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| Is Leopard an upgrade?
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Mockerator |
Thanks for the info Yabor and that other guy with the obsession for perfection. I'm anxious to try Column View with date modified. Did they improve anything else about Column View? I'm constantly fiddling with the damn columns. They move about, resize themselves on their own. What a mess. Makes it a real pain. Worse than usual. Even for OS X.
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Master Baiter |
All that bullshit with having to twiddle columns is still there. Then when you have it viewing by date and you want to quickly set it BACK to alphabetical, you can't do it without going to "View Options"... drives me scrammy.
Actually, Cover Flow is better when you're trying to visually browse, now, because it's basically LIST view below, with larger icon previews in the cover flow area. Yet you can still click on the Name, Date Modified, Label, etc. headers to sort. If the previews of Cover Flow filled in faster, it might be worth something. You can drag a cover flow icon onto the dock to a specific app and open it... that works. But you can't drag a document icon onto an APPLICATION icon in coverflow and have it open. Sheesh. You can't drag an item from cover flow into a folder in cover flow. You can't drag a document from the desktop onto a cover flow folder icon to put it in the folder. I could go on. You can drag a cover flow item into the left finder column. |
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Mockerator |
The first thing that needs adjusting in Leotard is the lousy mouse setting (the accelaration curve) that OS X has had since its beginning. OS 9 knew how to run a mouse. OS X doesn't. But I'm no longer surprised when such basic stuff is botched. But thankfully USB Overdrive cures the problem. I recommend that anyone install it. You might not know how good a mouse can really track. Better now, but it still doesn't feel quite right.
And then, of course, I went to the Appearance control panel and turned on the graphite and off the blue. When did it become a requirement to sign up for the Rainbow Coalition just to use a Mac? Could that background of the installer and the desktop picture being any more gay? I'm just going to go gray until I figure something out. The first priority is Just make it stop! Ahh. Change the System Preference icons to show alphabetically. Can't ever find anything with it listed in groups. Gotta pare some of the icons off the Dock (after first, of course, moving it to the left side of the screen). iChat? Go away. Leave me alone. I don't want inane conversation breaking in on me when I'm either working or typing up a good rant. How do people live in a world with dozens of "buddies" pestering them all the time? The labels on Dock items are a little less annoying, but barely so. And certainly not easier to read. Yeah, let's reverse-out the type and make it semitransparent. I'm surprised the Leotard doesn't come with a jar of Vaseline that you smear on the screen too. But let me take it from the top. Installation when smooth although, much like a TV show where a bomb is going to go off in 10 seconds, it took about 25 minutes for that last 10 minutes on the installation clock to tick down to zero. I also spent some extra time this time and let Leotard check the new 320 GIG Maxtor for errors. It went fine. The first impression I always have when loading one of these upgrades is that it feels like a change of regimes rather than an upgrade. Each version is a makeover of previous ones. Everyone's trying to put their mark on things. Oh, give me one consolidator over a hundred people trying to make their marks. Was that OS X telling me "Bloat" in about ten different spiffy floating and twisting languages during the first-time start-up process? Why are we still dealing with cat names? Anybody know? I see they have a disclosure triangle on the sidebar now. Yours truly suggested that soon after they had come up with that. I even drew a picture. I hate setup screens that intervene. You should get to the damn Desktop and Finder first just to let you know it worked right...and to prevent the setup screens from possibly botching things. It was interesting that they had a Keyboard Identify as part of the setup. Never seen that before. I hit the wrong key and the little progress rotator just rotated and rotated. I tried again a couple minutes later (not wanting to confuse Leotard) and it accepted it. Basically the progress-rotation rotator thingy wasn't showing that my Mac was in the process of doing something. It was just waiting for more input. Dumb. Time to do a rough calibration of the screen. Why the stupid new spinning-gears icon for System Preferences? A little continuity would have been appreciated. Dumb. Or, I mean, retarded. |
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Mockerator |
Doing the Software Update process now. That's going to take a while. Oh, I see the Leotard doesn't support Classic at all. That's going to demote this entire OS to the "tinkering" stage. Useless to me.
