![[F]](/Images/i7/site.gif) TidBITS  TidBITS TidBITS Talk
Six Things I Hate about Leopard![[Brown, Brian]](/webx/?30@@1) Brian Brown - 10:45am Oct 30, 2007 PSTGuest UserHello Matt, As I read your article, I tried out the items you talked about, and I
could not reproduce what you said about the Help. It looks like the
same (if upgraded) help viewer that was in Tiger. Strange. Thanks for the Blog post. Brian
Matt Neuburg (apparently)
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Nov 1, 2007 6:50 am
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Re: Six Things I Hate about Leopard
On or about 10/30/07 10:45 AM, thus spake "Brian Brown" <rbb  techgame.net>:
> Hello Matt,
>
> As I read your article, I tried out the items you talked about, and I could
> not reproduce what you said about the Help. It looks like the same (if
> upgraded) help viewer that was in Tiger.
Cool! That makes me wonder whether it might actually be possible to replace
the Leopard Help Viewer with the Tiger one as a way of recovering the old
interface (sounds like that happened to you accidentally). m.
--
matt neuburg, phd = matt tidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt/
pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei
Among the 2007 MacTech Top 25, http://tinyurl.com/2rh4pf
AppleScript: the Definitive Guide, http://tinyurl.com/2ouo3b
Take Control of Customizing Tiger, http://tinyurl.com/33ad5s
TidBITS, Mac news and reviews since 1990, http://www.tidbits.com
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DavidX J Chilstrom
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Nov 1, 2007 6:55 am
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Re: Six Things I Hate about Leopard
#1 The Dock – Some love it, some loathe it. I’m
in the love it camp. I like the added dimension it adds to the Desktop,
bouncing icons look less silly, etc. Yes, there’s a slight usability hit,
but it works for me. And, for the hate the Dock crowd, there’s a simple
terminal command, applescript, soon to be coming to your favorite interface
utility button that gives a very usable, traditional 2-D Dock.
#2 The Grey – I’m with you on this. While some
aspects of the interface have gotten the glam treatment, windows have gone to
the gulag. On the plus side, though, Apple has committed to one appearance for
all windows, so the net effect for me is positive. As for the backwards look of
the frontmost window being dark and inactive windows being lighter, isn’t
that how it has always been with windows on the Mac?
#3 The Menu Bar – Unquestionably a slight usability
hit, but I really like the look–and I have a rotating desktop picture, so
I see the menubar in all its better and worse states. It hasn’t
negatively impacted my ability to use the menubar in the slightest.
#4 The Stacks – Here was a cool idea (dragging a
pile of files to the Dock to make a stack) that degenerated into anemic docked
folders. I can easily envision Stacks (the virtual equivalent of the piles of
unfiled papers that litter desks and credenzas everywhere) coexisting happily
with Docked folders and all of their hierarchical goodness. I like the
functionality of the Downloads Stack and the notion of Stacks as a temporary
landing pad for unfiled documents. I’m sure the folks who championed the
idea of Stacks are groaning along with us.
#5 The Help – I have a big disagreement with you
here. Help is way better in Leopard than Tiger. Let me count the ways: 1. The
Help search field. 2. Menu helps that take you to the most deeply nested menu
items. 3. And finally, hooray no more stupid lifesaver and Help constantly
disappearing beneath the stack of windows as you switch back and forth. Yes it
floats, and yes you can keep working in your app; resizing, minimizing or
dismissing Help as necessary. Help appears to the user as bound to the
application that called and I think that’s a good thing.
#6 The Classic – As I’m on Intel now it’s
dead to me anyway, but I haven’t fired it up on my PPC machine in over a
year. Classic was always meant to be a transitional thing and Leopard is as
good a place as any to say so long.
David Chilstrom
Web
Author
Retain
Tribal Knowledge with CDI Managed Services
Outside
Intel: http://www.cdicorp.com
Office:
503-613-4285
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Matt Neuburg (apparently)
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Nov 2, 2007 5:13 am
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Re: Six Things I Hate about Leopard
On or about 11/1/07 6:55 AM, thus spake "Chilstrom, DavidX J"
<davidx.j.chilstrom intel.com>:
> #5 The Help - I have a big disagreement with you here. Help is way better in
> Leopard than Tiger. Let me count the ways: 1. The Help search field. 2. Menu
> helps that take you to the most deeply nested menu items. 3. And finally,
> hooray no more stupid lifesaver and Help constantly disappearing beneath the
> stack of windows as you switch back and forth. Yes it floats, and yes you can
> keep working in your app; resizing, minimizing or dismissing Help as
> necessary. Help appears to the user as bound to the application that called
> and I think that's a good thing.
