Yes I know, it’s bloody messy. As you can see, that’s my applications folder in Stacks (Grid mode)…
With Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) already upon many of us, there is much rejoicing in the Apple community as we breath new life into our freshly aged Intel Macs. With 300+ new features to the operating system, some purely aesthetic (e.g. 3D dock), some pretty darn neat (e.g. Time Machine which I concur with Paul on boosting HD sales), some under the hood for developers (e.g. Ruby on Rails), delightfully positive reviews have come in hard and fast.
In particular, Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal made a comparison to Microsoft’s Vista, where he noted how “[E]very piece of software and hardware I tried on two Leopard-equipped Macs – a loaned laptop from Apple and my own upgraded iMac – worked fine, exhibiting none of the compatibility problems that continue to plague Vista.”
From what I’ve experienced with the new operating system, this cat seems to be faster and mightier. Still, expect to face hiccups at least for the first few weeks where developers will have time to fix the apps to play nice. Being a blogger, I tend to use quite a number of open-source and social applications, a few of which have failed to work in Leopard.
So far, Pukka (a quick del.icio.us bookmarker) crashes upon login [no longer as Justin just released version 1.6.2 which has Leopard compatibility!], and the Last.fm standalone player (build 1.3.2.13) doesn’t want to launch at all. Having a Sony LocationFree TV base station, my Mac client no longer works as well (think “TV to Youtube” captures). Granted, for a major OS transition like Leopard, this trade-off is close to nothing since everything else works as before, if not more efficiently. I’m still looking out for apps that don’t work in Leopard (and no, Armor Alley was sweet, but doesn’t count). If you know of any, holla back.
Oh, I do have one more gripe though… it’s got to do with Stacks.
Leopard’s new Dock has folders of files organized automatically in a neat stack. One click and the stack springs open, revealing items in an elegant arc or an at-a-glance grid. Looks good right? But notice something unproductive about this… there is a limited number of items that actually gets displayed in the arc as well as the grid.
To explain, I’ve mentioned the following over at TUAW:
“If you think that’s bad, what about how you can’t default to simply popping up a folder hierarchy in the dock to show all your items, rather than to have stacks (or the grid option) offer you a smaller selection of your files, only to have you click once more on the “Show in Finder” arrow just to see what you could in your folder back Tiger? It’s simply unproductive and downright silly not to give the old option back!”
In Tiger, I could keep a folder in the dock and in one-click browse the folder’s hierarchy to open what I want. In Leopard, dragging any folder to the dock forces it into a stack, so I’ve to click once to span it out, then once more to search the folder in the Finder.
I’ve tried looking for a way to not activate a docked folder as a stack, but no dice. Any takers?
