FREN

#FF00AA


22 sept. 2007

Of big spotted cats

@apple@

I’d been hearing bad things about the Leopard betas for so long now, I never expected the current build to be usable. Yet it is, very much. It’s not a spectacular upgrade, but it’s quite snappy on my MacBook; despite all its flaws I like the new Dock, even displayed vertically; the new Leopard theme works better than installing UNO (although the new stoplight bubbles are definitely, inexplicably horrendous); and, as expected, I love having Cover Flow in the Finder, along with automatic icon previews.

Speaking of the Finder, there’s a little thing, however, that’s going to irritate a lot of people: by default, folders don’t remember what view mode you used last. In Tiger, if you open a folder and switch to List view, the folder will still be in List view the next time you open it; in the current Leopard build, a folder window will open in the last view mode you switched to in any folder — even though window dimensions, on the other hand, are retained. So you can set a folder to display in list view in a small window, then browse another folder using Cover Flow, and when you reopen the original folder it will be in a tiny window sporting a huge Cover Flow pane. I know this is going to infuriate me time and again, and I can’t believe I didn’t see anyone mention it. (Oh, wait… those pesky things called NDAs, maybe.) You can force a folder to remember which view you want to use, but that requires opening the View Options every time you arrange a new folder:

The transparent menubar, on the other hand, is ugly but actually bearable (especially with the toned-down Apple and Spotlight icons) — and it works particularly well with the default space-warp background, where it simply comes out as mostly grey. I guess Steve uses this particular background and hasn’t realized how wrong the menubar can look with more vivid colors.

Incidentally, when Think Secret released screenshots showing one of the background’s stars shining through the menubar, I thought to myself that OS X should pull a page out of the Vista book and apply gaussian blur to what’s below; turns out it already does:

All that’s missing now is toning down contrast and saturation a bit, too. But maybe they’re actually on the right track on that one.

 

I’m not going to talk about — or even try — all the features, because everybody knows how most of it works; the bottomline is, do I want to upgrade? I can’t wait to switch my main machine to Leopard for Cover Flow and Spaces, but I’ll wait until it’s stable and officially released (it’s my production machine, no playing with that); I wouldn’t mind installing it on the mini I use as a jukebox, but it wouldn’t change much to my daily use and that’s not worth the risk of using a beta on the machine that stores all my multimedia files on external drives; that leaves us with the MacBook I use to chat and email and teleport to the other computers (teleport works fine, just like most of everything else — for some reason Quicksilver’s Dock icon won’t hide, but that’s pretty much the only trouble I had so far), and I would love to have Leopard in there. Trouble is, the new Mail.app is incompatible with extensions for the previous versions, and I just don’t want to live without Mail Act-On, Mail.appetizer and Mail Badger. As unreliable as it’s generally getting, e-mail is still the most essential part of my professional workflow, so I’ll have to wait until all those plug-ins are updated.

Or maybe I could change my workflow. I like this new Dock. It makes my iMac feel old.

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