LOL. I wouldn't doubt it a bit, Markle. And I'm still trying to come to terms with anti-aliasing. A lot of people like the way that it looks, and I do too. But I generally don't like the way that it reads. A well-designed bitmapped font rendered without anti-aliasing on a relatively medium-res screen (like modern LCD's) is so much more readable and easier on the eyes to me. Remember those tests that you and some others have posted where either only the top halves of the letters in a sentence are shown, or the letters themselves are scrambled except for the first and last letters? And remember how surprisingly readable those sentences are? Well, that's a big clue how important edge-recognition is. And if you blur that in any way, you're going to make reading more difficult. For graphic arts it can be very important to have AA so you can get the gist of a letterform on a relatively low-res monitor like all of us use (I don't think there are any 300 ppi monitors out there yet, at least in wide use). Because both these needs are important (reading and designing), it just makes sense to let the user control anti-aliasing throughout a program or operating system.

Anti-aliasing looks great...um, on super-giant fonts. It's never looked good at low resolutions in OS X. The only way to make it moot is, like you say, to have monitor resolutions that can approximate the printed page. While I'd certainly LOVE that, it is still a ways off.

In the "old" days, you simply custom designed fonts that didn't NEED aliasing, for certain sizes. That was a sane and rational solution to having crisp type at small sizes onscreen. I don't know what the fuck happened to that, except that now the font rendering in OS X is all based on shrink/grow effects, which need outline fonts, and which need them to behave a certain way if they're going to be used as text and be able to be masked when highlighted.

You may recall that it's only been since Panther that much of OS X text was consistently ABLE To be highlighted without those stupid AA "haloing" effects. And in lieu of that, we've gone for warm/cool aliasing (which I call "technicolor antialiasing") which pulls edges of letterforms forward or back in space using color rather than tone. Fine, but when certain letterforms are kerned together, your visual threshold sometimes starts to discern cyan or orange edges on friggin' black type.

You mean to tell me that bitmap fonts wouldn't be EASIER to mask to? They did it in 1984. And why later, in OS 9, could we change our interface fonts to either huge or tiny, and they never had trouble masking to highlight colors no matter what size they were? Why was that so simple then, and so tough now? Right now, in certain apps, I'll STILL see small type not mask well to its highlight color.

OK, so after complaining and bitching to Apple about wanting smaller type in the Finder, we get it down to 10pt. If you choose your highlight color dark or black, in Finder column view it drops out fine when an item is selected. So they CAN do it... but when you try to EDIT TEXT LABELS, the text suddenly can't drop out anymore? Let's examine that.

Something must be different about the editable state of an icon/list item in the Finder, and its appearance at other times. If you look at the way LABELS work, it's the same thing. Text is labeled, until you need to go EDIT it, then suddenly the label around the text up and vanishes. Hmmmm the plot thickens.

There's two states for type in the interface/Finder. One is like the special effects state, and the other is the editable state, where text highlighting needs to be masked to whatever you type in.

And yet, to complicate things, I go to an app like Microsoft Word, and I can highlight text, it masks, PLUS can be manipulated by the OS to slow-genie-suck, including the text highlighting.

By the way, turning off aliasing on the Mac makes no sense at this point. Might as well set "Turn off text smoothing for font sizes...and smaller" to fucking FOUR. Something in the way fonts are handled in OS X means that when smoothing is turned off, spacing and form are really pooched in the Fonts that Apple is using for the interface. Since there is no MONOSPACED version of Lucida, it's always going to look terrible, so might as well not even bother with it.

However, go to Word, turn off aliasing below 10, and type in Geneva 9 in all its glory. And it can be highlighted. So it can be done. That's the font I want on all my Finder lists, and all my icon labels. I'd prefer it in my mail lists too. Or I'd take Monaco. There has to be some command somewhere where you could say, OK, if I'm using old school monospaced screen fonts, always pixelate them. No smoothing.

Lucida was meant to be seen onscreen at 13pt. I can function with its 11 point flavor in the Finder, but it's still not my first choice. Geneva 9 would look so much better. It would give me back at least SOME of my beloved legacy. In a place where I really count on font readability at small sizes.

oh, of course like a good little robot, I already ordered my copy. $135 and change.

I realized I can't look at brushed metal anymore. I can deal with the soft gradation.

Here's an excerpt from the FINDER entry at Apple, in the section where they describe the 300+ new features of Leopard. And I quote:

New Sidebar
Use the sidebar to do even more. Now items are grouped into categories (places, devices, shared computers, and searches) just like the Source list in iTunes [THALO CRINGE]. Start finding what you want with a single click.

Cover Flow
Flip through your files in the Finder just like you flip through your album art in iTunes [THALO CRINGE]. Cover Flow displays the first page of every document. You can also click through multipage documents and play movies.

