From the very first day Mac OS X appeared on the scene, many of you clamored for the return of some of your most cherished Classic features. How could Apple possibly remove the so many of the things that made the Mac OS special?

Do you remember, for example, when there was no Apple menu, and the Apple logo stared at you from the center of the menu bar? Yes, that generated an outcry so loud that you can still almost hear the echoes.

Time sure flies when you’re having fun.

Over time, some of those features came back in different form. I remember when Steve Jobs demonstrated an updated version of the Apple menu, incorporating items that used to be in the Classic Mac OS’s Special menu, which made them system-wide. He even remarked about the possibility of multiple Finders and/or Finder alternatives, but I think he was just thinking out loud, since nothing came out of that speculative chatter.

Or maybe he was just trolling for some extra headlines, or to make Mac users give Apple millions of dollars in free publicity suggesting what form these changes might take.

So what was the original Apple menu like? Well, starting with System 7.0, you could add items to the menu simply by depositing them (or an alias) in the Apple Menu Items folder. They would immediately (or almost immediately) appear right in the Apple menu. Over time, there were third party “extensions” that would create sub-menus, and Apple acquired one of these for itself, renaming it Apple Menu Options.

But it’s now six years since Mac OS X was introduced, and the Apple menu remains largely unchanged. If you want to alter it to conform to the Classic version, you must add a third party system hack. As it is, aside from setting the number of Recent Items in the Appearance preference panel — which does very, very little to earn its name — the Apple menu is a hard-coded component without lots of outside help.

Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with a system hack. In fact, they serve the purpose of providing features Apple didn’t incorporate into the operating system, or left buried without a graphical user interface. But as Mac OS X is upgraded, they can cause troubles because the system capabilities they exploited might be changed or removed.

Consider what happens when you have an older version of Unsanity’s Application Enhancer installed and you do a straight Upgrade installation of Leopard. The “blue screen of death” phenomenon must surely have made Windows fanboys pleased as punch.

But let’s return to the Apple menu, since there are so many possibilities left untouched.

Why, oh why, can’t Apple find a way to make it just as configurable as the older version, using the world’s most advanced computer operating system? With all that fancy 3D eye-candy occurring, surely relics of an older operating system ought to be easy to incorporate. Or perhaps they can provide a better version, using all the system know-how they’ve acquired merging the technologies from Apple and NeXT. Well, maybe I’m being a trifle facetious here, but I just cannot understand how today’s Apple menu is superior to the old.

No doubt the lack of a configurable Apple menu represents a change of vision, with the Dock meant to replace its missing functions. Indeed, you can drag an application, file or folder to the Dock and have it function somewhat like the Apple menu of old, only you access it directly, rather than grab a pull-down menu. When you have displays spanning 24 inches and 30 inches, I can see where Apple might have a point here, assuming that’s their logic in abandoning the configurable Apple menu.

Then again, maybe most of you don’t care. Millions of Mac users never used anything but Mac OS X, and that number is growing exponentially every quarter, so the features of old that you and I grew accustomed to are no longer top priorities.

This is not to say that everything in the Classic Mac OS is necessarily outdated. It took a while, but the Data Detectors feature of Leopard — which “senses” names, dates, locations and phone numbers in your email — is an old Mac feature that I’m happy to welcome back. I can say the same for the enhancements to Leopard’s Sharing preference pane, which lets you configure users and shares, just like in the old days. Again, what was old is new again.

So I ask you, dear reader: Are there any features to which you grew accustomed in the Classic Mac OS that you’d like to see restored for Mac OS X?

These are serious issues, and the feeling of nostalgia shouldn’t be a part of it. After all, a lot has changed since Apple was a beleaguered company thought to be doomed to tiny niche status, or destined to fade away in short order. Today’s Apple is a multinational consumer electronics company with a market value that exceeds that of any PC hardware maker. Just placating some old timers like me isn’t a practical business decision. If a new feature is to be added to Mac OS 10.6, there has to be a good reason, and it has to be done with the typical Apple flourish, to stand out from the crowd.

And, in case, you’re wondering, I don’t think the Classic Mac features continue to be absent from Mac OS X because Steve Jobs hates older Macs and the older Mac operating systems. If he could be persuaded that Apple would sell more copies of a future version of Mac OS X with a specific feature, you can bet he’d get his developers working on it pronto.

Let’s set aside the pretty desktops, the transparent menu bar and menus, and even the controversial 3D Dock. That’s all window dressing and doesn’t do a thing to make your workday go faster, although I suppose a pleasant desktop view does convey an appropriate level of comfort.