Cover Flow is a gimmick. Near worthless. But "Quick Look" looks like it has some potential. But the preview windows disappears when you switch to a different app and reappears when you switch back to the Finder. I find this behavior to be really odd. Why when you drag a folder of stuff to the Dock does it show up as not a folder but maybe as a pdf document icon? This is odd. And why does the Dock have that much wider dotted separation line? Couldn't they figure out a better way to waste space? |
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Mockerator |
I'm actually for the idea behind stacks (not the stacking itself). I like the idea of seeing small previews of things as an option to a list view (whether that list view is in a Dock, Apple Menu, or wherever). I could come to like the "tile" version of it. But what the hell is this Leaning Tower of Pisa shit? And you only get the "Fan" effect if the Dock is at the bottom of the screen. Okay. Actually (and quite surprisingly), a Macworld article has some good criticisms of Stacks. I almost had to look twice to make sure it said "Macworld."
Software Update stalled in the middle of the Quicktime download. Wasn't a problem on my end because the internet remained up and running. |
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THALO.net prophet |
What a waste of lifetime. I have Leotard here but i not very motivated to do the install... I need a reason to do so. Watched a friend using Quicklook on his machine - it's nice. We watched Quicktime-movie snippets. Double clicking the movie or using Quicklook was in the same league regarding performance. But Quicklook is not as good, because it goes away quickly and doesn't support anything more that looking. Well, it's really a "Quicklook".
Hmm.... I still see no real benefit right now. Spotcrap annoyed me yesterday and i shut it off. It indexed an external drive and killed performance overall, really great software. Doesn't wait for idle states, but hogs up cycles all the time. That's shit software. |
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Mockerator |
What a waste of lifetime. I have Leotard here but i not very motivated to do the install..
Well, brother Smithz, it's probably worthwhile just to keep up with "change for change's sake" because eventually you end up needing the latest version of the OS to run some of the software you want to run. And I see some changes that look good at first glance. I think Time Machine is by far the biggest potential improvement. The Sidebar disclosure triangles are a big improvement. But it seems to me that recognizing which is the active window is actually worse in Leotard than in Tiger, although I'll withhold judgment short of seeing an actual side-by-side comparison which would only be fair. Yabor said you could make the menus opaque. I don't see a setting for that, or did I misunderstand him? A friend of mine who I trust (and who lent me Leotard to install) sounds a lot like thalo. She's having all kinds of problems with getting the software to work sometimes. Dreamweaver keeps asking to be re-registered or something like that. And is it just me, or is the drop-shadow around the windows now more diffused and softer? They wouldn't need a drop shadow at all if they actually drew a proper edge to the windows. But it seems to me in Tigard it's a little darker. At least if you're going to use gimmicky things like drop-shadows, make them somewhat useful. I swear, if we ever went on some kind of tour of Apple Computer headquarters, sort of as a gang of us all going together, it would take one or two of you to restrain me from bitch-slapping a couple of the interface designers as we walked through that area of the building. Thalo, is there any way to make the typesize of the Sidebar items larger? Yeah, small can be good, but a little larger than the default would be nice. I dragged a document onto the titlebar of a Finder window for quick access. But it deeps showing up as a "?" question mark where an icon should be. It still works though. Yeah, the preview thing could be better. They should perhaps take a page from that Finder replacement program, Pathfinder, and give you the option of a larger preview pane in Column View and an attached pane in list or icon view. I hate to say "Drawer" because I really hate those things. But kind of like that. The mouse feels like it's working just a teeny bit better since I applied all those Software Update updates. |
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THALO.net prophet |
Well, i'm going to update somewhere in the future. That's for sure. Right now, dunno.
Besides, i'm using "Shadowkiller" since 10.1, so i really don't care for any dropshadows at all. It went worse in Leotard, because the active window sports a giant cheesy dropshadow... Glad i'm running Shadowkiller. Shame, that Apple doesn't offer any customization regarding shadows, window-borders, anything at all. Holy Steve said so, so be it. Cheesy style since 10.0. BN, are you actually planning to use Time Machine in a serious way? I'm just curious. Ps. Column view... Yes, you can choose your preferred way of sorting-method now, but you can't just switch it on the fly but must go into the prefs. WTF! That's stoneage again. |
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Mockerator |
I noticed when customizing the toolbar of Finder windows that the Cover Flow widget is hard-wired to the other view option widgets (it's just one, big widget). Too bad. I'm never going to use that kludge. That space up there could be better used for something else. I realize thalo may one day talk me into the usefulness of Cover Flow, but not quite today.
