#FF00AA

John Siracusa’s Leopard review is a must-read, as every time, and commenting it feels like blogging about a Stevenote — short of copying everything he said, you end up with a messy post made of disjointed observations. But what else can you do?

I started off just wanting to quote a nice image about the Finder’s obnoxious “Always open as…” checkbox in the folder View Options window (which I did blog about earlier):

This avalanche of mandatory explicit action effectively represents a denial of service attack on the spatial style of file management.

But then how could I resist launching a rumor based on the behavior of Dock stacks?

Apple calls this view “Fan.” The curve is jaunty, but it also makes it a bit more difficult to click items high in the stack, requiring a varying amount of lateral motion rather than a straight shot upwards. Putting the “Show in Finder” icon is at the top seems particularly cruel.

Picture this: What if Steve Jobs spent the whole Leopard development cycle playing with a touch-screen Mac that’s just about to be released? The rightward arc would make so much sense that way. (If it were just designed for and influenced by the iPhone, then it would have been introduced on the iPhone first, wouldn’t it?)

And I hadn’t thought about that one important tip:

If you use any sort of virtualization software like VMware or Parallels, each virtual machine hard disk image is a multi-gigabyte file that changes pretty much every time you use the VM. Double ugh. […]

In the meantime, it is possible to exclude individual files from Time Machine backups by dragging them into the “Do not back up” list available in the Time Machine preference pane. That will exclude the file by path.