I’ll leave it to the psychologists, however, to explain the potential impact, if any. On the other hand, simply having a computer that just works — at least most of the time — ought to be plenty helpful toward raising your comfort level.

However, let’s look at the most important function of a computer operating system, which is to manage things in such a way that it lets you run your applications with top efficiency and performance, and stay out of the way when you don’t need to be aware of its presence.

In that sense, Windows Vista, by dint of its chronic ailment of posting prompts about allowing one thing or another, fails miserably. With Leopard, for example, you’ll get a prompt for a password when you install an application, and a warning when you launch software you downloaded for the first time. Apple has been gracious enough to limit its notifications to situations where they’re needed, and nothing more.

For my particular workflow, I do a heavy amount of audio production, because of The Tech Night Owl LIVE and The Paracast. Although both are streamed live, there’s a lot of recorded content, and not all of it sounds so great, because guests frequently use wireless phones or chintzy headsets to record their sides of the conversation. I don’t get obsessive about it, but I try to clean out excess hiss, buzzing sounds, and frequent clicks, without hurting the clarity of the speech or the flow of the dialog.

I don’t confine myself to a single audio application. These days, for capturing two-way conversations in iChat and Skype, I use Ambrosia Software’s super-powerful WireTap Studio, which also has a decent level of audio editing capability. But my actual post-production is done in Peak Pro, though I’ve been doing a little experimentation in Apple’s Soundtrack Pro, which is being bundled with the new Logic Studio.

For live streaming, I’ve continued to use Apple’s QuickTime Broadcaster. Prerecorded files are presented in QuickTime, and the Sound preference pane is left open to monitor actual incoming audio levels from our outboard signal processor.

To make my job as easy as possible, I put all multimedia applications in a single space, using Leopard’s Spaces. If I have to respond to email, or change something on one of my sites, there are other screens that are exclusively devoted to those types of applications. This way my single monitor serves the purpose of many, I don’t have to be disturbed by the clutter of windows that I do not need.

Previously, I used an automatic hiding utility to clear the desktop, but it would only function with one application at a time, unless I used a special shortcut (usually “Shift”) when switching apps or set some custom preferences. Yes, there have been virtual desktops on the Mac before, but none are as seamless or fast as Spaces.

So, yes, in that respect, Leopard helps me organize my work and get my chores done a little faster.

But there’s more. The new Finder and associated components handle file sharing far more seamlessly, without delays, so I can easily connect to my other Mac, and even share its screen when appropriate. At the same time, file copying is more efficiently managed, with fewer slowdowns when working in other applications. That all adds up to improved productivity.

While I realize there are some early-release bugs in Leopard that might cause grief for a small number of users, I have never had a kernel panic, and only a handful of application crashes. I consider that a non-issue. What’s more, applications seem to launch faster.

As far as email is concerned, I was never too happy with the occasional flakiness of previous versions of Apple Mail. I had settled on Microsoft Entourage 2004 because of its superior handling of IMAP mail. However, the Leopard version of Mail is faster and more predictable, and the return of Data Detectors, which automatically recognizes such things as addresses, dates, names and phone numbers, is especially welcomed. I just wonder why it took long for this relic of the Classic Mac OS era to be reborn.

I’m also quite pleased with the performance and consistency of Safari 3, although I’m not about to use it full-time just yet. You see, WordPress, used to generate this site, isn’t fully compatible. Also, Safari doesn’t allow you to selectivity allow pop-ups. It’s either all or nothing, whereas Firefox permits you to disable the blocking feature on a site-by-site basis.

Now I haven’t gotten around to testing Time Machine yet. No disasters have occurred, and I’m not inclined to want to force the process. But I’m happy it’s there when I need it.

All in all, my experience with Leopard has been truly wonderful. If you’re holding off because some application you need isn’t compatible yet, your time will come soon enough. It’ll be worth the wait.

If you believe some of the things written about Leopard in the past week or so, you may consider it the buggiest system upgrade ever! But, as with all things of this nature, that impression is a huge exaggeration.

During Leopard’s first weekend on sale, some two million copies were moved as retail upgrade kits and preloaded on some new Macs. Since then, it’s fair to say hundreds of thousands of additional copies have probably been shipped, and the vast majority of Mac users who have Leopard have installed it.

It’s also a certainty that any point-zero release will have at least some annoying bugs. Some of these issues were pushed aside in the rush to ship the product — though Apple would never admit that. Others were simply not granted a sufficient amount of seriousness, couldn’t be duplicated or weren’t anticipated.