Back to My Mac
Connect to any of your Mac computers at home from any Mac on the Internet. Your home computers appear in the shared section of the sidebar. Just click and you’re in.

Instant Screen Sharing from the Finder
Start an interactive screen sharing session with other Macs on your network. Just select the Mac from your sidebar and (if authorized) you can see and control the Mac as if you were right in front of it. Change a system preference, publish an iPhoto library, or add a new playlist to iTunes [THALO CRINGE].

Icon Preview
See files for what they really are. Leopard displays icons that are actual thumbnail previews of the documents themselves.

Path Bar
See the path of a file when you view it in the Finder. Just choose Show Path Bar from the View menu and the path is visible at the bottom of the Finder window. You can also drag files to any location in the Path Bar.

New Folder of Options
Take control your view options. Adjust the grid spacing to move icons closer together or further apart for the currently viewed folder, or with one click make this view the default for all your folders.

Folder Sharing
Turn any folder on your Mac into a shared folder. You can share any folder in your home directory from the Sharing system preference. You can customize access privileges and even authorize specific contacts in your Address Book.

Overall, Leopard looks to me more unified, cleaner, less bubbly. Big technical improvements in the Finder I hear (about frickin' time). Time Machine is splashy but clever (the ability to search for deleted or lost files via the application UI themselves) seems drop-dead easy. Spaces looks interesting - a very polished virtual desktop implementation. I like the *idea* of Stacks - not convinced if their current implementation is perfect.

And thalo, you'll like this for sure.

Also, don't knock CoverFlow / QuickLook in the Finder for quickly paging through images until you've tried it. I think it'll be surprisingly useful.

I'm curious whether the auto font-activation in Font Book will actually work well. If so, that's a big plus for designers.

And I have read that the menus, which were more transparent than the ones in Tiger (much more), at the last moment have been rendered opaque! David Pogue was complaining about these menus too.

We'll see.

Lookmark, it sounds like you have a reasonable attitude toward this upgrade. And that reasoned opinion (what the hell is that doing here at thalo.net?) helps me to keep an open mind about some of this stuff, like Cover-flow. I think there's a lot of "we'll see" stuff in Leopard. And I'm sort of like you, I don't know if Stacks will work, but I like the idea. Auto-font activation sounds spiffy.

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Even Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, who loves OS X, complained in his review of Leopard today about the translucent menu bar.
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I can't wait for thalo's "review"...

On the net i read some so-called reviews (mostly rewritten press releases), plus i read on unholy MacNN-Forum. New Dock seems like a waste of space. I'll have to wait for some serious review on ars-technica.
Stacks seem visually nice to some people, but effective? I doubt that.
Transparent Menubar, i still don't know if this can be altered via Pref-Panel.
Cover-flow in finder? ... <sigh>...
UI-Wise i saw screenshots still containing crystal sausages. Strange.

"Quicklook" could be a useful feature, let's see how quick that really is. And what kind of different documents it can handle. A fast and realiable preview feature in the finder is IMHO essential. Tiger is OK, but not brilliant in this case. (Too slow, esp. on movies)

So far, nothing really catching my breath. I'm still curious.

Another thing that annoys me since 10.0: Do Finder windows update their contents like they are supposed to yet: which should be immediately?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: smithz,

I had the box containing Leopard waiting for me when I got home from my vacation to Florida. I'll be working on installing it today. Wish me luck, oh my brothers...

I have Leopard installed already.

The transparent menubar (which I don't mind, really) can't be changed. In general there are no customization options bar the graphite look --but NB: the blue progress bar in Safari remains: how sloppy can you get?

The aqua widgets and sausages are still there as standard, and have a sickly hue now: the traffic lights look more like dead fish eyes than ever. As for buttons, some are metal, and some are Aqua. -- The Aqua elements really ruin what could be a nice interface.

There are dysfunctional transparencies everywhere, including the menus. Ridiculous.

The 2-D dock on the side is OK.

Quicklook is indeed quick on my machine.

The maddening moving targets in the dock are fixed, that's good. Finally. But there's no drilling down into dock folders, if ye know what I mean.

The grid option in the Finder works well, and is a huge relief. Finally.

There is special anti-thalo.net software built-in: the skulls on the frontpage take an age to load, and the site is slow in general.

I'm still getting used to stacks and other stuff. Cover Flow seems useless to me at this point.

Thanks, yabor!
I would be interested in Quicklooks knownledge of different file-types. What is working besides JPG, GIF, PDF, PNG?
How's the speed regarding mpeg2-movies, .mov's in general, Word-Documents, Indesign (if you have that, dunno).
Did you experience any beachballing in 10.5 ?

Does 10.5 offer sorting options in column-view?

