November 12, 2007

Spotted Cat

Posted by Eric at 7:07 am | Category: Technology

I installed Leopard this past week.

The pictures of Leopard boxes don’t really do it justice. There’s a weird hologram-ish thing in the background of the “X” that makes it look like it’s floating in the middle of space. No really, go check out a box in a computer store (or an Apple Store). It’s pretty nifty.

Overall, I like it a lot! Spotlight and the Finder are considerably more snappy, which is always a great quality of life improvement (yes, it’s sad, much of my life is spent on my computer). QuickLook is excellent. Spring-Loaded Dock folders are also very useful. The new ability to create Dashboard widgets from Safari is quite handy; I’ve set up weather.com and PhD comics widgets. I don’t know what else I’d use it for, though. On the programming side, I’m looking forward to automatic memory management in Objective-C.

I’m not bothered by the UI changes as much as other people seem to be. I don’t like high-contrast backgrounds anyway, so the transparent menu bar isn’t a problem, and I’m just not nit-picky enough about the dock to worry about the angle it’s at. On the other hand, I’m having trouble getting used to the over-saturated colors on little bits of the system (like the menu highlight color), and the rounded corners on everything. It’s still jarring to me that my top menu-bar isn’t white, or at least grey; I keep thinking that I’ve engaged “Exposé.”

The UI change that bothers me most is that the icons in the “Stacks” on the bottom of my computer are pictures of the contents, which means that I have to move my mouse along to hunt for the correct folder, as rarely are the mismash of icons very informative.

A note to those who use DoubleCommand and Logitech software: installing Leopard will cause problems. Logitech’s programmers have decided to try to hack OS X in ways Apple has explicitely told them not to in order to make their hardware work, instead of writing proper drivers. DoubleCommand, for some reason, causes hangups of the system during shutdown, so I’ve had to manually go through and remove every trace of it.

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3 Responses to “Spotted Cat”

  1. Apollo Says:
    November 12th, 2007 at 9:52 am

    I don’t actually use Spotlight that much, but the faster/native Finder does make things a lot nicer. I’m also a big fan of Quick Look, and as I used Virtue for multiple desktop spaces before, Spaces is a great addition for me (particularly being able to easily drag windows from one space by holding down the mouse button on the window title and clicking the keystrokes to switch screens). Spaces is also great for running Parallels in one of the spaces.

    I’ve only used the custom widgets once so far, but it was useful: I was tracking a rather expensive package (my diagnostic set) through the carrier site, and the tracking information fit quite nicely and updated perfectly.

    As for Stacks, I’m only using one for a “Current” folder (i.e. things that would go on my Desktop normally), but I took a suggestion offered on one of my RSS feeds: I made an empty Automator program, gave it an arbritary title like “–”, and gave it a custom icon to give the Stack a permanent icon. I’m sure there are other ways of doing this, but this is easy enough.

  2. Eric Says:
    November 12th, 2007 at 10:23 am

    Just to let you know, a folder would work just as well; there’s nothing particularly special about Automator programs. I’m currently using the suggestion here to give my stacks particular icons overlays.

  3. A Different Ben Says:
    November 12th, 2007 at 11:07 am

    As Lester alluded to, you can just put random images into your applications/documents/etc. folders and name them so that they’re always first alphabetically. I found some nifty icons that are much easier to discern than a blank folder as the Documents stack and the 1Passwd icon for the Applications stack. (The system icons and extra icons have these colored circle icons with or without graphics that I particularly like.)

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