Appleis Mac OS X 10.5, "Leopard" has matured into a solid operating system, according to Computerworld on Thursday. While some thought it was released too early, and there were some early snafus, debates about Leopard as a worthy upgrade have vanished.

Right after Leopard was released, there were two notable bugs that alarmed the Apple community: the copy file bug to a server and the Blue Screen crash attributed to Unsanityis APE software. Those issues were quickly resolved, and the early debate, as is typical, centered on the cosmetics of the new OS.

One item that particularly annoyed Mac users was the deletion of a favorite way of viewing folders in the dock, as a hierarchal, text-based list. Instead it was limited to either a grid or a curved stack. Apple fixed that and returned the hierarchal list in update 10.5.2.

Another annoyance, for developers at least, has been the delay of Java 6 support (also called Java 1.6). [This week, Apple addressed that issue as well with "Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1.0" which adds support for Java 1.6.0_05, but that release is restricted to 64-bit Intel Macs.]

Now, six months after release, there are few doubts about Leopard. With Vista stumbling, not by sales numbers, but by the regard it has in the enterprise, Leopard has received newfound corporate awareness and respect. IBM caught the attention of corporate America with its own internal test to evaluate Leopard (and Linux) for internal deployment. The ability to run other OSes, including Vista and XP, while in place for a long time, is gaining more and more momentum in business circles.

"Though Appleis hardware is what so often draws a crowd -- remember when the iPhone and MacBook Air came out? -- that hardware is just a collection of parts. Leopard is the heart and soul of the Mac," Michael DeAgonia concluded.