Ya know, it helps to type "Leopard" and not "Leotard" into the Google search field. At least for now. That word could catch on, I suppose. Here's a nifty technique for adding separator lines to the Sidebar. That's actually a useful idea and was what I had envision for further enhancements to the Sidebar about the second I saw it. Besides, i'm using "Shadowkiller" since 10.1, so i really don't care for any dropshadows at all. I like Shadowkiller. I used it once. The only problem is that it needs a complimentary program called "WindowEdgePutBackInner". I can't tell you how many times I overshoot the scrollbars and get dumped out of the program I'm in because I click on some other window below it. And all this is with the drop shadows. It only gets worse when you eliminate them. One of these days, I swear, Aqua will look just like OS 9 because OS 9 got most of these things right. Call it convergent evolution. BN, are you actually planning to use Time Machine in a serious way? I'm just curious. No. Because Leotard won't run Classic, I'll just be playing and nose-picking when I'm using Leotard. But I've long been of the mind that before ANY operating system adds another bell or whistle, they should make recovery of data (due to crashed hard drives or just accidentally deleted file) Job One. I don't know how well Time Machine works, but it's long overdue. Ps. Column view... Yes, you can choose your preferred way of sorting-method now, but you can't just switch it on the fly but must go into the prefs. WTF! That's stoneage again. That's what thalo mentioned. Agreed. Stone age. Might even be so far back that it's in the Tar Age. Another thing that is a slight improvement is that the background of the Dock is a medium light gray. That's about exactly the shade of gray I used when I tweaked the dock via the utility "Transparent Dock." But I always made that gray opaque. Apple nose-pickers (otherwise known as "human interface scientists") continue to be enthralled by being able to see through things. Okay. We get it. It's possible. |
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Mockerator |
I know a lot of people are a big fan of Spaces. And I'll admit that they could be potentially useful. But I think "potentially" is the active word here. If you spend more time fiddling with something setting it up into Spaces than it takes to simply move to another window or windows via other means, I can see never fiddling with Spaces. But I might be in the minority on this one.
Dashboard/Safari do a potentially useful thing. You can clip an area of a Safari web page and it will turn into a Widget. Presumably it will update itself. If Dashboard itself weren't such a junk-drawer thing, I'd be willing to say that this is potentially quite useful. But why should this stuff hide away in Dashboard's junk drawer? Wouldn't that be better on the Desktop or in some kind of Dashboard-like layer in Safari? Thalo's right. The one place where these idiots could have used transparency was to make the active window really pop out against the rest. Right now, it's a mess. I can see it's far worse than Tigard in this regard. (That sort of rhymes.) I kept getting these damn delays when clicking on stuff in the Finder. I was pretty sure I knew what it was. By default, Energy Saver puts the hard drives to sleep whenever it can. Does anyone else leave that checked? How much energy does a hard drive use? Even if it's a lot, it's just unworkable waiting for a hard drive to spin up every time you want to read something off it. |
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THALO.net prophet |
I agree 100%! ... I have this specific app "WindowEdgePutBackInner" programmed into my cortex, visual information decoding area  ...Yeah, there is that add-on "Windowshade" by Unsanity which can put the Window-Edges back into OS X, at least you can alter all the parameters of the shadows so it draws an edge only. But it's not free and i don't know if these unsanity-tools are still running with 10.5. (Update: Currently NOT compatible with 10.5) It's great to live in the Stoneage of 2008 . :-P |
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Mockerator |
It's a bitch to see when Column View is not able to be chosen. It's grayed out, but the lines are so thin. I wonder if it's the same way in Tigard.
Here's a page that mentions starting a slide show via the Finder. I can't find any right-facing triangle though.
Yeah, there is that add-on "Windowshade" by Unsanity which can put the Window-Edges back into OS X, at least you can alter all the parameters of the shadows so it draws an edge only. But it's not free and i don't know if these unsanity-tools are still running with 10.5. (Update: Currently NOT compatible with 10.5) Yeah, there is that. I used a demo of it way back when, but decided I didn't need it. But it might be worth another look, assuming it works with Leotard. Right now I can't get Mail to talk to my mail server. But that spinning dealie sure knows how to spin and spin. Okay, Mail finally cooperated...for some reason. I'm also checking out moving my HyperCard stacks over to OS X via SuperCard. Yeah, I may be in the Tar Age by using HyperCard, but if it's an easy conversion, I could dispense with Classic entirely. |
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Mockerator |
Well, I tried out SuperCard and its HyperCard stack converter. It looks doable. It will require a lot of tweaking of the HyperTalk code, but it looks doable. The program isn't that expensive either which is nice.
