.

But it seems that’s one can use a keyboard (bluetooth, if you want to be across the room) and Front Row’s keyboard access commands to evoke it and watch content, not needing a remote.

Here’s one persons experience:
http://discussions.apple.com/t.....8;tstart=0

One user writes “I’m using the new BT Apple keyboard and have asigned front row to launch from F6. I can now appreciate the small size of the new BT Keyboard now as it sits very comfortably in my hand/lap from where i can now use front row.”

However, i am amazed at the accolades that Apple is getting for Leopard. i couldn’t wait to get my hands on it and had it on pre-order for months. But, i was amazed when i installed it how simple usability has declined with this “upgrade.�

Stacks, for example, removes the capacity to pull a folder (or an entire hard drive for that matter) into the dock and to be able to thereby easily navigate the subfolders contained therein. Stacks appears to go only one level deep, so the user has to open the folders to then dig into subsequent ones to obtain the file being searched for.

Then there is that silly Windows-like drive-bar that shows up in every single folder that is opened in the finder. Like this is necessary? Not only is it ugly, but it makes every single window far larger than it needs to be. In 10.4 this side bar could be hidden by a simple click in the folder window on its pane, but now, the only way to rid oneself of it is to collapse the entire tool bar (and it still has a habit of showing up). This annoying side bar causes folders to be entirely too large, ugly, and to take up screen real-estate.

The cover flow? Again, one level deep. And when clicked on, the folder that is chosen appears BEHIND the coverflow folder. How useful is this?

Time Machine? Although you can tell it what you DO NOT want it to back up, you can not tell it what you WANT it to do. For example, i can’t tell it i want it to watch specific folders on my hard drives to back those up rather than backing up the entire hard drive.

The download folder? Fine. But what idiot didn’t know how to designate a folder to place all their downloads into in the first place? Please.

This OS has lots of “pretty� features. But these features hardly increase ease of use, nor do they increase productivity. In my estimation, Apple has sorely screwed up with this outright UGLY thing they refer to as an “upgrade,�

It’s a little pricey at $25 a year or a $65 one time charge.