Leopard Love/Hate

[music | Bauhaus - Exquisite Corpse]

Mostly hate, but there are some things to like here:

There's a bunch of stuff I'm pretty ambivalent about, Quick Look looks neat for what it does. Finder still sucks. I haven't used Leopard long enough to form a really strong opinion about anything but the following.

Love:
Mouse focus follows mouse. That is, when you mouse over a window, you can now scroll bars, right click to get the context menu, etc, without switching to that app and raising the window. I would love to see this extended to keyboard focus. It would almost make up for the impossibility of Auto-Raise.

Display Quickness. I have a Mac Pro 2.66 Dual dual-core machine. I always thought it was unacceptable to have things like Expose be anything less than completely smooth.

Context text in the Dock. When you mouse over a Dock icon, it pops the text in a black translucent text area, rather than the 10.4 way of just white text, outlined in black.

Hate:
X11 does not work in multi-head. I have two monitors. X11 apps will only open on the main one and cannot be dragged to the secondary.

Everything else about the Dock. That's not true. I think the Fanned and Grid content view are probably fine, but the facts behind "stacks" prevent their usefulness because you never know what folder you're on. I think I can fix the Stacks annoyance with symlinks and empty link folders, but that would break the spiffy display stuff. Another alternative is to make a big bitmap of what the folder "should" look like, and name it 1111111111.png and drop it inside. That will make it the "Top" of the stack, and let you identify the folder. That's dumb too. I know I'll just memorize the position of any folders in the Dock, but come on, why do this to people? Why make the icon for people's folders change constantly based on content?

Spaces. Spaces does what it claims, it's a virtual desktop manager. However, it is, as I feared, crippled for my use. I like to have a bunch of virtual desktops on multiple, completely independent monitors, such that switching the virtual desktop on monitor 1 has no effect on monitor 2. In linux, this had the unfortunate side-effect that you could not drag windows from one monitor to the other, but it was way worth it. I like being able to flip around on one desktop without losing what I was working on on the other.

Translucent Everything. Just because you can, does not mean you should.

That goes ditto for CoverFlow. This is neat for 5 seconds in iTunes, assuming you haven't gotten frustrated enough to smash your MightyMouse into a million pieces after the scroll wheel stops scrolling for the thousandth time. Without a Mighty Mouse, it's not even "neat". It's a horrible way to visualize large amounts of data for choosing or anything but a slideshow. Especially if that data isn't internally consistent (ie a folder full of mostly photos, but with some text files in it, or an iTunes library of 1500 CDs, only 300 of which are on ITMS, which is the only non-manual source for cover art, for instance).

If you do have 1500 CDs in your collection, you quickly learn how bad it sucks to try and spin the damn mousewheel from Acumen Nation to Revolting Cocks with any accuracy. Forget about dragging the scrollbar. Yes, you can use the search box, or just click in the coverflow window and start typing the band name, and it will take you there. But those options make me take my hands and put them on my keyboard. You know what works better? A "LIST".