I'm glad we disagree, because this raises the following profound question:
How hard would it have been to make this a pref? Come to think of it, how
about a pref for stacks, menu bar opacity, and sidebar text/icon size? This
is what I really object to: not the changes, but that Apple thinks it knows
better than I do what I want. Choice is good. m.
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csbrown (apparently)
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Nov 3, 2007 7:19 am
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Re: Six Things I Hate about Leopard
on 11/2/07 5:13 AM, Matt Neuburg at matt tidbits.com wrote:
>
> I'm glad we disagree, because this raises the following profound question:
> How hard would it have been to make this a pref? Come to think of it, how
> about a pref for stacks, menu bar opacity, and sidebar text/icon size? This
> is what I really object to: not the changes, but that Apple thinks it knows
> better than I do what I want. Choice is good. m.
Choice is good, indeed.
In the meantime we'll waste our time hacking. I spent an over an hour
yesterday putting white bands on my favorite desktop pictures under the
space where the menu resides to eliminate the transparent menu problem.
Charlie Brown
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Wasim altaf
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Nov 3, 2007 7:34 am
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Re: Six Things I Hate about Leopard
I completely disagree,
the Dock: dock needed a change and it is changed and it looks
different, it is not way better but still better than in tiger and
pretty good lookin... making that dock 2d is just something crazy...it
looks way ugly than the original...
The Grey: The grey is uniform and is quite good ... it is simplicity
and simplicity makes the best of design... wat ya ppl need red green
blue yellow poppin colors all over the screen, ... look at the how
simple is it and still way better than any other OS ...
Menu bar : transparency of menu bar is just the best idea, becoz it
suits with all desktop pictures, it matches with color, older versions
had bright menubar and it often popped out and distracted... new
menubar is just so silent...i hope u understand
Stacks : for my usage stacks is good, it makes me do stuffs fast like
i download a file it is there , i dont have to search around... i
should be able to stack differnt selected files in dock...
Help : u must be crazy to complain about help system... it works like
charm and that is wat was required... who needs to look at other
options while searching for something specific
Classic... Lets move forward
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johnbaxterlists (apparently)
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Nov 3, 2007 2:09 pm
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Re: Six Things I Hate about Leopard
On Nov 3, 2007, at 7:34 AM, Wasim altaf wrote:
> Stacks : for my usage stacks is good, it makes me do stuffs fast like
> i download a file it is there , i dont have to search around... i
> should be able to stack differnt selected files in dock...
For those who like to keep hierarchical stuff in dock folders, it's
time for a small change in plan--use Finder sidebar instead. (At
least for me, as I always have at least one Finder window open in
column view.) As an added benefit, you gain the use of that hierarchy
in Open and Save As dialogs.
Choice would have been better: mark a dock folder as Stack behavior
or old-style behavior. Wouldn't have been that hard for Apple. (It
would be harder now--the old behavior's code is likely gone into
version control purgatory along with its test cases, and putting it
back would likely require revising it and adding stuff to the full
test cycle.)
For my purposes, Stacks are either just as good, or better. Clearly
not for others.
--John
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Alexander Hoffman (apparently)
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Nov 6, 2007 7:10 am
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Re: Six Things I Hate about Leopard
At 2:09 PM -0700 11/3/07, johnbaxterlists mac.com wrote:
>Choice would have been better
Here is an interesting spot where the user DOES have a lot of choice.
I was just in column view looking in a folder of 23 rather similar
items (versions of the same word file, with a couple of resulting
PDFs) for a particular one. The preview icons were killing me,
because the PDFs were not jumping out as they used to. (i.e they are
red, and Word docs are blue.)
I switched to list view (command-2) to sort by date and saw the old
icons. I checked the view options (command-j) and saw an option for
"Show Icon Preview," which was not selected. Switching back to column
view (command-3), it WAS selected.
So, here is an option that user can set, and they even can have
different settings for each view (icon, list and column), but they
are global for that view. That is, they cannot be customized for each
folder.