It's also seems that the Finder windows, especially the sidebar, is a little more professional looking in Leotard. The "Merge All Windows" command in Safari is useful. I applaud them for thinking of useful things. I'd like to put the Safari team in charge of the Finder. It seems like the Dock no longer clicks to that 32 x 32 sweet spot when you hold option down on the resizer thing while resizing. Most of the Open/Save column views default to near postage stamp size making it a pain in the ass. |
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Mockerator |
Well, I don't know how long SuperCard will be developed, but it sure looks like I can move my HyperCard stuff to OS X. And I probably should. Luckily there seems to be just a few syntax changes to dick with, but nothing that horrendous. But there is just tons of code, and it's much too complicated to ever be able to delve into it again from scratch. I mean, here's just the code (certainly not up to professional standards, for sure) of one button of one stack. All the prices are out of date. I don't even use them anymore. This is legacy stuff from all the way back to making PMT halftones with screens. Oh, geez, it's a lot easier to scan things now.
Yeah, I do like the new sensible look for folders. Can I make them gray? Okay, am I missing something? You can view by date in Column View, but it doesn't show you your current sorting order. No feedback. It's kind of useless to me. If I have to guess what state things are in, I'll just leave it as "by name." |
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Mockerator |
Anyway, to further reflect on your question, Smithz, I don't see a compelling reason to switch to Leotard. I like fooling around with new software just for the fun of it. QuickLook could be handy once in a while, but it's not a Killer App by any means. In fact (and I'm willing to stand corrected by brother thalo who's delved a lot more into Leotard than I have...by far) I'd be willing to say that there is no Killer App or concept in Leotard. If what you're doing now works for you, I doubt you'd miss Leotard at all. If you have a separate drive to install it on, then by all means, go for it. Check it out. Kick a few tires, as we Americana say. But it won't change your life. That's what iLife is for.
I'm back in Tigard for the moment. But playing around with Leoptard has given me the inspiration to perhaps (yeah, he's a conservative) finally put Classic behind me. The only things I use it for are PageMaker and HyperCard. I prefer Illustrator 8, but can make due with CS1. But I'm not motivated to get rid of Classic by any silly notions of "purity." Hey, to me, OS 9 was a hell of a lot more purer than the bloat and gawd-awful interface of OS X. It was "snappier" as well. But I find Classic to be pretty unstable. But Leotard has sort of inspired me to upgrade a few things. I still use Outlook Express in Classic, for example. I just prefer it. Mail has always been so bloated and buggy. But I'll try converting to Tigard's Mail and see how that goes. I'm obviously not Apple's target market. They're looking for those people like you see on the QVC channel or one of those infomercials where they hawk crap and everybody goes noodles and nuts over a toaster that "can toast on both sides at once!!!" And everybody whoops and hollers and gets wet between the legs because their toaster oven has a setting for apple pie. The Mac is a religion. Always has been. That's how it's sold. That's how it's maintained. I get a kick out of listening to some of Bill Gate's interviews where he expresses true consternation that a roomful of people (at one of Job's gigs) could get so excited over seemingly nothing. He' right, of course. But at one time the "religion" was over ease-of-use and breaking down the geek aristocracy (although those exact words weren't used at the time). But now it's all turned so trivial. People get woodies over small changes in the menubar. I just want to be able to read the friggin' menu and the items contained within with maximum legibility. So, if you're anything like me, you can take or leave Leotard. I don't need another religion, nor do I need another pain-in-the-ass upgrade. But it's got a few nice things here or there, but probably nothing that will have any impact on your workflow other than to slow it down because of software problems. But one day you'll use it because things move on, whether we like it or not. |
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Master Baiter |
Don't even say that word unless you want me to cry with nostalgia. Leopard's mail has a lot of bug fixes over Tigtard. Mail was driving me insane, now it's working pretty well. I think you've gotta go with Leopard just for the Finder, spotlight, interface and font rendering improvements. The only thing I don't know, is how slow it runs on your hardware. You have an MDD? Does it drag? On the G5 I find it slow to preview Finder icons, slow to fill in cover-flow, but once it fills in, it's OK. Same old same old, but I actually have fewer really bad beachballs in the Finder now. I find I am using "Spaces", but I have been able to trip it up. The Dock seems a little buggier, and I do truly hate the little barely visible application running lights. The dark triangle was way better. Can take or leave "Stacks"... in order to work, I think they should be smarter. For example, if you have applications NESTED in folders in your application folder, the "Applications" stack should just show you the app icons in the grid, so you can one-click launch. Not the folders, which just open a Finder window, which means you should have just used the Finder for them. |
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Mockerator |
The only thing I don't know, is how slow it runs on your hardware. You have an MDD? Does it drag?
