Brain Drippings

Keep in mind that it is far easier to complain than criticize, so even though I have some complaints here, overall I am thrilled with Leopard and do not, for a second, regret upgrading to it on the 25th (Yes, I got mine a day early).

While I love spaces, I find the mechanism for adding applications to it to be just dreadful. Thankfully, it is something you do but once, and it will be easily improved.

I have found several very nice features that just popped up for me. My aunt moved recently and sent out an email with her new address. I went to copy it from the email to paste into address book and got a very cool data detecor rectangle around the address. I clicked it, said add to existing contact, and Viola! her new address was in AddressBook.app on her card. Same for the phone numbers.

When adding email addresses to my kids’ logins, I was initially frustrated because I could not seem to drag contacts from my AddressBook (the entire ‘family’ group) to the allowed email list, but then I pressed the disclosure triangle and the whole address book was there, and it was trivial to add the whole group.

File sharing is, overall, much easier—and more powerful. I’ve had some issues with SMB mounts that have been very annoying, however:

1. When I tried to specify the workgroup name of my windows machine (MSHOME) it refused to stick, and Leopard kept showing up as being in the workgroup WORKGROUP.  I finally just changed the wintendo’s group to match.
2. I was able to connect to the windows SMB shares, but the Finder said I was connected as “Guest” even though there is no guest account on the windows machine. It also would not let me copy files to the share or delete files, saying I lacked permission.  However, I was able to do both tasks from Terminal.app without issue, so the Finder was lying. This behavior persists even now, but I am able to copy files or delete files via the finder if they are not at the top-level of the SMB share.
3.  There doesn’t seem to be a way to force an SMB share to always be mounted and keep it at the top-level of the sidebar.

I was using spaces briefly today with two monitors (I used to run two monitors all the time, but when I added a flat-panel to my Mac I found I couldn’t bear to look at the old CRT anymore) and found it very awkward.  It seemed like there should be a setting in spaces “Only activate spaces on this monitor” which would let you have lots of workspaces, but keep the second monitor static across all pages.  Of course, you could sort of fake this with some prefs in Spaces, but not exactly.

Spaces does have some weirdness.  For example, when I switch to iTunes using command-tab, spaces does not switch to the desktop that iTunes is pinned to.  Likewise, when I switch to Firefox, Spaces switches, but the Firefox window is not selected.  The app is in the foreground, but the window is deselected so typing does nothing.  I find myself missing the old Eudora dialog that came up after 8 or so keypresses in the app when no window was up to accept the input.

I’d also like to be able to specify that some spaces have fixed desktop pictures and/or don’t show the ‘desktop’ items.

One of my favorite features in Leopard that’s not been widely covered is the new voice, “Alex.”  It’s a fantastic voice, so good that I have turned on the voice alerts and some other voice features.  I have the speed cranked one notch short of maximum, and it’s perfectly understandable and a real benefit.  I wish that “Alex” was a female voice, as the name would indicate :).

So far, I have completely failed to get BootCamp installed.  I tried to install it as a partition of a non-boot drive, and the partitioning worked, but the Windows Installer could not install.  I then tried to add a small 20GB partition to my Boot drive, and that failed with a mysterious ‘some files could not be moved’ error and no way around it.

I really have to take a moment to reiterate my least favorite Leopard ‘features’: The transparent menubar and the new folder icons.

The transparent menubar is simply an abomination and nothing more need be said.

The new folder icons are really quite annoying though.  In list view, your home folder contains 10 folders that look basically exactly the same.  Without making the icons huge, or dragging them to the sidebar, there is no distinction.  Here’s a sample.  Why couldn’t those nice colorful icons in the sidebar be used in the list view?

And why can’t I drag multiple items onto the sidebar at once?

More to come…