Leopard First Impressions

So, I knew I should probably wait, but I installed MacOS X 10.5 Leopard on Friday. Over all, the experience was good – I have an external hard drive that I backed up using SuperDuper!, did a fresh install of Leopard, and watched the Migration Assistant bring over all of my data from the backup. Very cool. Now, I’m just hoping the SuperDuper! team gets an updated version out soon, since apparently Time Machine doesn’t make bootable images. This would be a perfect time for karma to bite me and kill my hard drive. I could recover, but not quickly. Leopard has lots of improvements that I’m sure everybody will discuss ad nauseum, so I’m just going to mention the things I’ve had problems with or don’t like.

Network shares. I’ve got a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, with shares for files, music, and photos. I spent the better part of an hour trying to get these shares remapped. I could do "Connect To Server.." in Finder and the share contents would be displayed, but I’d get no icon on the desktop or in the Finder window to show that the drive was actually mapped. For some reason, about 50% of the time, I couldn’t connect to the share anyway – I’d get a message saying that the device could not be found. Strange and annoying behavior.
Backup. I have several backup jobs that run and archive to the NAS. Since the upgrade to Leopard, all of the backups that have run have failed. I had to go into the configuration for each backup job and make sure that the correct share was specified. This is where it got confusing – apparently there’s some subtle difference between smb://nas/files and smb://nas/files. The destination that was specified before the upgrade failed, while the destination created after the upgrade works. I have noticed that SMB shares now use a different icon, so there may be something happening behind the scenes that’s not obvious.
Bootup. On my MacBook, Leopard takes about 3 times as long to boot as Tiger did. Not a big deal, considering I rarely reboot, but still annoying.
The dock. I don’t have the issues with the updated dock that others have complained about. I do miss the little black arrow telling me which applications are running – the little white blob is much harder for me to see, so I can’t tell at a glance what’s open. I’m sure somebody will come out with a utility to fix this soon.
Java. Where is Java 6? I had been under the impression that Java 6 was coming with Leopard, and was sorely disappointed when it was missing. This means that I’m still going to be stuck loading up a virtual machine to develop, since the apps I work on rely on Java 6. Not a show-stopper, but still a pain.

The only issue that is really a problem is the network drive issue. I’ve been able to get the shares to map on my notebook, but the shares absolutely refuse to show up on my mother-in-law’s Mac Mini. This means that her data isn’t getting backed up at all right now. Am I missing a setting somewhere to make mapped network shares visible/hidden? I looked but I couldn’t find anything that looked promising.