That grid option is late, but better late than never. Whoa, i'm nearly crapsettling. Give me a kick!

Besides, WHEN did thalo installed the new frontpage? Last week I just accidently went to thalo.net instead directly to the forum and was very surprised to see this new design.

Bruder smithz, I can't answer your questions now because I have to go to bed. But with luck thalo will do a proper review and answer your questions properly.

No beachballs, everything is fast, including Spaces, which I'm trying out. Internet is sometimes slow but that could be my connection.

NB I'm not a power user, not a pro using huge folders and heavy programs like Photoshop.

Dock-folders our now Stacks exclusively, and stacks seem pretty useless for folders with lots of content.

Apple, for starters kill the transparencies and remove all Aqua elements. That's elementary.

This is the first time I have not bought a release of Mac OS X straight away.

It was between Leopard or this smc PENTAX-M 1:4 20mm lens.

The lens won.

The installation was pretty painless, but took over an hour.

The interface does seem more consistent, and I do like the way the active window seems to float higher over the others... but it's still just too much drop shadow for my taste. Not crazy about the transparent menubar, or the new transparent/spatial/reflecty dock. It seems like we kinda took a step backward with eye candy. There's more mushy transparency and drop shadows than Tiger had... it felt like some of the stuff Tiger tamed, is coming back with Leopard. My workaround was to put a solid white band across the top of my desktop image. Fuck transparency. Looks way better.

Cover flow is kind of cool when browsing through graphics, but it takes fucking forever to fill in. If I have this little patience with it now (a directory with 59 items in it had me drumming my fingers on the desk)... holy crap, what am I gonna do when there's 2,000 images for it to load? No thanks.

I was glad to see the stupid Aqua 3/4 view folders go. I much prefer the flat-on folder icons. But they're this dingy, Netscape blue color that gives me the willies. I'd give my right nut to change their default color to graphite (for the graphite theme). That folder blue is fugly fugly fugly.

So is the stupid startup screen of space. Ridiculous. Where do I change that? Horrible. Microsofty.

Um, I thought crystal sausages were gone?? My scrollbars still have them. I was really looking forward to their death. iTunes has the new ones, but not the FINDER? How can that possibly be? Very disappointing. The interface looks half-assed with different style scrollbars.

OK, more later.

Stacks are kind of fun, but they are about the same or slower than before. The Finder, in general is dog slow, especially in coverflow. But Spotlight seems a little more well-behaved. It doesn't stall after you type a few characters now. That's a relief.

The new system preferences icon is stupid. I can't fucking BELIEVE they used spinning gears! How hilarious. Looks like nothing when small. I preferred the Apple lightswitch.

Just starting to play with Spaces now. Not really getting it. I almost want every app in its OWN space... my design "spaces" are just as cluttered as they were before.

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Apple Acknowledges Some Leopard Installation Problems
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quote:

After over eight years of exposure, even the hardest of hardcore classic Mac OS fans have gone through all five stages of grief over what's been lost—some of us multiple times. Though what's been found in Mac OS X has long overshadowed those concerns, rest assured that they are not forgotten. The difference now is that enough time has passed to allow them (I hope) to shed all semblance of nostalgia and be seen as they always should have been, as critical statements about the current state of Mac OS X, full stop.

In other words, no Maclash......
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quote:

The rationale proffered by Apple for the use of translucency in the original Aqua design was that it denoted a transient element—pull-down menus and sheets, for example. Now it's being applied to the least transient element in the entire interface.

Leopard's new look has been compared to the Aero Glass look in Windows Vista. While I think there are few legitimate similarities, this comparison comes up as often as it does because the two designs share one prominent attribute: the gratuitous, inappropriate use of translucency to the detriment of usability.

Why, Apple? Why!? Was there something horribly wrong with the existing menu bar—something that could only be fixed by injuring its legibility? Like the folder icons and the Dock, it's not so much a fatal flaw in and of itself. It's what it implies about the situation at Apple that is so troubling. What in the holy hell has to happen in a meeting for this idea to get the green light? Is this the dark side of Steve Jobs's iron-fisted rule—that there's always a risk that an obviously ridiculous and horrible idea will be expressed in his presence and he'll (inexplicably) latch onto it and make it happen?

See the minutes of that meeting on the previous page.
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originally posted by RicoX:

This is the first time I have not bought a release of Mac OS X straight away.

The Maclash has begun!

quote:

holy crap, what am I gonna do when there's 2,000 images for it to load

2,000 ? With OS X ? You've got guts, man.

Just installed the latest Ubuntu release on my mini-mac and experiencing this peaceful, harmonious feeling you get when things just work.

The key point of the arstechnica-review (read the dock-part: just hilarious) of course is

"Over time, people get used to everything".

Steve knows that.