Leopard Peeves

Computing

So, I just [upgraded][1] one machine to Leopard …… here are my initial impressions.

The Stupid :

The translucent menu bar, bejebus what drugs were they on ?!?!?!? It is so incredibly ugly !!!! Thankfully you can fix it easily, following [these instructions][2].

The Broken :

The new Finder is OK I suppose, much too much emphasis on eye-candy for newbies IMHO (this is a general complaint I have against MacOSX). What really pisses me off is that WebDAV Volumes on your local network, that broadcast their location using Bonjour “_webdav._tcp” do not show up in the ‘Shared’ section of the Finder’s sidebar, until you manually mount it via the “Connect to Server” dialogue. I would call this a bug. I do not have a fix for this ATM.

The Crap :

Supposedly, Stacks were originally slated for Tiger, but withdrawn. I sincerely wish Apple had left them out of Leopard as well, specially as they have replaced perfectly good functionality with something far less capable. You used to be able to keep folders in the Dock, and have a menu of their contents popup, allowing you to navigate into nested folders. I used to keep my Home, Applications and the HD’s root in the dock, allowing me to reach anywhere quickly. This was especially useful for quickly launching Applications you don’t use often enough to keep in the Dock. Stacks do not offer anything close. More fancy but useless eye-candy for people with like 20 documents. Totally unscalable with 100’s of thousands of documents, specially as my Documents folder only contains folders at the top level. So now if I want something similar, I have more work to do, I have to manage folders full of aliases by hand, hmmm a great advance !!!!!

Spaces is interesting, but will take a while to get used to it’s weirdness. What is badly needed IMHO is a contextual menu item for all windows, allowing you to move a window or all windows of a running application into a specific space. Dragging and dropping Exposé style miniature window proxies is too clunky. The officlal technique of “Move the pointer over the window, and hold down the mouse button while pressing the Control key and an arrow or number key.” is totally bizarre !!! You’d need to be some kind of mutant contortionist! My hand is not big enough to hold down the control key and press arrows at the same time.

The Fix : Oh joy, now I can finally type uninterrupted into Spotlight’s search field!!! WOW!!! You mean they could not fixed that in 11 updates of Tiger ????? GRRRR!

I sincerely hope that next time I write, I have something nice to say about Leopard !!!

[1]: {% post_url 2007-11-22-upgrading-to-leopard %} [2]: http://limi.net/articles/fixing-leopard-translucent-menu-bar