Leoptard
It’s been said that I loves me some Apple. It’s been said that I’ll run out and buy any old crap they release. It’s been said that I’ve got a tattoo of Steve Jobs on one buttock, and a tattoo of myself on the other, such that when I clench it looks like they kiss.
These things have been said. But with the release of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”, it seems that my miniature Steve has kicked me sharply in the back of the balls with his tiny, inky foot, for Leopard is just one big daily regret.
My irritants, let me show you them:
The pointless translucency of the menu bar. This isn’t eye candy, it’s eye manure. Even with a much-welcomed salve, the anti-aliasing is still noticeably worse than the rest of the system. It’s like someone at Apple saw the ridiculous, illegible window chrome in Vista and thought “Gee, Microsoft have hit the aesthetic zeitgeist with that one: all aboard the shitwagon!” At least they haven’t changed the font yet to Marker Felt, though I feel sure it’s coming, like another testicular jab from illustrated Steve’s perineal boot.
Stacks. Much has been written about how Stacks is broken, all of it true. Just to ramp up the gall, when you drag a folder with a lovely custom icon to nestle in the Dock, you’re treated to an animation of its own icon transforming into the collection of its contents’ icons. Oh, look what you could have won. To try to ameliorate this, some plucky soul put together an assortment of drawer icons, which have the upside of making each stack distinguishable from all the other Stacks, and the abundant downside of always being there when you open the stack — into either a cramp-inducing fan or a comedy grid where giant icons loom over inadequate, truncated text labels. Here’s my alternative icon to put at the head of a stack.
I’m going to harp on about Stacks, actually, because the old behaviour was a source of not inconsiderable joy to me, joy which Apple has punctured like a schoolyard bully with a flick-knife. You see, I’d keep a selection of oft-used folders down there, and would frequently mouse down to open one conveniently and quickly. No more. Yes, I could create a stack of aliases to these folders, but that’s two clicks and a bunch of muttering. Or I could put aliases on the Desktop and use Exposé to clear the windows out of the way to get to them. Or I could just drive a staple into my leg and throw curses toward the East Coast. Hallelujah that dragging an alias into the Dock gets you halfway there, the other half being the hierarchical menu of folder contents you used to get when right-clicking.
I hate the 3D Dock, with its confused perspectives, annoying reflections and exaggerated shadows, and I frankly hate the new 2D Dock too. Many application icons are designed to work best over a pale background, since that’s generally what one finds in a folder view in the Finder. The great thing about the Tiger Dock was that it was a simple, elegant pale sheet beneath the icons. The new 2D Dock is a black smudge at the bottom of the screen, making icons murky and indistinct, and even then trying to draw attention to itself with an excessive border.
Spaces promised much, but delivers only frustration. Thanks to the glory of Desktop Manager, I’ve used virtual desktops for a couple of years now. Generally, I have a desktop open with a collection of windows for each project I’m working on at a given time — a TextMate window, a Transmit window, a Terminal window. Any letter, as long as it’s T. But with Spaces, this seems impossible. If you set up one desktop and then move to the next, the moment you switch to TextMate to open a new project, you’re shuttled back to the first space. OK, you say, why not set TextMate to open in all spaces? Ah, but then when you change space, the TextMate window follows you into the new space, like a little yapping chihuahua. So, off goes Spaces, and back on goes the elderly Desktop Manager.
My printer is behaving badly, but that might be Oki’s fault.
Leopard includes Apache 2, but not mod_perl 2, and I’m led to believe it’s difficult to get it to install correctly.
I lament for Volume Logic with the passion of an effeminate teen under a blanket.
On the bright side, at least Mail now allows you to forward messages as an attachment, tempting me away from the smashing orangeyness of GyazMail. The final feature of GyazMail that I’d sorely miss is its ability to attach a Finder-label style colour to a message (which I use for “Urgent Action”, “Action”, “Reference” etc). I know that one can use rules in Mail to achieve the same thing, and perversely, to assign arbitrary colours to messages using the Show Colours menu option — but were someone to create a Mail plugin that allowed assignment of Finder-label colours to messages from a toolbar icon, and further allowed these colours to become criteria in a Smart Folder, I swear I’d love them longtime. Alternatively, GyazMail could acquire smart folders and let me use Spotlight to find messages, but that seems even less likely.
I must go. Buttocky Steve requires nourishment.