Longtime Apple appreciator and WSJ columnist Walt Mossberg likes OS X 10.4 Leopard:On Friday evening, Apple will release yet another new version of OS X, called Leopard, to replace the current version, known as Tiger. I've been testing Leopard, and while it is an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, release, I believe it builds on Apple's quality advantage over Windows. In my view, Leopard is better and faster than Vista, with a set of new features that make Macs even easier to use. Evolutionary, not revolutionary, sounds right to me. Still there's nothing wrong with a little evolution, and there are some cool new features, plus some long standing annoyances have been worked out. Definitely worth the upgrade, but I won't be standing in line on Friday night or anything.
Installed last night. My computer is the oldest laptop that Apple is officially supporting, and I only have 512 MB of RAM (512 more on the way.) So I'm pushing it. Still, Leopard seems to be slightly faster. Or at least more responsive which is really what I'm after anyway.
I like the feel of it. And some of the new features are pretty cool. Time Machine in particular is very well done. This automates backup and restoration of your computer to an external drive. There have been tons of solutions to this problem which have been around forever, but Time Machine really nails it in the easy to use department. Spaces - Apple's take on virtual desktops - is nice too. And the new tabbed terminal will be helpful.
But what the hell were they thinking with the new folder icons? They are indistinguishable from each other (the Applications folder looks almost exactly like the Documents folder which looks almost exactly like every other folder!) And although in the abstract I like the idea of stacks in the dock, what's up with making the stack icon into the icon of the top most file in the stack? That is, to put it very mildly, completely insane. The first issue can be fixed by hand, and I'm sure people will produce nice 3rd party icon sets. But this is what Apple is supposed to be good at. Stacks I think might just be useless.
Anyway, I like the rest so far. It's just weird for them to have gotten a visual thing like this so wrong.
Someone at Ars came up with a nice solution for the universally derided stacks in the dock adopt the icon of the top document inside the folder "feature". To solve this make an alias of the folder which is to become a stack, rename the alias with an underscore as the first letter, and put the alias inside the folder in question (the underscore forces it to the top of the list.) Now the stack will always show the icon of the folder's alias (which is the same icon as the folder.) Sort of hacky, but it works. Still not sure I like stacks though.
Just got my new memory. Can't believe I lasted for so long on 512 MB (just looked it up, and I bought this machine on 11/14/2002.) Unfortunately the 512 was 2 sticks of 256, so I had to take it all out and put in 2 new 512 sticks. So if anyone needs 256 MB of 133 MHz CL3 RAM let me know.
Wow. Just noticed that Safari 3 (comes with leopard) renders textarea boxes with a little handle in the bottom right hand corner you can grab and drag to resize the box - regardless of how its HTML. Very nice touch.
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- jim 10-25-2007 7:00 pm
Installed last night. My computer is the oldest laptop that Apple is officially supporting, and I only have 512 MB of RAM (512 more on the way.) So I'm pushing it. Still, Leopard seems to be slightly faster. Or at least more responsive which is really what I'm after anyway.
I like the feel of it. And some of the new features are pretty cool. Time Machine in particular is very well done. This automates backup and restoration of your computer to an external drive. There have been tons of solutions to this problem which have been around forever, but Time Machine really nails it in the easy to use department. Spaces - Apple's take on virtual desktops - is nice too. And the new tabbed terminal will be helpful.
But what the hell were they thinking with the new folder icons? They are indistinguishable from each other (the Applications folder looks almost exactly like the Documents folder which looks almost exactly like every other folder!) And although in the abstract I like the idea of stacks in the dock, what's up with making the stack icon into the icon of the top most file in the stack? That is, to put it very mildly, completely insane. The first issue can be fixed by hand, and I'm sure people will produce nice 3rd party icon sets. But this is what Apple is supposed to be good at. Stacks I think might just be useless.
Anyway, I like the rest so far. It's just weird for them to have gotten a visual thing like this so wrong.
- jim 10-30-2007 5:49 pm
Someone at Ars came up with a nice solution for the universally derided stacks in the dock adopt the icon of the top document inside the folder "feature". To solve this make an alias of the folder which is to become a stack, rename the alias with an underscore as the first letter, and put the alias inside the folder in question (the underscore forces it to the top of the list.) Now the stack will always show the icon of the folder's alias (which is the same icon as the folder.) Sort of hacky, but it works. Still not sure I like stacks though.
Just got my new memory. Can't believe I lasted for so long on 512 MB (just looked it up, and I bought this machine on 11/14/2002.) Unfortunately the 512 was 2 sticks of 256, so I had to take it all out and put in 2 new 512 sticks. So if anyone needs 256 MB of 133 MHz CL3 RAM let me know.
- jim 10-31-2007 8:14 pm
Wow. Just noticed that Safari 3 (comes with leopard) renders textarea boxes with a little handle in the bottom right hand corner you can grab and drag to resize the box - regardless of how its HTML. Very nice touch.
- jim 10-31-2007 8:15 pm