Since I chose to format my drive before installing Leopard I’ve spent much of today installing and testing software. The news is good, in fact, the news is very good, out of the twenty 3rd party apps I installed nineteen worked. The only thing that didn’t work was the Logitech drivers for my ergonomic keyboard and it turns out that doesn’t matter (more on that in another post). Everything else, including the drivers for my scanner, worked perfectly. Below is the full list of 3rd party apps that I’ve successfully installed and tested on OS X 10.5 Leopard.

[tags]Apple, OS X, Leopard, Compatibility[/tags]

  1. AdiumX
  2. FireFox
  3. Thunderbird (I tried using Mail.app again, still don’t find it meets my needs)
  4. iStat Nano (Dashboard Widget)
  5. Namely (I tried using the improved spotlight as an app launcher, still not quite good enough for me)
  6. The Unarchiver
  7. Perian (Quicklook does not seem to pick up the codecs added by Perian but QuickTime does)
  8. MPlayer OS X
  9. VLC
  10. Flip4Mac (Free version)
  11. iGTD
  12. ImageWell
  13. Teleport
  14. Caffeine
  15. JellyfiSSH
  16. SSH Agent
  17. Transmit
  18. PasswordVault
  19. EPSON Scan – The software for my scanner (an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo)
  20. arRsync (only tested backing up data folders, not the OS)

My Cannon Pixima IP1600 printer also works with Leopard, in fact, it works out of the box with Leopard, no need to even install drivers!

Anyhow, this should give you some idea of how many apps and what kind of app work fine on Leopars. It should also give you an insight into my favourite OS X apps.