--
=Alex Hoffman
Leadership, Policy & Politics
Teachers College, Columbia University
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Matt Neuburg (apparently)
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Nov 7, 2007 3:39 am
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Re: Six Things I Hate about Leopard
On or about 11/6/07 6:10 AM, thus spake "Alexander Hoffman"
<ahoffman aledev.com>:
> I switched to list view (command-2) to sort by date and saw the old
> icons. I checked the view options (command-j) and saw an option for
> "Show Icon Preview," which was not selected. Switching back to column
> view (command-3), it WAS selected.
Correct - this "Show Icon Preview" is a tricky one, because each option
(checked vs. unchecked) has its advantages and disadvantages. As I say in my
"Customizing" ebook, "checked" previews the file's contents, but "unchecked"
can be better because it shows you more clearly what kind of file this *is*.
> So, here is an option that user can set, and they even can have
> different settings for each view (icon, list and column), but they
> are global for that view. That is, they cannot be customized for each
> folder.
I disagree - they *can* be customized for each folder. Let me know if you
need a screen shot proving it.
m.
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JolinWarren (apparently)
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Nov 7, 2007 3:56 am
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Re: Six Things I Hate about Leopard
At 16:06 on 29-10-2007, TidBITS Editors wrote:
> When you choose something from the Help menu in any application,
> what opens is no longer the Help Viewer application. It's an orphan
> window that floats over, and blocks your view of, everything else
> on the screen.
Though I have yet to upgrade to Leopard, like a previous poster I
actually think this is a good thing. Using Microsoft Office's help
always makes me wish that Apple's standard help viewer would float
instead of being a separate application. A floating window is better
precisely because I tend to look something up in help and want to
follow along in the application. It's far preferable for me not to
constantly switch between apps but to work in the app and still have
the instructions floating on screen. I actually think that it's only
on huge three-screen setups that the separate help viewer app is
useful, because then you can position it so it's still visible when
in the actual application.
> I've already started to make plans for writing my own alternative
> help application that will act like an ordinary application.
That will be great for those who prefer a separate application, but I
hope any software using this alternative help application only makes
it optional!
> Some of us even make a living out of running a Classic application,
> as I do with FrameMaker.
Whereby "us" you are presumably including Apple's documentation
division. Look at the info for Leopard PDFs (such as "Mac OS X Server
10.5 Getting Started") and you'll see that they are created by
FrameMaker 6.0. I think it's funny that there is obviously a large
department in Apple equipped with 'old' (PPC) computers and unable to
run Leopard, because they need FrameMaker to turn out all of Apple's
documentation (including the documentation for Pages). How long can
this last?! I would have thought that internal use alone would have
been enough of a reason to include Classic in 10.5.
< http://images.apple.com/server/macosx/docs/Getting_Started_v10.5.pdf>
_________________
=> Jolin
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gsegol (apparently)
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Nov 23, 2007 8:00 am
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Re: Six Things I Hate about Leopard
OPEN LETTER TO APPLE
Please do not listen to Matt Neuburg's complaints. The unified, elegant color scheme in Leopard is beautiful--a welcome break from the color orgy of the Web. We are glad to see OS 9 gone, having carried this lame duck for four upgrades(*). An expert like Matt has no use for the Help function, so disregard his grumbling. Granted, a 2D dock would be better than the 3D version, but this is no big deal, even on my 13" MacBook.
Matt's eBook "Take Control of Customizing Leopard" is superb. With the royalties earned, he will upgrade his eye glasses and most of his complaints will vanish.
Regards, P.S.:(*) Incidentally, why does the Migration Assistant still install an OS 9 Desktop folder after upgrade?
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Dan Frakes (apparently)
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Nov 24, 2007 5:21 am
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Re: Six Things I Hate about Leopard
On 11/23/2007 7:00 AM, "Genevieve Segol" wrote:
> P.S.:(*) Incidentally, why does the Migration Assistant still install an OS 9
> Desktop folder after upgrade?
In my experience, it doesn't install a Desktop Folder at the root level of
your drive; it does, however, bring that folder over if it existed on the
volume from which you're migrating. Which makes sense to me: if such a
folder exists, that means that at some point the disk was used in OS 9, so
there may be data in that folder. Better safe than sorry.
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