So you can bet that, sometime in the next few weeks, there will indeed be a 10.5.1 update, and that, every couple of months, further maintenance updates will be delivered. This is something you have to expect, and you might feel angry at Apple for not shipping a more robust product, but the fact of the matter is that most of the Leopard early adopters have had excellent upgrade experiences, and I can be counted as part of that number.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

You had to expect it was coming. After Leopard received gushing praise in most of the early reviews, a few tech pundits have come along and said it was nothing if not Apple’s worst system upgrade ever. How could Apple let this thing get into the marketplace, they claimed, without fixing the well-known serious bugs that have been reported around the Internet?

Now to be perfectly fair, it is true that Leopard left the barn with some persistent bugs, a few of which may be serious in some situations. I’ve already weighed in on the reported data loss issue, which may actually be a long-standing Mac OS bug that has persisted for years, but is only being regurgitated now because Leopard is new and they need some material with which to trash Apple.

Of course, when it comes for the potential of losing your files, it is an extremely serious matter, but the possibility of lost or corrupted data isn’t new with Apple, nor with Microsoft Windows for that matter. I just hope Apple is taking it seriously enough to fix it for once and for all this time around.

But the reports about some of the other catastrophic bugs seems to be somewhat exaggerated. The other day, for example, I read a report that Skype wasn’t compatible with Leopard. Now this struck me as odd, since I use Skype for conferencing on both of my radio shows, and it runs fine under Leopard.

After reading the fine print in the article, though, I found out that what they were really talking about is a bug or oddity in Leopard’s firewall, where if you set up application-specific firewalls, Skype won’t function because of the way the application is designed. It’s self-modifying, and, because Leopard digitally signs applications when you invoke the appropriate setting, after a single use, it won’t function until reinstalled. Some online games are similarly affected.

All right, I’ll grant that’s a problem, but one you can work around real easily, by not using that particular setting until a more workable solution is available. No, you won’t impair your security, since I presume most of you use routers anyway, such as an AirPort, which provide their own levels of security. Over time, Apple will probably address this particular firewall limitation in one way or another.

But the headline was, once again, misleading, since it implied a situation that would only reveal itself under a single circumstance that most Mac users who use Skype would not encounter.

In fact if you believed all these claims, you’d think that most of the millions of Mac users now running Leopard must be facing persistent crashes, the inability of their Macs to boot, Wi-Fi connection irregularities and all sorts of other shortcomings that could cut a wide swath into your workflow.

However, like all operating system releases, there are some issues with Leopard that might really cause grief for some of you. For example, my friend John Rizzo, who runs the MacWindows cross-platform integration information site, wrote me with a troubling list of enterprise-focused issues that need to be addressed by Apple and some third-party developers:

SMB file sharing. MacWindows readers are reporting that turning OFF file sharing ENABLES the Mac to access SMB shares. (That’s right. Turn off file haring to enable file sharing.) Also lots of reports of other flaky configuration issues.

Enterprise network developers told me flat out that Apple shipped Leopard with known bugs that they had reported.

Huge, gapping security holes. For instance, the firewall’s Block All Connections setting actually allows certain connections!

Incompatibility with third-party AFP and SMB enterprise products. Group Logic says that the Leopard AFP client only talks to Leopard Server. (Spotlight and Time Machine use AFP, not SMB.)

Active Directory access is broken. Massive problems with Apple plugin.

Third-party products that enable Active Directory are incompatible. Vendors tell me they didn’t get the golden master until October 26.

Several VPN clients are broken. This happened with Tiger, but may not be as widespread now.

Bugs in Safari 3, which still appears to be beta, such as crashes with ISA Proxies

Bugs in Boot Camp beta still in Boot Camp 2.0. For example, problems with Nvidia drivers in Windows Vista.

Understand that none of these issues has affected me in any way, and they are not widely discussed by the people who are so hell bent on finding something wrong with Leopard. More to the point, the larger portion of Mac users won’t encounter these difficulties either, and a fair portion of them might be attributed to other companies and not Apple.

However, I am troubled by one significant piece of information that John presents, which has been confirmed to me by developers with whom I’ve talked, that they didn’t receive the Golden Master version of Leopard until after it was officially released. So they were unable to confirm any outstanding issues with their products.

Now I appreciate the fact that Apple might be concerned about software piracy because of an early release the final version of Leopard to developers. But it also postpones the availability of certain Leopard-compatible products. That, rather than the questionable issues raised by some of tech writers, is the real issue you should be concerned about.