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journal: mac
Cool tricks, random weirdness, and other Leopard observations
Now that I have my mitts on the big cat, I have to say that by and large I like it a lot. So far I haven’t run across many bugs, and it seems plenty responsive. The first part of our Leopard review will be posted tomorrow or Monday. Until then, though, here are some little quick notes and observations regarding Leopard.
I can see right through you--sort of
Leopard fakes the menubar transparency!
I first suspected this when I invoked Exposé (F11 - clear the Desktop) and the windows were not visible through the menubar. Instead, I still saw the desktop background. It turns out that this is actually the case, according to the Many Tricks blog.
Shocking!
Icon tomfoolery
Mac OS X now supports icons up to 512 x 512 pixels. However, outside of CoverFlow and Quick View, the Finder can still only display icons up to 128 x 128 pixels.
Feed me!
Safari now supports multiple RSS feeds. Just click the RSS button in the address bar and select the feed you want to read.
Don’t stick your tongue out at me!
iChat’s 
Best new Leopard feature
Alert the media! Leopard does not lose its lunch when it loses a connection with a network volume! That’s right, if Leopard loses a server connection, it will inform you of the disrupted connection and allow you to disconnect without forcing you to stare at a spinning beachball.
Not to be snide, but it only took five revisions to get it right.
Best new Leopard feature 2
Spotlight is fast. Like, amazingly so. Spotlight gives you instant results as you type now, as opposed to pausing before giving you results. I think that for the most part Spotlight is finally living up to its promise.
Worst new Leopard feature
The 3D shelf Dock. The running application indicator is very difficult to discern. In my opinion the 2D Dock wins both in terms of aesthetics and usability. And in case you missed how to activate the 2D Dock for the bottom location, here’s the terminal command for that:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
You will need to restart the Dock for the changes to take effect (type “killall Dock” into the Terminal and press return).
Worst new Leopard feature 2
This alert is way too much like the “Cancel or allow?” alerts in vista that Apple liked to mock:
It’s not that I have a problem that this alert exists--after all, some people do need to be protected from themselves--it’s that there is no way to turn it off as far as I can tell. If someone knows of a Terminal command or something to disable this alert, please let me know.
See that stack over there?
I have mixed feelings about Stacks. Yes, they’re not as functional as folders in the Dock used to be, but on the other hand it is much easier to distinguish folders in the Dock now. And I have actually been using Stacks (though to an limited extent), where I never used folders in the Dock before. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Stacks, redux
One nice thing about Stacks is that you can drag items out of a stack and into any other folder in the Finder, another folder in the same stack, or into another stack. Nice!
Stacks, again
I seem to remember a Leopard beta demo where one could simply select a group of files and drag them into the Dock to create a stack. This functionality is nowhere to be found. Am I imagining this? I can’t find the demo anywhere.
Give me a little more space
So far I like Spaces. I know you can move a window from one space to another by moving it to the edge of the screen, but I wish there was a way to move to another space by using this same technique without a window. I want to be able to shove my mouse to the side of the screen, leave it there for a few seconds, and watch as I am moved to the other space.
Lookin’ good, lookin’ good
I must say, I like the new look of Leopard. It gives the user interface a more coherent look, and many bundled applications look downright beautiful. I was afraid that the dark gray look would make the entire UI feel dark and heavy, but it doesn’t. The UI as a whole has a very pleasant feel.
Into the shadows
The giant drop shadows looked downright ridiculous in screenshots, but when you actually use Leopard they’re barely noticeable.
I’m .doc-ing to you! (doc-ing...talking...get it?)
Okay, that has got to be the worst subhead I’ve ever written. At any rate, here’s an interesting observation: TextEdit in Leopard can save files in Word 2007 (.docx) format. Pages cannot. Will we see an update to Pages at some point?
High thread count
Oy, another bad subhead. And I’m making a reference to sheets here. For some odd reason, sheets in Leopard are now spawned from below the toolbar as opposed to descending from directly below the window title.
Icomplaint
Icon view is now available in Open and Save dialogs. You can also adjust the icon size (click and hold the Show as Icon button), however the grid spacing does not adjust to the icon size. As a result, you can end up with really tiny icons with really big spaces in between them.
