Assorted Geekery

Although I’d never dream of writing a complete review of Leopard—that job is taken—I always get a kick out of looking for those tiny changes that don’t show up on feature lists. Since Leopard seems to be all about these little details, much of this topic seems to have been covered elsewhere. That said, here are some of my own (hopefully new) observations.

• Front Row plays its own music, rather than just controlling iTunes in the background.
• Fast user switching is much…faster.
• The format Mail stores To-Dos in on an IMAP server is gross. Not editable outside of Mail, and it says so at the top of every one. I’m not convinced that turning email servers into program-specific data stores is a good idea.
• Sometimes Mail won’t let you close its main window.
• Icons on the desktop sometimes become un-selectable. Relaunching Finder fixes this.
• The Cisco VPN client works (and so does Shimo).
• Safari now automatically resizes images that are too big for the browser window, but you can barely tell, because it does so beautifully (as opposed to Firefox and IE/Windows).
• “Create Archive” in Finder is now called “Compress”, and BOMArchiveHelper has been renamed to a much less scary-sounding “Archive Utility”. “BOMArchiveHelper” needed to go, but “Compress” is too vague for my taste. Just call it “Create ZIP”.
• I hate to say it, but things do feel…snappier.
• The free space indicator at the bottom of Finder windows updates in real time, rather than waiting for you to activate the window.
• Clicking an empty stack will open the folder in Finder. This surprises me every time.
• The default time based searches have funny names: “SEARCH FOR: Today”? Search for today? What?
• Grammar check is pretty lenient and seems relatively unobtrusive:
• Tabs in Terminal, and they have the same functionality as those in Safari 3, but they appear to be custom. They look like Safari’s, and work like Safari’s, but they’re not as smooth and there are no fancy transitions. Shame that this code couldn’t be shared between the applications. Hopefully one day Apple will provide this to developers for free.
• If you build a widget in Safari, and the containing block changes size, the widget resizes itself as necessary in Dashboard.
• If the Help menu item isn’t the last one, the last one will be selected if you try to mouse directly to the Spotlight box. In other words, this doesn’t work:
• When scrubbing a dragged item over the Dock, the floating labels slide in rather than just appearing.
• The new “Alex” voice is really, really good. On a related note, when I’m in charge, all computer voices will be female, by law. Tax breaks for hiring Majel Barrett.
• Some of the dead space in Finder’s toolbar works as a drag handle, some doesn’t. Command-dragging the dead space when the window is in the background brings it to the foreground (which is bad). This works as expected if you click where the title bar used to be.
• The shift-command-4 screenshot crosshairs now have a position indicator.
• Preview can take screenshots.
• It’s easy to get lost in Spaces and accidently woosh yourself somewhere else. The Mac interface doesn’t really work with virtual desktops, if you ask me.
• It’s always iCal Day.
• Built-in print previews in many apps when you expand the new print dialog.
• Because Mail seems to delete and recreate notes every time you edit them, and Gmail never deletes a message, you wind up with several copies of every note on Gmail. Weird.
• Stickies is at version 6. Does anyone else find this hilarious?
• From a friend at work: Screen Saver Preferences Pane > Pictures Folder > third display style from the left. Unreal.

Dumb to include the number of observations in the permalink. Here’s a few more:

• When choosing a desktop picture from your iPhoto library, the image picker now shows a progress bar as it loads your photos.
• When deleting users, you’re given the option of storing their data in a disk image (as opposed to just a folder in previous versions).

Please add your own in the comments!

This entry was posted by Chris Biagini on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Apple, OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.