Speed doesn't seem to be an issue. No, Cover Flow doesn't work very well, but I just can't imagine using that even if it did. I find I am using "Spaces", but I have been able to trip it up. Well, grouping things together can work very well, whether one is talking layers or objects in some graphics program, or windows in an OS. If you're always working with the same set of windows, I can see Spaces working well. But I tend to jump from thing to thing and Spaces wouldn't do much for me. But for big web projects or programming projects, I can see the benefit. Again, love the avatar. Can take or leave "Stacks"... in order to work, I think they should be smarter. Yep. And the big loss is that you can't drag a folder of stuff to the Dock and access it in just the form of a hierarchical list. That's a huge loss, although I don't tend to make much use of that feature, but I know that others do. For example, if you have applications NESTED in folders in your application folder, the "Applications" stack should just show you the app icons in the grid, so you can one-click launch. Not the folders, which just open a Finder window, which means you should have just used the Finder for them. Probably nothing says "unfinished, half-baked, and unrealized" as much as Leotard's implementation of stacks. They just make little sense to me. They work one way in the Dock at the bottom and another way when the Dock is at the sides. The grid arranges itself in various ways depending on how many items you have in a folder. The actual icon that shows up in the Dock is not easily predictable (at least in any intuitive sense). It's a complete mess. I was least impressed by Stacks. More junk drawer. Most over-hyped is Cover Flow. I just don't see the use for it, at least not until all the fixes and additions that you have mentioned are added. It also seems to be missing something fundamental, although I can't quite put my finger on what it is at the moment. I think one thing is that it's so hard to control. It's not like a linear scrolling list. With Cover Flow it's so easy to over-shoot. There's really a horrible "feel" to the scrolling in Cover Flow. Yeah, HyperCard has given me some nostalgic pangs as well, especially in delving into all that HyperTalk. I remember doing it. And I tried to comment the code to a certain extent, but for the most part I've lost my familiarity with the language. But the transition to SuperCard should work okay. What I wrote did nothing very fancy so compatibility issues are small. I got done what I go done, but I realize programming is a true art. I remember looking into the code other people did for their stacks and it was just so better thought-out and organized. But I guess that stuff can also be taught to a certain extent. Me, it was all seat of the pants. Anyway, I just got done importing my mailboxes from Outlook Express. First time around everything froze up. I deleted a whole bunch of older items (it's all archived if I ever need it again, but I deleted everything older than January of this year). It worked. Thalo, is there any special mojo or technique to setting up an existing Hotmail account in Mail? Is that a "Pop" or "Imap" type, for example? Also, how do you import all your contacts? That didn't import over to the address book. Okay, never mind. I figured out how to do it. Export from Outlook then import form Address Book. |
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THALO.net poet laureate |
Strange, Leopold V is MUCH faster than Tiger (on the same machine) for the wife and I. The difference is huge. It's the very first thing we noticed, with relief. And yet you bros don't seem to notice any difference, or maybe even a slow-down.
I see two explanations: 1) there was something wrong with our Tiger installation, or 2) Leopold is faster on Intel Macs (like ours) than on PPC ones. Hurray, Brad, the Gauguin avatar is gone. |
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Master Baiter |
No, you can... you just have to do the fucking extra twiddle to do it now. You have to set it to "Folder" and "List" in the Dock popup menu. And you have to do it for every folder you drag in there. But once set, it remembers. Hopefully. "Stacks" is just another intellectual Everest. OpenSource development is all about doing stuff because they CAN, or because it's cool, rather than for any true or useful purpose. These guys would sit around all day watching spinning gear animation if you let them. There's more care put into the fucking REFLECTIONS ON THE DOCK OR IN COVERFLOW than in whether those things are actually useful or intuitive. I don't have any hotmail accounts, but I think it's all going to depend on whether or not you have a legacy account or a newer "Windows Live" one. I think the only hotmail that's going to work in Mac Mail are the subscription accounts, and who the hell wants to pay for email? For contacts, where are you trying to import them from? I just imported from another copy of Address book on my other drive. If you're going from outlook or something you have to export to a tab-delimited text file (or some other common format like LDIF or vCards), and then import that into the Apple Address Book app. I imported all my contacts from Entourage many moons ago. Now I just copy the files from thalo/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/ |
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Master Baiter |
That's my guess. I tell you, I've never felt more strongarmed by Apple into buying new hardware than I am for this migration. |
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