eight hours
Just eight hours after finally installing Leopard, there are a few things that are obviously beneficial or bloody terrible for my tastes.
Safari - I can no longer read the tabs. The bar is so dark that my eyes have a difficult time quickly assessing what is written in each of my tabs. It’s a similar issue as was addressed here with the replacement of the highway fonts for something that was easier to read at night. This is going to bug me.
Translucent Menu Bar - Puke. Puke. Puke. I hate messing around with important system settings, even though I have tangoed with Terminal in the past, but I hope Apple eventually makes this aesthetic atrocity an option.
Dictionary Widget - I use this thing all the time and they changed the font. For the worse. I simply detest font changes (with the exception of the aforementioned highway sign example) with something I am incredibly accustomed to.
Spell Check - It’s everywhere. In your documents. In your username textbox. Even in your WordPress textbox. At first, I really disliked it, particularly with the username situation (of course “ryanharne” is correctly spelled). But, when I tried to write “accostomed”, it gave me a red-dotted warning and I realized that I will never again have to check my spelling by revision. Imagine that. Even less editing on my part.
Mail - Thank you, Apple. It no longer takes 5 seconds to open any given mail folder. Now it takes about 0.5 seconds. I’m a patient person, but not patient with myself, or my mail.
iCal - Reading about it made me leery of the click-to-edit feature. But I am a big fan of large windows, with lots of white space so I can distinguish one item from the next. Killing the sidebar makes iCal so much better and I can cram my days with more events than ever. For better or worse.
Dock - Speaking of how I love large windows, now I have less room to maximize programs to! Since I always want to see my Dock and the open applications, the minimization feature is not an option for me. However, now the dock extends about 50 pixels higher from the bottom than it did before. Boooo. Programs don’t maximize to the extent that they once did. iCal gets wider hacking off the sidebar, but it also gets shorter. Blast. Just when you thought you were getting lucky.
Stacks - I need to see if I can set up a Stack for any/all screenshots that I take. I typically have 5 to 20 screenshots on my desktop at any given moment - a quick stack to show just what the screenshot looks like would save me a ton of time grabbing the one I want.
There are hundreds more features of Leopard that I haven’t touched yet. But eight hours is barely enough time to sleep, let alone dive into a new operating system. I’m sure some of the new pieces will become manifest as I use my MacBook this week. Plenty of time.
November 26th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Please leave your feedback about the f’ugly menubar translucency at http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html if you haven’t already.
Lots of people are complaining, but not enough are submitting feedback to Apple through the appropriate channel. I’m just trying to rally everyone.
November 26th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
done & done. i’m sure some work is already moving along on it.
November 26th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Yeah, I submitted feedback a few days back. We’ll see what pans out.
The most disturbing thing about Leopard is its “Vista” like emphasis on razzle dazzle. Nicer icons here and there are a nice touch, but translucent menus?
I won’t even start ranting about Stacks. They’re a Disaster with a capital D.