And one quick note
Okay, so you have an Open dialog open, and you have three files with very similar names. Any of these three files could be the one you’re looking for. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just press the spacebar and invoke Quick Look? Well, as of now, you can’t. Sorry.
Part One of our totally awesome, kick-ass Leopard review will come Monday Tuesday (I’m not going to rush it). Part One will focus mainly on the UI changes in Leopard. Don’t miss it!
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5 | 1996 |
| Nick | comments | views |
thinkback
That might have been the only Siracusa article I did not like. It had way too much filler and kool-aid drinking. It seems to me that (other than the visual changes) he was really concerned with making this look like a MASSIVE update by writing a long article.
He spent the first two pages talking about nothing. Then the next couple bitching about the new dock, unified look, and menubar… which have all been covered elsewhere thousands of times.
He finally gets to the kernel on page 5 and he spends the first half of that page not talking about any new features just filling space. He sums up the Scheduler, VM, and sandboxing improvements in a short section then he writes a long ass section about D-Trace. He thne calls that the biggest new feature in th4e Leopard kernel. Why the hell did D-Trace get as much or more face time than Concurrency did it Tiger when the latter is far more important?
Then there’s a whole page on why 64-bit is important to X86 but not as much to PPC and about Apple unexpectedly dropping Carbon 64-bit elements. To me it makes sense to cover all the general stuff about a technology when that stuff hasn’t been covered before, like when he wrote about Metadata int he Tiger section, but not when he isn’t even relating the general stuff to what the real feature is or when he’s just filling space with stuff Arstechnica has already covered in detail.
Damn near a whole page on FSevents when that feature already existed in Tiger and was covered in his Tiger article.
Core Animation gets whole page. Okay fine.
The next page is devoted to QuartzGL and Resolution Independence just to tell us that it was around in Tiger but didn’t work and now here it is in Leopard and it still doesn’t work properly. A whole page for that.
Then another full page for CoreUI. This is something that should have appeared in the grab bag section like CoreText or on the previous page with QuartzGL and Resolution Independence.
Then a section on the Finder which I liked.
Then a page on the Dock… which was covered in detail earlier in the review. Why?
There’s a whole page on Time Machine which I understand but why does he say:
“Time Machine is the best new feature in Leopard, perhaps the best feature ever added to Mac OS X.”?
Time Machine is something that requires extra hardware (or HD space) and will rarely be used by anyone but the complete idiot who deleles files all the time. Time Machine is better than Exposé, Spotlight, and the new Finder? I think not. Sounds like Kool-aid too me.
A full page on performance without a single benchmark.
Spaces in the Grab bag section? WTF?
Overall I think that review sucked compared to all his other reviews.
Time Machine is something that requires extra hardware (or HD space) and will rarely be used by anyone but the complete idiot who deleles files all the time.
I am usually pretty careful with what I delete, but there was one time where I accidentally deleted my entire iPhoto Library. I spent $100 on data recovery software The data recovery software corrupted something on my disk and prevented my Mac from booting. It took me a hours to get everything back to normal.
I would have killed for something like Time Machine.
And aside from that, how could anyone not appreciate something that encourages people to back up their machine on a regular basis?
| Nick | Oct. 31, 2007 | |
| 2:39 am |
No, you shouldn’t feed the troll. If it’s on the Mac, it’s a bad feature or a feature nobody will use. If it’s on Windows, it’s a good feature. It’s as simple and predictable as that.
Yeah, it’s amazing how many people ran out to buy USB Flash memory to speed up Windows ME II.
The thing he is missing is versions of files. A lot of people will use this just to go back to an older version of the same file, a file not deleted, to get information that changed or was edited and saved. They can do this without even leaving the application. So if I’m in Photoshop and I realize I need a layer that was in my .PSD file yesterday but was changed, I can go back in time to that version of the same file.
But what I’m hoping is Time Machine will do that with the System and also applications. I don’t have it yet, but I want a system snapshot utility in OS X and I also want an uninstaller (since Apple’s pro applications don’t include one). Does anyone know if you can go back in time with the OS itself or with applications? I’m guessing the answer is no, but maybe you can.
| Oct. 31, 2007 | ||
| 7:57 am |
1.
Siracusa’s take.
So much for the idea that Leopard is a minor update.